As I’m writing this, there’s some voodoo something going on in the street outside. It involves what can only be described as a dancing pile of hay.
Anyway, Friday was the celebration for the end of Ramadan, one of the holiest days in the hijri calendar. That morning there was a monsoon and I was teaching (well, playing hangman with my students) when hundreds of Muslims in their white dress robes flooded into the schoolyard, looking for a place to pray. Pretty soon after that I gave up on controlling the class and let them go, which was fortunate, because some people soon commandeered the classroom for praying. I picked my way through the crowd in the swampy yard and went to the classroom where we have our office. I had to make people roll up their prayer mats so I could open the door. Inside, surprisingly, there were more people praying.
Peace Corps warned us about anti-American sentiment among some Muslims here, thanks to the (now aborted) plans of a pastor in Florida to burn the Qur’an on 9/11. His timing could’ve been better: the end of Ramadan fell on 9/10 this year. PC said that the protests in Cotonou last week were anti-American, though I’m pretty sure they were about something else. I talked about it with my host family and with some Muslims I know, and they had no idea what I was talking about. I also celebrated the Ramadan feast without incident. I’m not going to ignore a warning from the PC, but I haven’t seen anything to validate it.
In explaining this to people, I ran into an unexpected problem: Beninese have a hard time understanding religious intolerance. Given recent controversies in New York and Florida, Americans could stand to learn something from that.
