Self-Directed Visits to Al-Sabeel Masjid for Comparative Religions Class
I knew I wanted to go to a mosque for the self-directed field trip to a place of worship different from my own, so I looked up San Francisco Mosques online and found three: Al Sabeel Masjid Noor al-Islam at 48 Golden Gate Avenue, Muhammad’s Mosque at 5048 3rd Street, and Masjid al-Tawheed at 1227 Sutter Street. I thought of just dropping in, but after I considered how vulnerable the Muslim community feels, I decided to let them know why I wanted to come and let them screen me. No, I wasn’t from Homeland Security or the FBI. I filled out an online form for Alsabeel Masjid at 48 Geary Street on November 5, but I hadn’t gotten an answer when our instructor reminded us that we had only two more weeks before our report was due. I filled out the form a second time and got an immediate response through e-mail and by phone. Someone gave me the telephone of a woman named Rofida, who would help me if she wasn’t out shopping.
Rofida and I played phone tag for an evening and then made voice-to-voice contact on Saturday morning and arranged to meet at the Alsabeel Masjid at 1:00 that day. She told me that it was in the Tenderloin in the same building as the Golden Gate Theatre, so I knew where to go. She told me to call her as soon as I was in the area.
I was surprised that the parking was so easy. I found several parking places on Jones right by Saint Anthony’s Dining Room, where people were lining up. I wish I’d thought of going in and making a donation or helping ladle out soup, but I thought only of joining them and getting something good to eat. Instead, though, I called Rofida and headed towards 48 Golden Gate. She told me she’d be all in black, and she was—a beautiful, dark eye beauty in black. (I sometimes think that some Muslims use the hijab the way some Americans use the American flag—as a symbol of their pride in their identity and even in defiance of those who feel threatened by it, but the hijabs have become so stunning that now they seem like fashion statements.)
Rofida began guiding me through the big basement that comprises their mosque—a large prayer room for men, a somewhat smaller prayer room for women (“WOMEN ONLY” says the sign)--classrooms for children and an office, and I soon found out that she was Egyptian-American and the daughter of the Imam Safwat Morsy. She told me Saturday is family day, and children have classes from 10:30 AM until 2:30 PM, studying Arabic, Islam, and the Quran. All of the teachers are volunteers, as she herself is. All prayer areas were covered with rugs, so we took our shoes off.
She explained the ablution, which I’d learned about in Algeria, but I didn’t tell her I even had it illustrated on my bathroom wall beside the sink. (“Rincez-vous et gargarisez-vous la bouche tris fois,” for example.) She said they washed their hands, cleared their mouth (“No chewing gum”), cleared their nose, washed their face three times, wiped their right arm up to elbow, touched their hair, ears, feet up to ankles (but a gesture would do if they’re wearing socks), and made sure that their nails were clean. She told me about facing Mecca and saying “God is great,” and she went through the “rounds” of prayers during the day. (I liked her use of the word “rounds.”) She illustrated the steps and explained that Muslims believed that if they made prayer a practice throughout the day, that would keep God in their minds, and they wouldn’t harm anyone or do anything bad. She said that when she was at school, she didn’t carry a compass to determine the direction, and it was about God, anyway, not about Mecca, so she just prayed wherever she was, and when I asked her where she was going to school, she said she was at Cal-State East Bay in Hayward and told me about her major in psychology and her interest in working with trauma victims but not children. She seemed as interested in her major and future career as she did in Islam, and it occurred to me that she could combine them and work with Muslim victims of misrepresentation. She gave me a volume called English Translation of the Meanings of The Noble Qur’an, a brochure “Islam Explained,” “Muhammad the Messenger of Allah by Abdurrahman Al-Sheha, “The Month of Fasting-- Ramadan,” their newsletter Al-Sabeel Masjid Noor Al Islam (on which I notice Eid Mubarak and couldn’t help thinking of the deposed leader even though I know it’s a greeting and even on my postage stamps—“blessed festival”?), and “A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam.”
It was fun seeing the children running around. She told me there were a lot of Algerians who came to the masjid.
When I went home, I went online to look up her father, Sheik Safwat Morsy, and found a picture and video from February 2011, when he was dancing with others in the United Nations Plaza to celebrate the news that President Mubarak had stepped down. I found Rofida and her sisters in the video, too. Then Safwat Morsy came up in something called “David Frum’s Diary” on National Review Online and on Jihad Watch.
In an article from June 19, 2006, Frum summarized a “deeply troubling story” from the Wall Street Journal about Morsy, a Bad Muslim, being fired by Soulemein Ghali, a Good Muslim, and then going to court and winning $400,000 in a wrongful-dismissal judgment. (I’m taking the Good Muslim, Bad Muslim terms from Mahmood Mamdani’s book by that title—a book in which he discusses political Islam and perceptions that Good Muslims are Westernized and secularized and Bad Muslims are pre-modern or even anti-modern and fanatical.) I wondered how accurately David Frum had summarized the report because the original source was available only to subscribers, so I decided to go back to the Alsabeel Masjid the following week to interview Sheik Safwat Morsy and see what he would say. Ahmad, an Egyptian classmate in my demystifying the Middle East class offered to meet me at the mosque, where he would be finishing prayers at 1:00.
I wrote out questions for him but didn’t begin, “Is it true that you’re a Bad Muslim radical terrorist?”
1. What would you like people in our Comparative Religion class to know about Islam?
2. How do you feel about the recent parliamentary elections in Egypt?
3. Is it true that you urged American Muslims to do what Palestinian suicide bombers have done?
When I arrived in the basement mosque, I saw only men, and when I moved towards the men’s praying area, one man motioned for me to move back, but another said I could go ahead if I took off my shoes. I took off my shoes, and my classmate Ahmad introduced me to Sheik Safwat Morsy, whose handshake wasn’t very firm. I thought of the stories I’d read about Muslim women refusing to shake hands and hoped my offering to shake hands hadn’t embarrassed him. I was then asked to wait in the Women’s Prayer section, where Rofida joined me. We talked for about twenty minutes, and I began to worry about the parking meter where I had parked on Jones Street and which I’d fed with as many quarters as I could find—$2.50 or forty-five minutes worth. When I was invited into a room with Morsy, Rofida, and a Palestinian man, I explained the situation with my parking, and the Palestinian said he would take care of it. Then we began the interview, which was interrupted only once, when it was time for them to pray. Morsy speaks English but not as fluently as his daughter and Palestinian friend, so they helped translate from time to time.
In answer to my first question, he said he would like people in our Comparative Religion class to know that Islam is “clear and easy.” It’s one God, the Day of Judgment, all the prophets, the angels. It’s not philosophy. It’s clear. It’s easy because “it’s just you and God. There’s not a lot of mystery, and nothing is hidden. You don’t need anyone else. It’s just you and God.”
On the subject of the elections in Egypt, he said, “If it means freedom, I like that.”
As for being a radical terrorist, he claims to be neither radical nor a terrorist. According to Morsy, he won the court case against Soulemein Ghali (the Good Muslim according to David Frum and Jihad Watch) because Ghali’s witnesses didn’t speak Arabic and therefore couldn’t have understood his sermons, which had not contained the incendiary statements he was accused of making. Furthermore, it came out that Soulemein Ghali had embezzled funds and was trying to get rid of Morsy because he was getting the word out. All of this information is available at 400 McAllister, Superior Court of California, but I doubt that I’ll have time to look at it anytime soon (like in my lifetime). But from the interview it was pretty clear that Sheik Safwat Morsy has either changed his tone radically (!) or was misrepresented from the beginning. He said he was interviewed about the “Mosque at Ground Zero” (neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero), and he said that Muslims had the right to build their but that they should be sensitive to the feelings of those who were traumatized by the attacks and deaths. He also said that his dentist was Jewish and his attorney was Christian. He asked what I was, and he also asked about our instructor’s religious beliefs. He said that the thought our beliefs were ninety-five percent the same, so he didn’t think we needed to debate the remaining five percent but, instead, focus on our commonalities. He gave examples of how they at Alsabeel Masjid had worked with the Catholics at Saint Anthony’s, using their kitchen for their Ramadan feast, when they invite the community in. They also help cook for the people at Saint Anthony’s.
Also applicable to our class is the fact that the Islamic School took the children on a field trip to the National Shrine of Saint Francis of Assisi in San Francisco and learned about the person the City was named after. They also learned that St. Francis of Assisi “made a historic visit with the Sultan Malik at Kamil of Egypt and learned about Islam.”
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