Dark Sky Magazine - From Born Again To Muslim in Under Twenty Years - by Jeff Gibbs

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From Born Again To Muslim in Under Twenty Years - by Jeff Gibbs

"I’m not sure I will ever go much deeper into Islam. Like many Americans my age and younger, I tend to play in religions. I’ve done Buddhist meditations, Tibetan and Thai. I’ve attended Quaker services and Russian Orthodox, read the Bhagavad Gita and Vedas. And so my ablutions in the ocean that day on Cape Ann, I think, was not so much a ritual to remember God, as a ritual in the face of the awful power of time and a struggle to preserve a friendship.

My time in Turkey had been magical, and already, my memories of it came in fits and starts, breaking into pieces–the emotions I’d felt praying next to him in the Mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent, the tears that came to my eyes when once, standing on one of the red cliffs of Cappodocia, we heard the call to prayer drift out from village after village over the long, quiet valleys of red stone. One day soon, Turkey would perhaps just be another set of pictures I ran across sometimes and Ekrem and his family less and less vivid until all I could remember were the photos. And so this ablution was to him as well. A space set aside to revere that memory and his continued living presence, and to remember and bring to life all that I had lost and stood to lose and wanted to feel again." Note EU-Digest: "Maybe we can also get the viewpoint of someone out there in the "Cyber World" who went from Muslim to Born Again."