“I know it sounds bizarre.”
Gaza City, January 10 – The spiritual leader of a congregation in this embattled coastal territory confided today that his mind still contains a wisp of recognition that once, an unclear time ago, his house of worship served as a center for something that was not a weapons depot, military position, logistical materiel hub, or entry point to underground passages, but the specifics remain fuzzy.
Imam Nimr Issa of the Al-Kalb Mosque in the center of Gaza City shared with others in the mosque that he recalls a time, and it feels like a lifetime ago but was probably just a matter of months or maybe a couple of years, when non-military activities took place in the building. So much has happened in the interim, however, that he has trouble determining whether those murky memories are in fact real.
“Was it prayer?” he wondered. “Is that what I’m thinking of? I have this amorphous recollection that a mosque has, historically, served some purpose other than a base for killing Jews. Not that I oppose killing Jews! Just that I have this flash of something in the distant past, a time when we did other things here. It might explain those books and mats all over the place. But I can’t be too sure.”
Imam Issa also mentioned a cloudy sense of having preached values of self-discipline, kindness, community, and humility, but that might as well have been someone else. “Perhaps it was a badly-remembered dream,” he allowed. “Certainly in reality, the only appropriate subjects for sermons are the wickedness of the Jews, the glory of dying for Palestine, the perfidy of the Jews, the money one gets to die for Palestine, the corruption of the Jews, the pleasure one gets in Heaven after dying for Palestine, and the cruelty of the Jews.”
The imam’s colleagues at other mosques echoed the haunting sense of things having been different at some point, but none have achieved clarity on when that was, or on what, precisely, distinguished that occluded past from the universe humanity inhabits now.
“Wasn’t there something about a big rock in Arabia?” suggested Issa’s old madrassa classmate Subhi Masri. “I’m pretty sure we learned about that, about walking around it and ‘stoning the devil’ – and there are no Jews in Mecca, so we know that couldn’t be literal. I’m struggling with this, like there’s this previous incarnation we all had, in which mosques are houses of worship? I know it sounds bizarre.”
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