Eid Prayer

Eid Prayer. Last Monday was Eid. A special holiday to Muslims all over the world.

When we woke up in the morning we went to a mosque in San Antonio. As everything in Texas the mosque was huge and really beautiful. I think this is the biggest mosque I’ve ever been to actually. Entering the building was full of people with roots all over the world. Arabic, Indian, Pakistan and, for the day, Germans as well. I was really impressed by that. In Germany the average mosque is different. Normally people from one nation share a mosque, and mosques are hidden. People don’t recognize them directly. They used to be really small and because of the guest-workers who came in the 1970s to Germany also more pragmatic. This is changing at the moment. People are making effort to build new mosques, that answer to the needs of communities.

This year Eid was on 9/12, one day after 9/11, which happened before exactly fifteen years. As you can imagine, this brought mixed feeling to me. This remarkable coincidence of course brought new perspective on Islamophobia in general as well. I know that islamophobia is an issue in US and Germany as well. But I think that Americans are more aware of having this problem. As I could learn by talking to other Muslims in Texas is, that Muslims here have the insurance to be protected by the law. I think this is different in Germany. Even if People in Germany are given the right to choose religion freely, still Islam is not accepted by law. I believe that both countries do face that problem, but still they have different challenges within this problem.