I walk our dog twice a day where we live.
I have done so for thirteen years, every single day, year-round, along the same routes in Frederiksberg. You come to know a street and a neighbourhood that way. Not really something you think about, but something you just know how it is - who lives where, when the light changes, what an ordinary morning sounds like.
And therefore also when something is different.
The other day a car stopped on our private road. A couple got out, they did not look stressed, nor searching, just kind of naturally present. They opened the boot and pulled two blankets out of it. They laid them on the asphalt behind the parked cars - then oriented themselves toward Mecca and began to pray.
I want to say clearly from the start - I do not judge them. Individual prayer during a journey has always been permitted in Islam's own tradition, the traveller may pray where he is, when the time comes. It is not the two people who are the point. They are just doing what their tradition prescribes.
The point is that I stood there with the dog on the lead - and even though I knew it would come one day, it still hit me - and thought: "for thirteen years I have walked here, and that there I have never seen before. Twenty years ago it was unthinkable. Today it is Tuesday..."
This is what normalisation in a society looks like.
Not as a decision someone has made, and not as something someone has voted on, but as a slow shift in how things used to be - like what the street is, and who it belongs to - so gradual that you only notice it the day you stand with it in front of your own front door.
And you could, in fact, just leave it there, at the wonder. Most of us do, because there is no cost to that. But I still became curious about a question I had not asked myself before - how do they actually view prayer in public space there, where Islam is not new, but has been the social order for fourteen hundred years? That is, not what we think about it in Europe - but what they think about it, there where it comes from.
The answer surprised me.
Egypt has gathered Friday prayer in approved mosques and regulated street prayer.
Algeria and Morocco dissolve unauthorised prayer gatherings in public space.
Saudi Arabia expects prayer in the mosque and treats unannounced religious assemblies on the street as a matter of public order.
The countries with the longest experience of Islam as social order are simultaneously also the countries that enforce most strictly that the street is not a prayer room.
Why on earth is that?, you might think.
They know something we have forgotten, or perhaps never knew. They know that collective prayer in public space is not only a religious act and never has been.
It is a territorial act. The one who gathers people in prayer on the street makes a claim on the street. Not juridically, but symbolically - and in the symbolic order it is the claim that counts. That is why Algiers stops it within ten minutes. That is why Paris forbade it in 2011 and acknowledged what Rue Myrha had become.
And the phenomenon is spreading in these years through the European cities and capitals. And notice where it often happens. Not in the side streets, not in the back car parks, but in central squares, along main streets, in front of churches and cathedrals - places chosen, not randomly ended up in. Where the mosque has space, and the carpet is still rolled out in front of the cathedral, one need not guess at the intention. The place is the message. Visibility, numbers, territory - and for each time it is repeated unchallenged, the boundary of the normal shifts a little. Marseille, Nice, London, Munich.
The pattern is the same, only the city names change.
When demonstrators in Clichy in 2017 prayed at the town hall square after the closure of a prayer room, they themselves called it a protest. They were more honest than our own commentators, who insist that everything we see is only piety, private life and inner connection - and that anyone who sees more is seeing visions.
Classic Danish canvas-trouser-and-good-boy naivety.
So let us say it as it is.
Call it by its proper name.
Where the mosque is full, and the street takes the overflow, it is a question of capacity that must be solved, if Denmark wishes further mosques built.
But where space exists, and the street is chosen anyway, it is a demonstration. Of something or other. And it is not my reading or my naming.
It is Cairo's, Rabat's and Algiers' reading, codified in their own legislation, enforced by their own police.
The West is the only place in the world where one must not know what the Islamic countries themselves have known for centuries.
The street is never neutral.
It belongs to those who dare to use it.
And perhaps that is just how it should be here.
If so, I will consider making a detour past Moses Hansen on the way home from summer holiday in a couple of weeks, and ask if we could not borrow his old cross.
Perhaps I should take it on a walk from outer Nørrebro, through the district and in to Christiansborg - and with his permission of course - present it as a gift and an artwork that could stand in front of the palace, well protected by the 85 granite-cast Quran blocks.
Kind of symbolic.
Remind everyone, in there, where we are.
And what we believe in here.
Take the street back.
Peacefully.
I will gladly do it alone, if you are not comfortable with it. But company is naturally always nice on walks.
What do you think about it?
May one do that?
Should one ask for permission?
Or is it just like the blankets in the boot - harmless exercise of one's faith, which I can quite peacefully and risk-free set out to do? 🙂
❤️🔥🪽