We don’t use air conditioning in my new place. That’s what happens when two cheap college guys share a room. So even in the air, my new place feels different. It’s not all too hot, but it’s muggy, and the wet air seems to cling to everyone.
My neighbors don’t use air conditioning either. I know this because their door is open, a fact which I noticed when I heard them having an argument. People speak loudly here, and to my ear it sounds more like French or even Swahili than Arabic. But they can’t be speaking Swahili, can they? I’m told they’re Moroccan.
There’s three locks on the door. One works. And, just sitting in this muggy neighborhood, listening to Middle Easterners chatting loudly in some unintelligible foreign language, I already know that we’re not going to do anything about those locks.
The neighborhood isn’t trashy, but it isn’t pretty either. The parking lot is a sort of mixture of sand, gravel, and dirt, and the road is patched over and over. There aren’t streetlights, so I already know I’m going to be walking from my bus to my house in the dark pretty often.
Surprisingly, I feel comfortable with that. In this Muslim neighborhood, doors are open and people are arguing and children wonder about and everyone says hi, except for some of the women, who wear head coverings and scrupulously avoid eye contact.
Except for the fact that the women are modest, this feels a bit like being back in Latin America. There’s also the mosque, the Masjid Omar Ibn Alkhattab. Their website says they offer a bachelor’s degree in Sharia. From their mission statement, here’s a few highlights:
1. Establish peaceful coexistence between the Muslim community members and the rest of the community that is based on mutual understanding, help, & respect.
2. Provide legal, disciplined, moderate, & realistic opinions.
3. Answer religious, social, & financial questions.
4. Provide family consultations with the goal of resolving issues before they result in a family breakdown.
9. Help in choosing spouses for the youth.
10. Prevent the deprivation of the youth, including educating about and protecting them from smoking, drugs, and moral corruption.
11. Anger management workshops.
12. Exercises in public speaking.
17. Training to save time & to be organized.
18. Assistance to individuals to help build morality and good behavior.
24. Work toward correcting the image of Islam amongst non-Muslims and remove the suspicions that some may hold about Muslims.
If you want to know why Islam works, look no further than those objectives to see the mindset. These people are focused on making Islam respectable to the outside world, providing what are essentially religious courts for family problems, teaching productivity, efficiency, and abstinence. The mosque seeks even to openly involve itself in the selection of spouses for youths.
How well the mosque fulfills those goals, I do not know. But if the police records of the neighborhood are any indication, and if the experience of the Christians I know who have lived for years in that neighborhood may be trusted, whatever it is these people are doing has a surprisingly safe neighborhood, and one where people are consistently friendlier than other neighborhoods in Columbus.
Another perk of the neighborhood is that because nobody wants to live around Muslims, rent is low because landlords have trouble getting tenants. It’s a great deal for me. I don’t mind living around Muslims a bit. That being said, I can imagine why some would be anxious about living here.
The mosque I will be walking past every two days is the where Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad attended from 2006 to 2007. He is now in prison for life after having shot and killed Private William Long, 23, and attempting to killed Private Quinton Ezeagwula, 18, in Arkansas, while the two soldiers were on a smoke break at a recruiting center. He said it was in retaliation for the mistreatment of Muslims by American soldiers throughout the world.
Most Americans I know treat soldiers as though they personally share in all the merit for all the good deeds the US military has done throughout the world. Abdulhakim Muhammad’s thought process was similar, except that he treated soldiers as though they personally shared in all the guilt for all the innocents killed by the US military throughout the world. Though the average patriotic American and Muhammad have come to different conclusions about the US army, their moral theories share a certain eerie similarity.
A fellow named Nuradin Abdi also lived in my neighborhood and attended the mosque. His friends Lyman Faris and Christopher Paul, who also attended this mosque, were convicted in 2007 of having plotted to blow up a mall in Columbus.
One dead soldier, one wounded soldier, and four terrorism convictions, all connected to an innocent-looking little building in my neighborhood.
Wael Kalash, who stabbed a twenty-year old American girl in the abdomen at the bus stop where I wait every for my bus, ran into the Masjid Omar Ibn Alkhattab and hid there until the police found him.
A boy from my neighborhood, as I mentioned before, he encouraged my friend “Jimmy” to beat his wife. “You can do that because she’s your wife.”
He’s a rough child. One time, wearing a shirt with John 3:16 printed on front in all caps, he offered to teach me to count to ten in Arabic if I’d teach him to count to twenty in “Mexican.” So I taught the boy uno through veinte. He seems like a nice kid, if somewhat confused.
Humankind is messy. I wish I had a simple simpler explanation of my neighborhood, but I don’t. We’ve had four terrorists and I feel safer there than I feel in my old neighborhood, which was primarily composed of upper-middle class college kids.
Perhaps the difference between the two neighborhoods boils down to sociology. College kids are a rather recent invention. In the very recent past, we decided that it would be a good idea to send millions and millions of kids, at a tremendous cost, to live on and around massive instructional institutes where they would live a life officially composed of study, with almost no outside supervision, on other people’s money. It is no wonder that a neighborhood filled with college kids would be a messy and noisy place: the kids are here temporarily and are for the most part burning through social and monetary capital rather than building it.
In my new neighborhood, on the other hand, we have a very, very old social phenomenon — married couples raising their children. These people are poor, hard-working people building capital rather than using it up. This is why the neighborhood is quiet at night (people raising kids and working can ill afford to be drinking and arguing at 3 am on a Wednesday night), and why there is no hint of luxurious living anywhere. It seems more like a real human neighborhood than a college neighborhood, which often appears to be some sort of sociological experiment in induced decivilization.
Terrorists or no terrorists, it’s saner place to live. When I was a little child, I lived as a gringo boy in Venezuela. Being a stranger in a strange land was my condition for the first five years of my life. And now, in a neighborhood which sometimes seems more like a part of Iraq than the United States, I’m a stranger again. Maybe that’s why this place feels so much like home.
Related Posts:
A Stranger in a Strange Land
We don’t use air conditioning in my new place. That’s what happens when two cheap college guys share a room. So even in the air, my new place feels different. It’s not all too hot, but it’s muggy, and the wet air seems to cling to everyone.
My neighbors don’t use air conditioning either. I know this because their door is open, a fact which I noticed when I heard them having an argument. People speak loudly here, and to my ear it sounds more like French or even Swahili than Arabic. But they can’t be speaking Swahili, can they? I’m told they’re Moroccan.
There’s three locks on the door. One works. And, just sitting in this muggy neighborhood, listening to Middle Easterners chatting loudly in some unintelligible foreign language, I already know that we’re not going to do anything about those locks.
The neighborhood isn’t trashy, but it isn’t pretty either. The parking lot is a sort of mixture of sand, gravel, and dirt, and the road is patched over and over. There aren’t streetlights, so I already know I’m going to be walking from my bus to my house in the dark pretty often.
Surprisingly, I feel comfortable with that. In this Muslim neighborhood, doors are open and people are arguing and children wonder about and everyone says hi, except for some of the women, who wear head coverings and scrupulously avoid eye contact.
Except for the fact that the women are modest, this feels a bit like being back in Latin America. There’s also the mosque, the Masjid Omar Ibn Alkhattab. Their website says they offer a bachelor’s degree in Sharia. From their mission statement, here’s a few highlights:
If you want to know why Islam works, look no further than those objectives to see the mindset. These people are focused on making Islam respectable to the outside world, providing what are essentially religious courts for family problems, teaching productivity, efficiency, and abstinence. The mosque seeks even to openly involve itself in the selection of spouses for youths.
How well the mosque fulfills those goals, I do not know. But if the police records of the neighborhood are any indication, and if the experience of the Christians I know who have lived for years in that neighborhood may be trusted, whatever it is these people are doing has a surprisingly safe neighborhood, and one where people are consistently friendlier than other neighborhoods in Columbus.
Another perk of the neighborhood is that because nobody wants to live around Muslims, rent is low because landlords have trouble getting tenants. It’s a great deal for me. I don’t mind living around Muslims a bit. That being said, I can imagine why some would be anxious about living here.
The mosque I will be walking past every two days is the where Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad attended from 2006 to 2007. He is now in prison for life after having shot and killed Private William Long, 23, and attempting to killed Private Quinton Ezeagwula, 18, in Arkansas, while the two soldiers were on a smoke break at a recruiting center. He said it was in retaliation for the mistreatment of Muslims by American soldiers throughout the world.
Most Americans I know treat soldiers as though they personally share in all the merit for all the good deeds the US military has done throughout the world. Abdulhakim Muhammad’s thought process was similar, except that he treated soldiers as though they personally shared in all the guilt for all the innocents killed by the US military throughout the world. Though the average patriotic American and Muhammad have come to different conclusions about the US army, their moral theories share a certain eerie similarity.
A fellow named Nuradin Abdi also lived in my neighborhood and attended the mosque. His friends Lyman Faris and Christopher Paul, who also attended this mosque, were convicted in 2007 of having plotted to blow up a mall in Columbus.
One dead soldier, one wounded soldier, and four terrorism convictions, all connected to an innocent-looking little building in my neighborhood.
Wael Kalash, who stabbed a twenty-year old American girl in the abdomen at the bus stop where I wait every for my bus, ran into the Masjid Omar Ibn Alkhattab and hid there until the police found him.
A boy from my neighborhood, as I mentioned before, he encouraged my friend “Jimmy” to beat his wife. “You can do that because she’s your wife.”
He’s a rough child. One time, wearing a shirt with John 3:16 printed on front in all caps, he offered to teach me to count to ten in Arabic if I’d teach him to count to twenty in “Mexican.” So I taught the boy uno through veinte. He seems like a nice kid, if somewhat confused.
Humankind is messy. I wish I had a simple simpler explanation of my neighborhood, but I don’t. We’ve had four terrorists and I feel safer there than I feel in my old neighborhood, which was primarily composed of upper-middle class college kids.
Perhaps the difference between the two neighborhoods boils down to sociology. College kids are a rather recent invention. In the very recent past, we decided that it would be a good idea to send millions and millions of kids, at a tremendous cost, to live on and around massive instructional institutes where they would live a life officially composed of study, with almost no outside supervision, on other people’s money. It is no wonder that a neighborhood filled with college kids would be a messy and noisy place: the kids are here temporarily and are for the most part burning through social and monetary capital rather than building it.
In my new neighborhood, on the other hand, we have a very, very old social phenomenon — married couples raising their children. These people are poor, hard-working people building capital rather than using it up. This is why the neighborhood is quiet at night (people raising kids and working can ill afford to be drinking and arguing at 3 am on a Wednesday night), and why there is no hint of luxurious living anywhere. It seems more like a real human neighborhood than a college neighborhood, which often appears to be some sort of sociological experiment in induced decivilization.
Terrorists or no terrorists, it’s saner place to live. When I was a little child, I lived as a gringo boy in Venezuela. Being a stranger in a strange land was my condition for the first five years of my life. And now, in a neighborhood which sometimes seems more like a part of Iraq than the United States, I’m a stranger again. Maybe that’s why this place feels so much like home.
Related Posts: