Week 5: Religion and Retail

“All religions in the world preach peace; it is man’s interpretation of them that causes problems…” explained one of our two guides at the Jumeirah Mosque in Dubai. My friend, Diane, and I were continuing our quest to make her week-long visit as fruitful as possible and I took a couple hours off of work to visit Jumeirah Mosque with her. It is the only mosque in Dubai that allows non-Muslim visitors and we arrived with head scarves in hand to get glimpse inside.

Jumeirah Mosque

Diane in a head scarf inside Jumeirah Mosque

Our guides, a married couple who volunteer for Dubai Center for Cultural Understanding, shared with us the 5 pillars of Islam and explained their Muslim traditions, prayer, and dress. They were open in terms of customs and beliefs; they encouraged us to ask tough questions or raise the myths or rumors we’d heard about the Muslim faith.

Our guides explaining traditional dress

Diane and I left this visit not only feeling welcomed, but also warm and encouraged – what we’d learned about Islam, its teachings and the way it considered other religions was a revelation in my view of the faith. Of course, I realized that if I’d asked the same questions or tried to dispel myths in a highly conservative area, like Saudi Arabia, I’d probably have walked away feeling completely different. But then again, if someone were to ask me about my Christian faith, would I not tell them something very different than if they’d asked a Baptist, a Methodist or a Mormon? Yet we are all Christian. In the US, we tend to judge Muslims by the fundamentalists we see on TV who are violent, oppressive and even backward. I wonder: do those less familiar with Christianity judge us by our history of bloody crusades or the recent coverage of the Texas polygamist sect?

Diane and I decided to balance our religious adventure with a little shopping. We went back to the older side of Dubai to the covered souk (market) where we started the bargaining: how many cool Indian tapestries / wall hangings could we buy as gifts for ourselves and our families? We were the hot pair in the market – once the shop owners saw that we were out to buy and not just peruse, they all wanted to entice us into their jam-packed nooks of stores. By the end of the evening, I’d seen so many beautiful tapestries of various sizes with beads, embroidery, sequins, copper lacing and immaculate patterns…well, let’s just I made a difference in the weekly income of at least a couple of shop keepers!

This balance of religion and retail carried over as Diane and I took our 2-day excursion to Cairo, Egypt. Following the recommendation of a friend, we had hired a female Egyptian guide in advance. Our guide, Mona, met us at the airport and we immediately launched into our tour of the historic area. It was truly like a real-life walk through the history books I read in elementary school and junior high. Just across the Nile from Cairo in Giza, we got to stand next to the Grand Pyramid and admire the 3-foot limestone blocks that rise in perfect structure to form the ~136-yard high triangle. Mona explained how the pyramids were built as tombs for kings and their wives and how mummification was the process of preparing the physical body to be reused when the soul was resurrected in the afterlife.

Grand Pyramid at Giza

Perspective on size of the pyramid - just one block was up to our shoulders

Panoramic View of the Pyramids at Giza

We also saw the Sphinx, which was carved some a single block of stone left after the near the pyramids after the many blocks of limestone were excavated for the pyramids. Its shape in the form of a king’s head with a lion’s body represents the royalty’s pursuit of both wisdom and strength.

Sphinx & Grand Pyramid

Sharing a kiss with the Sphinx :)

Back in Cairo, we visited the Citadel, a hilltop fortress with a beautiful mosque. The inside of the mosque was beautifully decorated, particularly its multiple domes. Visitors were praying near the front of the mosque, just like I had done when I visited breath-taking Catholic churches in Europe. Mona shared her perspective on Islam, which was very similar to what we’d heard at the Jumeirah Mosque in Dubai.

Mosque at the Citadel

Dome from inside the Mosque

Mona, like most women we saw in Cairo, covers her hair with a colored head scarf to match her outfit and wears long sleeved shirts and pants that were both modern / stylish and modest. This was a little different than Dubai where you see few covered women (since most are foreigners like me) but the ones that do cover tend to wear the long, black traditional abaya (think judge’s cloak) and black head scarf.

Also in Cairo, I went to the Egyptian Museum where I got to see the treasure of King Tut, including his 2 solid gold sarcophaguses and the black and gold head dress that covered his entire mummified head and shoulders. It was truly incredible! Even more amazing was that fact that King Tut was not a well known Egyptian king – he ruled just briefly from age 9 to 18 and had a relatively small tomb given his unexpected and young death. What made him famous was that his tomb, unlike most others, was never raided or robbed before its archaeological discovery. Can you imagine what treasure would have been uncovered in the many pyramids and tombs in Egypt if they’d been found by historians rather than thieves?

Not to be forgotten, we did have our retail adventure in Cairo! We saw a demonstration of how Egyptians made the first paper from flattened, dried papyrus plant and bought some Egyptian paintings on this paper. Having tried our hand at reading hieroglyphics inside the nobles’ tombs by the pyramids, we ordered some jewelry with our names scripted in hieroglyphics. I also got to visit the old part of Cairo which, similar to Old Dubai, is filled with tiny alleyways of shops selling neat gifts and handicrafts. I picked up a couple pieces of silverwork and thanked Mona for her assistance – with her native Arabic tongue and knowledge of all the best (and often hidden) hotspots, she helped negotiate prices and checked quality with the local vendors.

Alleyways of shops in old Cairo

As I left the shops and ended my tour of Cairo, the call to prayer began to ring out across the city and blared from the loudspeakers at the large mosque adjacent to the market. I packed up my purchases in my purse and thought: retail and religion…what a great week.