On the first day of Christmas, my dear lord said to me....yaddah, yaddah, yaddah...
We all know that song, or some parts of it anyway, and the feelings it evokes.
Imagine my feelings when last night I heard a presenter on ART say the words, “On the eighteenth day of Ramadan....”
I never consciously thought Muslims kept track of how many days into Ramadan they had gone. Now that’s a mistake. The muslims around me do keep time: they keep track of how many hours they have spent without food, and how many more hours to go before the fast is broken for the day.
They also keep track of how many more days have to go before they can throw off the fast, have a big break and kick up their heels celebrating eid-el-kabir.
The mistake is this: the muslims around me don’t necessarily represent the true image of islam. There are ordinary followers of faith among Christians. Islam has its own category of nominal followers.
Back to the presenter. He spoke Arabic, or so I thought, seeing as I was watching him on a TV set inside a restaurant whose owner decided it was much civil to leave the volume turned so low the pictures on screen made you feel like you were watching those old soundless movies.
Apart from speaking Arabic or something like it, subtitles were provided on screen by ART. At least, that’s what the credits said.
This presenter was fully bearded and bespectacled, endowed with pinkish lips that made all the ladies in the restaurant sit up and take notice. He had charisma. I turned sideways to my companion and mentioned that the presenter was the Pastor Chris Oyakkhilome of the Muslim world. My companion easily agreed.
The word God kept flashing across the screen, and it took the sharpest of eyes to discern that the presenter was a muslim speaking to the muslim world. My companion placed him in a world of his own. I thought that was wrong, kind of. The word God, and the few times the word was represented by the masculine pronoun capitalised (He and Him), wasn’t the preserve of Christians. Come to think of it, it was an English word. The fact that the name Allah never made it into the subtitles didn’t help things with my companion. The name of the Prophet, however, made it onscreen a couple of times.
Prejudices aside, when the programme ended a few minutes later, it left me with the same feeling I get when I watch Christian programming on television.
