Today was an easy Friday Prayer. My wife dropped me off while she and my father took the kids out. This saved me the quarter mile hike from the campus parking garage. With that and lower than average temperatures at a cool 89 degrees, I arrived cool and dry. I stopped by my department to clear out my desk; I will not be a teaching assistant this Fall along with several others due to funding constraints (and also because it seems I suck). Apparently, our government is not interested in creating a pool of intelligent experts in Near Eastern and Islamic Studies. In the 1950's and 60's, the government flooded Academia with funding for Soviet studies and Russian language. We won that one. But, I digress.

I and one of my professors went together. We arrived just as the call to prayer was finishing. As is typical, the majority of people had not yet arrived, so we got near-front row seats. I usually don't even try to get the front row exactly because of its rewards. I've never been one to advance myself in front of others for what I see as self-serving reward. Let others get it; I will find my rewards in ways that don't deprive others, since afterall the number of people who can sit in the front row is limited.

The sermon was apolitical today, at least until the closing supplication. Don't worry: more on that later. The preacher has a unique style of presentation: loud voice and sweeping his head to and fro. Thankfully, although he took pleasure in reciting Hadith in Arabic, he spoke in fluent English. He spoke on the subject of obtaining provisions in life. I thought his choice of 'provision' as a translation of rizq was somewhat antique; I might have used 'making a living' instead. He could have made it a great sermon focusing on how to avoid overwork and obsession with excess wealth. Instead, he gave us the usual pious double talk: don't worry about your livlihood, but you can't just sit around either. I understood it as "Man proposes, God disposes" but he went on to list eight ways (oh, just eight, huh) to increase one's livlihood (rizq), mostly centering on how being more devoted to God increases one's livlihood, and I don' think he meant solely one's spiritual sustenance, either. I endured all eight items in his list, and I have to say it was in anycase well structured and backed up by hadith. I noticed his reliance on hadith and thought how different the Shia sermon would be since it seems Sunni ones are a different set than the Shia hadith.

After the mid-sermon pause, he went on to try to explain why some people have more wealth than others. He told us a verse in which God says something about not bestowing wealth on some people because they would only use it against themselves. Thus, he implies that poverty is a blessed mechanism to save people from themselves. Possibly, but his ignoring of human agency and free will in acquiring livlihood and wealth disturbs me.

In the end, I joined him in the final supplication before prayer. At one point I lowered my hands and looked up when he asked God to unite the hearts of all Iraqis. Its sounds nice enough, but I was fully expecting him to ask for thier victory implicitly over the bodies of Marines… but, he didn't and he kept it apolitical. I'll give this one a 7 out of 10.