It started the way some of your best stories probably start: “How cool would it be to go up in that minaret? Think we could?”
My team mate Frank and I screwed up our courage and asked the caretaker. This wasn’t easy since together we spoke about eight words of Turkish and he no English, but somehow the query carried and he said yes.
Before we could enjoy the crazy great view of our city from the balcony of the minaret, he requested we wash in the ritual way Muslims do before entering the prayer room.
The caretaker showed us what to do, including the part where water is sniffed up to clean the sinuses. Foreseeing what would happen, I fake sniffed. Frank, who was very young and trained well to follow instructions, snorted what must have felt like a quart of water up his nose and nearly drowned himself!
While he spluttered, the care taker and I laughed!
This ritual cleaning is called wudu and has roots in both the Quran and various hadith. It consists of four obligatory actions:
- Washing the face, including sniffing (a small amount of!) water into the nose.
- Washing both arms to the elbows.
- Wiping the head.
- Washing the feet to the ankles.
As you might guess, the rules about how to do wudu vary and can be a little complicated. And the discussion on what breaks the state of ritual purity are extensive and can cause me to giggle like a middle school kid. IE: A toot is cause for redoing wudu, but only if it is heard or smelled.
Muslims practice wudu to prepare themselves for ritual prayer. As a Christian I’m profoundly grateful to be clean before God in all the ways that matter. I depend on the example of Jesus and the teaching of Paul that the cleanness of Jesus makes me clean.
That said, thinking about wudu makes me wonder if sometimes I’m a little too casual with my Father, the Creator, the Most High God.