Religion + Development = ?

Friday afternoon post-internship I decided to meet up with samay xarit (my friends) at the HLM market--the place you go in Dakar when you need to buy...well, anything you could ever need. And most times you come out with many other things you really don't need. Kind of like the Target of Senegal. Slightly different atmosphere, though.

Anyway, the truly significant detail of this story is not so much where we went but when we went. The fact that we are in a country whose population is over 90% Muslim and all men are required to attend afternoon prayers at a mosque on Fridays... well...it must have just slipped our minds.

Coming home for lunch most weeks I'd actually witnessed the hordes of men flooding the streets in their "Sunday Best" (or rather Friday Best) toting prayer rugs and beads, but never before had I seen them in action talking to the Big Man Upstairs. Well, that changed on my way to HLM.

I can easily say it was this most incredible taxi ride of my life. Several blocks before coming up on one of the local mosques, I began seeing people lined up in perfectly neat rows on the sidewalk, their prayer rugs laid out in front of them. As we got closer to the mosque (and this one wasn't even that big) we could see literally hundreds of men lined up row after row on any free ground space they could find. Right as we passed through, the call to prayer rang out through the mosque's loud speaker, and at once, this sea of heads was suddenly bowed to the ground.

The cultural sensitivity and curiousity in me had an epic battle over whether to take a picture, but the sensitivity won out in the end. It was the kind of moment that was better spent experiencing than trying to capture, anyway...though I suppose that might be true of most moments.

The roads and intersections beyond the mosque were scattered with abandoned taxis and car rapides...it was almost ghosttown-like. It was as if everyone had been going about their day and all of a sudden dropped everything they were doing to pray, cut off mid-sentence. Frankly, I think that kind of is what happened. Time seems to stop come Friday afternoon prayer time. Coming from the Melting Pot, it was incredible to see that religious solidarity in such a metropolitan setting.

Interestingly enough, we just had a speaker at school talk to us about how religion is one of the major obstacles standing in the way of Senegal's development. She talked about the danger of crediting everything to "God's will"... if a building structure fails, a doctor makes a fatal mistake with a patient, a politician makes a controversial decision--God's will. Obviously this explanation is not used clear across the nation, but there is a big enough concentration of this mentality to cause concern among critics.

My econ class has discussed how Africa has been developed by Western standards and by that measure, it's been a failure. The continent needs to change its definition of development to fit African culture and society. For me, it's just hard to imagine what that would look like hand-in-hand with such strong religious convictions. That is not to say it's impossible to live a faith-based life and be developed... it would just look different from what we now know as development.

I feel like our Western economically developed societies place high value on money, time, advancement of the individual, survival of the fittest...and it's hard to picture Senegal with that face of development. That just seems so far, so opposite from what their society is now.

Even after mulling over this for a couple months, it's still hard to know what to think...or what to propose as a better solution.

p.s. I keep spelling development with two Ps because that's how it's spelled in French and I keep getting the two mixed up...AH!