Quote:
Originally Posted by Jude
Atlasthome,
Whether or not there is a prayer hall (of course there will be) isn't the issue. The scared folks who've watched too much Fox news are terrified that these folks are going to use their community meeting rooms to plan attacks on innocent Americans.
To answer your question, however, a mosque prayer hall is open to anyone at all so long as they observe proper Islamic etiquette, i.e., women covering their hair and dressed modestly and men observing the Islamic dress code for their gender. In fact, I'm sure anyone would be welcomed and given a free Quran for their visit :-).
Did you know that travelers in other countries stop overnight in mosques sometimes. Nobody asks if they are Muslim. People even stop in to have an afternoon nap on the carpets without raising an eye brow.
Sad fact is that our media has inundated us with a lot of B.S. about one of the world's major religions -- made these folks out to be terrorists and Al Qada sympathizers. How soon we forget about the Christian Crusades and the Inquisition and the persecution of the Jews of Europe, of course.
It's unlikely that we shall have the whole and accurate story of what happened on 911 in any of our lifetimes.
Take away the constitutional rights of one faction of people in America and rest assured that there's no going to be a lot of empathy for the rights demanded by gay people.
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Thank you so much for this information!
I have been thinking a lot about this (why I posted earlier) because there are many centers that have a specific religious afiliation that are open to all. And it seems to me that requiring respect and observance to the religion at hand is just not a big deal and is usual and customary. Way back as a Catholic student involved in Newman Center organizations on college campuses, the prayer room or someties called a chapel was open to anyone visiting our center. We also had accomodations for overnight travelers, too. They didn't have to be Catholic at all.
These centers were far more liberal than regular Catholic parishes, but the idea was about community interaction within and outside of the catholic faith. There were requirements then, too, but many of the prior kinds of things like women having to cover their heads during a Mass were no longer observed and women were deacons and alter girls. Not the church of my parents and grandparents! Actually, there are many, many traditional Catholic rituals and requirements of women in the past that don't differ much from some of what a woman would be subjected to in an Islamic mosque. I don't agree with any of this with either religion (it's about patriarchal tenets for me), but, what is important here is the fact that a center such as this with a prayer room is open to anyone of any faith- or those not having a faith at all.
Gee, kind of knocks the whacko's fear of all those Islamic people gathering without the rest of us being allowed in to plot against us, doesn't it?
Thanks, again.