From Richmond Times Dispatch
They can scare us, and they can comfort us.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, on words
In September 2007 our Honda Odyssey idled in the gravel parking lot of a mosque in Clemson, S.C. As it turned out, the unadorned aluminum structure sat ironically and lonely on Old Stone Church Road in the Deep South. Suddenly my then-2-year-old daughter voiced the words that apparently reverberate in America from time to time: “Mosque … scary.”
A man named Abdul had invited our family to join the Muslim community in the Clemson area for a veritable potluck dinner. Southern fried hospitality meets hijabs, thawbs and take-your-shoes-off. Only God knew what the scene would actually be like.
I was already downloading the church fellowship halls of my youth: utilitarian fold-out tables; rickety metal chairs; desperate parents imploring their children to eat something nutritious before stuffing down the sugar, running around mad and spinning into orbit within sacred space like some Pentecostal or Sufi.
Abdul did say there would be Algerians, Egyptians, Palestinians, Lebanese, Turks, Pakistanis and Indians. So the casserole selections were certain to be noticeably, if not deliciously, different from those famed potlucks I treasured.
