El Taraweh Prayers

In Ramadan the one before the last one, I went to pray “el tarahweh”, we only pray taraweh during the holy month of Ramadan, it is a considerably long prayer where you have to stand still for a long time listening to the Imam reciting Qur’an, it’s a very good thing listening and thinking about the words of god in the Holy Qur’an, but like all Muslims or better say all people our minds drift away, no matter how hard we try to resist it, so in that beautiful prayer, my mind drifted away, I tried to concentrate on the words of god, it was very interesting being able to understand it, feel it and learn from the stories in it, I felt great happiness, felt as if my soul is being nourished, I felt the greatness of god in such simple words that have very profound meanings, only then that I realized that the one standing on my left hand side is south African and the one standing on my right one is Turkmen, which made me feel sympathy for them they don’t understand anything .. literally anything because the Qur’an is recited in Arabic..yet, they still come to the prayers and do what they have been asked to do, so I started speculating.. they might be feeling the meaning of these words in their souls or I don’t know but there must be something great happening here or else they wouldn’t be doing this, or maybe they are just doing it coz that is the orders of god and they have to obey it to be part of the great ideology in which they believe in.

But either way, this is the true meaning of Islam which is submission to god .., they did what they were asked to do coz they really do believe in it, and I shouldn’t feel sympathy to them anymore coz in fact they might have a better understanding of the religion than I do.

Ziad El Adawy