Sidebar on Religion
All this talk of Christianity/proselytizing/evangelism on the list lately has got me to thinking about some of the differences between the majority Christian culture here, and the super-majority Muslim culture in the UAE.
They don't have any truck with the idea of "separation of church and state" over there. Islam is the official state religion. It is also much more firmly entrenched in the culture than, say, the Anglican Church is in England, even though that is an offical state religion there.
The legal system is Sharia - Islamic Law, based on the Koran. They behead people for drug trafficking, they chop off hands for theft, and the tradition of "blood money" is practically official policy. For those not familiar with this tradition, it essentially means that you can get away scot-free for murder, if your family can afford to pay the victim's family enough. How much is enough depends mostly on how well-off the victim was. A poor Pakistani laborer might be worth less than $100,000, while the son of a sheik would run into many millions.
(Yeah, something similar operates here (e.g. OJ), but at least we go through the motions of an arrest and trial, and most of the money goes to lawyers.)
They consider you guilty until proven innocent, they can hold you indefinitely without even bail or a lawyer, and they don't even have to feed you. Your family is supposed to provide for that. If an American is caught breaking their laws, about all the Embassy can do is make sure you get fed, and try to get you a trial. I heard of one case where someone hit a camel with her car and they actually came and took her out of her hospital bed and threw her in jail until she could come up with the money to pay for the camel she killed. (And any dead camel automatically becomes a "valuable racing camel" worth up to $20,000, since it's impossible to prove otherwise.)
Their religion pervades daily life. Here, you can pretty much avoid Christianity (except maybe around Christmas and Easter) if you really want to. Sure, you might get the occasional evangelist accosting you in the park, or whatever, but in the UAE you can be arrested and thrown in jail for smoking a cigarette or chewing gum in public during Ramadan!
Anyone you meet is likely to greet you with "Salaam Alechaam" (God be with you). If you ask someone about almost anything in the future, they are probably going to qualify their answer with "Insh'Allah" (God willing).
Anywhere you go in the city, there are at least 4 mosques within sight, and more to the point, within earshot. Muslims pray 5 times a day, and at every prayer time (starting around 4 am) they announce a "call to prayer" through loudspeakers mounted on top of the minarets. I never was able to determine whether it was a recording or a live person chanting into a microphone, but it makes no practical difference. You can't escape it. If you're a light sleeper, or happen to be unlucky enough to live right next door to one of the larger mosques, it will wake you up. A (non-Muslim) friend of mine, who lived nearer a mosque than I did, used to refer to the early evening (about 5:00) call as the "call to beer."
In addition to re-arranging the entire class schedule around Ramadan, throughout the entire year our students were also excused for 15 minutes to go down to the mosque to pray if prayer time happened to occur during class (and since we had classes from 8 am to 8 pm, there were about 3 of those every day). When prayer time starts 25 minutes into a 50 minute class, how many students do you think come back for the last 10 minutes? I would usually try to get my students to agree to a compromise though. I'd let them out 10 minutes early if they waited until then to pray. Technically, that was allowed in Islam. If you weren't able to pray at exactly the proper prayer time (especially the mid-day ones) you could do it at your earliest opportunity.
That wasn't good enough though. I was essentially fired from my job because the students complained to the dean (a Muslim) about how much work I required from them, and when I explained about the lack of instructional time due to prayer to my immediate boss (a non-Muslim), the dean told him that was not an excuse and I had to be removed from the classroom. I spent the rest of the semester writing placement tests for the next year's incoming freshmen. I also found out later (after I had left) that the building where our offices were, and where the placement tests were kept, burned down before they had a chance to be graded (but after they had been given.) It didn't surprise me at all, though. That building was built like a chimney flue. I could look through missing ceiling tiles and see the sky from some offices.
On my flight over there at the start of my sojurn they would display information about the flight on the screens when there wasn't a movie showing. Things like altitude, outside temperature, time to destination, etc. They even had a little icon of a plane superimposed on a map of the region with the flight path in red. One thing puzzled me about that display though. There was another little icon in the lower left corner that looked like a little stone sculpture or something. I finally figured out that it indicated the direction to Mecca, so the Muslims on the flight (Gulf Air, remember) would know which way to face when they were praying. I never did figure out what time they prayed at though. Was it prayer time at their point of origin, their destination, or the point they were located above? If it was the third option, Muslim astronauts would have quite a dilemma, since a low-earth orbit circles the globe every 90 minutes or so, and it would be prayer time almost continuously.
When I was teaching on the boy's campus I had several students that made half-hearted attempts to convert me. This consisted mainly of asking "Teacher, why are you not a Muslim? It is the best religion. You can have many wives." I would usually answer that I liked pork and beer too much to give them up, and that would generally end it.
Speaking of pork and beer, in a city of about 200,000 there was exactly one place to buy pork and 2 places to buy beer. Most restaurants didn't serve either, and any that did serve pork would have an asterisk or other notation on the menu indicating "This dish contains pork. Not for consumption by Muslims." (They even did this on dishes that *obviously* consisted almost entirely of pork, such as bacon and eggs.)
The pork butchery was located in the back of the clothing section of one of the local supermarkets, and had a completely separate entrance from the rest of the food section. It had a big sign that said "Pork butchery. Not for Muslims." In addition to the normal pork products you might expect, like ham and bacon, they also had anything the manufacturer would not certify didn't contain pork, so in the middle of the freezer section were cartons of blueberry ice cream tham might have had a hint of lard in them.
One day I went in there and they had just gotten a shipment of whole pork tenderloins (frozen). I immediately called all my friends and told them run down and pick up a package or 2. I used half of mine to make a killer chili for the Ramadan chili cookoff, and the other half for Bar-B-Q.
When it came to alcoholic beverages, the situation was even worse. You needed a license from the main police station in Abu Dhabi, over an hour away, and they only issued them a few days a week, for a few hours a day. You needed a letter from your Embassy certifying that you weren't a Muslim in addition to the standard documents like passport copies, photographs, and employment letters.
I arrived in August, and didn't manage to get my liquor license until the week before Thanksgiving. Until then, I had to depend on the kindness of colleagues with licenses to buy me a case every so often. It all came out in the wash though. When they were getting ready to leave they didn't want to expend the time and money to renew their licenses for a only few months, so I bought beer for them.
Even with a license, you were limited on how much you could purchase each month (based on your income). It was fairly generous, a little over $100, but one really nice bottle of cognac, or a party, could put you over the limit in a hurry. And everything was imported, of course. Budweiser cost almost the same as Heineken. I finally figured out that it was OK to have more than one brand of beer in my fridge. I'd get a couple of cases of some Australian swill, at DH 50 a case, and a few more of Heineken, Beck's or something else good for about DH 80. After a couple or 3 Heineken's, you couldn't taste the difference between that and swill anyway.
Needless to say, we all also took full advantage of the duty free stores every time we returned from a trip out of the country.
During Ramadan (which ends this Sunday), the whole country was oriented towards religion. Even the pubs (the few there were) closed down for the entire month. However, it was an open secret that they really just changed location. Our main hangout, the Horse and Jockey (a genuine English-style pub) moved from the ground floor of the InterContinental to temporary quarters in one of the banquet rooms on the top floor. They closed down earlier than usual though. Going up and down in the elevators then is when I eventually noticed they had a set of 7 different rugs for the elevator floors - one for each day of the week, in case you forgot where you were and what day it was. Actually a pretty good idea for a hotel with international clientele.
So, Mr. *****, Ms *****, Ms *****, et al., I'm not going to say "count your blessings" or anything like that, but just be aware that it could be a whole lot worse. A professed atheist would not even be allowed into the country. I had a friend who had one of his children's video tapes of Jason and the Argonauts confiscated because the customs agents thought it was about Jesus and the Argonauts, and no amount of pleading or "reasoning" would change their minds. I had several tapes confiscated myself, and when I tried to find out why, I was just told they were forbidden. (I don't even own anything with a religious theme either. These basically showed a little more skin than they felt was acceptable, such as James Bond movies.) They held them all up at the post office for about a month too, before they finally released the ones they deemed acceptable to me.