From mosque to computer club

From mosque to computer club

The sun was setting when the muezzin announced the call for evening prayer and residents of the neighborhood began to flock to the mosque.

For the local children, participation in collective prayer was more of an entertaining and educational value than a sacred, spiritual meaning.

The spacious hall of the mosque makes it possible for the young to lie with friends on the floor covered with soft carpets, organize a comic fight with pillows, or, climbing the stairs to the second floor, scrutinize the orderly rows of worshipers from a height or make faces to friends left below.

“If children’s laughter is not heard behind you during prayer, know that your religion is under threat,” Muhammad Fatih, the conqueror of Constantinople, once said. In this mosque, for the time being, everything was in order in this regard. Children were its regulars, and their funny giggles often accompanied the melodious sounds of prayer coming from the imam’s microphone.

Playing and spending a lot of time here, the children simultaneously became involuntary listeners of sermons, received wise instructions from their elders, were imbued with an atmosphere of spirituality and, to some extent, avoided the pernicious influence of the street: in the mosque no one smoked, drink or swear.

But one day everything changed. Children began to come in less and less often, until one day there was not a single pair of children’s shoes on the shelves in the hallway. The foot of a child no longer stepped on the soft carpet of the mosque…

It all started with grandfather A. The elderly man joined religion relatively recently, but he did it just as energetically and consistently as he used to lead the local party cell and then the entire collective farm. A strict and active man, he did not tolerate disorder in any form. And the children snooping around the corners of the mosque were, in his understanding, one of the manifestations of chaos with which he always struggled.

His educational impulse was supported by a couple of old people and now an initiative group had already formed. At first, the children were threatened with a finger, shushed at and demanded to stop making noise. Then the game with pillows and running up the stairs fell under the ban. And after that, any children’s activity inside the mosque, with the exception of prayer and study, became the subject of a thorough examination of the “initiative group”.

The children stopped going to the mosque. Their long absence was noticed by one of the local old parishioners, who told about the results of educational work to all other supporters. Everyone unanimously agreed that finally the mosque would be quiet and the old people would enjoy the long-awaited peace.

A couple of years later, returning from the mosque, elder A. noticed a group of young people gnawing sunflower seeds at the door of a brand new computer club that had recently opened in the area.

They laughed loudly, quarreled rudely, some of them had cigarettes in their hands. The old man recognized them from old time’s sake. These were the same children whom he had previously driven out of the mosque.

“I told you they were ill-mannered,” thought the old man, passing by …

P.S. Of course, making noise in the mosque, preventing people from worshiping is not allowed. If children go beyond all reasonable boundaries in this regard, they need to be stopped. The question is how to do this without chasing them away and breaking the hearts that the Almighty tied to the mosque from such a young age.

Perhaps it will happen that our rudeness will push a child away and will lead to the fact that his foot will never cross the threshold of the mosque. Are we ready for such a responsibility?

May children’s laughter always be heard behind our backs during prayer. The time will come - the children will grow up and fill this row instead of us.

Otherwise, the children will certainly flood all the haunted places of the city, and then, instead of children's laughter, we will listen to our bitter lamentation for our own children ...

Hamid Asadulin

As-Salam correspondent