Imam Konate began the prayer one weekend afternoon at Masjid Aqsa in Harlem. Crowds chatting idly on the sidewalk slowly ambled into the hall. They removed their shoes and placed them on the shelves lined along the walls around the entrance. The worshipers formed rows facing Mecca, and greeted each other with nods and smiles. The air quietened quickly, and Konate continued his prayers as the crowd knelt on the ground. I was unsure of my role and conscious of my presence. I was there waiting to interview Imam Konate for another story, and didn't feel like I knew how to pray. I hung around the shoe shelves instead, silently begging for forgiveness.
After the prayer, Adame Konate, a New York City cab driver who is also a relative of the Imam, greeted me. "Africans are very peaceful people," he assured me without my inquiring. I realized he felt a need to be an ambassador for his faith and a protector of his people to avoid persecution and restore an image. It seemed unnecessary, yet inevitable, that religion and region would often have to explained and distinguished.
***
When I reported on stories from the West African community in New York City for a course at Columbia, I figured I was way beyond my comfort zone. For one, I wasn't from the community. I was, by definition of my beat, racially and geographically profiling like nobody's business. But something I did not realize till much later, is how often I would be around people when they prayed to their gods.
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The International Central Gospel Church, on Park Avenue in the Bronx, faces a set of railway tracks on a quiet industrial block, next to United Collision auto body shop. The church's renovated interiors, converted from a warehouse, provide a cavernous room with an altar at the front and rows of neatly laid out red chairs, each with a pocket slipped onto the back for pamphlets. A PowerPoint presentation projected the text of the hymn on the wall facing the Sunday crowd.
"The light of God shall shine upon those in darkness," sang Deacon Richard Nyamedi, as churchgoers slowly found their place in the aisles and sang along. Later, the pastor asked everyone to raise their hands and feel the Lord's energy. "Seek God and prosper," he advised, aware of the economic climate. A woman wearing a cream kabba sang along as she raised her hands. Immersed in the moment, she knelt down with her elbows on her chair and prayed.
It was my first time at a church service of any kind; this was a Ghanaian gospel church in a warehouse in the Bronx. Sitting in the audience, it seemed awfully odd and pointless to be taking notes, while everyone around me stood up, raised their hands and sang.
It soon became obvious to me standing there that I couldn't just suddenly get into the moment, that faith was a world far removed from skeptical inquiry.
The gospel choir sings and worshippers pray at the International Central Gospel Church in the Bronx.
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People like Nyamedi, who converted to Christianity when he was 12, are convinced of their adopted faith. To Nyamedi, the path to heaven is through Christianity. "If you are not Christian, forgiveness doesn't exist always," he says.
Nana Kwame Acheampong, a Ghanaian pastor at a Bronx church (Nana is an honorific title for a senior leader in Ghanaian traditions) has been seeing the push in the African community in New York to join churches, and has mixed feelings about it. He laments that some Ghanaians are joining the churches in the city as much for community as for faith. In Ghana, people could always rely on the larger community and the extended family in times of need, he said. But for those living in New York City, the church often plays that role. "I want people to join because of faith," said Acheampong. "It brings people together."
Ghana has a reputation for its religious tolerance: incidents of intolerance are rare in the nation where roughly 70 percent are Christian, 15 percent are Muslim, and 10 percent are people of indigenous faith. But the indigenous population has dwindled in recent years, as more people of traditional faiths convert to Christianity, particularly to the increasingly popular Pentecostal practices.
Ghanaians' history of religious tolerance has been tested with a rising allegiance to various Christian denominations. Tensions have occurred between Christian and indigenous faiths;
Afrikania Mission, a traditional indigenous religious group, has been critical of the government and foreign bodies for diluting traditional Ghanaian values, according to a 2008 U.S. Department of State report on international religious freedom. These indigenous and religious values, however Afrikania chooses to define them, existed long before Ghana became a nation.
***
It was 10 p.m. on a Saturday night in August last year. I had been in Queens for three hours, waiting to attend the final Ashanti funeral rites for a revered and remembered elder in the community (and unknown beyond) who passed away in Ghana in 2007. The invitation had been making the rounds for over a week, including notices at local grocery stores that DJ Freddy and Metro Hitech would provide the music.
That Saturday, streams of Ghanaians sauntered into a ballroom for a ceremony in a Queens residential complex. Chairs lined up around the perimeter of the room quickly filled with family and friends of the bereaving family. A Christian pastor led the prayer, before the music and drinks. The emcee informed everyone about a donation sheet being passed around the room. Funerals and memorials are a communal affair in the Ghanaian community. People often pool in money and support the grieving family; a cashier keeps the records. Donating is a gesture that is part respect, part concern for the grieving family, and part out of reverence for the ancestors.
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The only thing that ties these disparate elements is perhaps that they go unreported. They fall through the cracks in our canvas of experience. But in our efforts to make sense of our world, it has sometimes become important to use religion as the tool that carves those very cracks.
I thought about all these moments soon after the Mumbai attacks in November 2008, when politicians hid and the public expressed outrage. The media often deconstructed issues into black and white. It was quick to tell us what to think. "The softer tissue of human experience -- culture, religion, values -- also binds Indians and Jews," wrote Sam Freedman, in a New York Times commentary on how Israel and India have been the target of Islamist terrorism. In these times, religion and nationhood, it seemed, were interchangeable. And if that were the case, where do devout moderate Muslims go? Why else would Adame Konate, the worshiper at Masjid Aqsa in Harlem, feel a need to distinguish his peaceful African identity to me?
Fundamentalists do not identify with regional borders, and it seemed like an unnecessary connection between Jews and India at a time when Muslims feel alienated. Pakistan shares more ties with northern India than perhaps any other nation. Bomb blasts killed 27 people in Peshawar too on Dec. 5, 2008; Muslim leaders in India refused to allow the bodies of militants killed in the Mumbai attacks to be buried in Islamic cemeteries, saying they were not true Muslims.
There are perhaps no easy answers in religion, especially when mixed with nationhood. My brief forays into faiths that I did not understand only told me that they bind and blend in some inexplicable, naïve and clichéd way.