You have heard this countless times, five times a day if you lived within earshot of a mosque. In the place of worship where your parents took you to pray in public, you saw the Imam or Islamic leader (who performs the same duties as a Protestant minister in Britain or North America) raise his hands and lift his voice to say: "In the name of God, the Mercy-giving, the Merciful!" Then you followed him with your lips and heart. Whenever the Imam was not there, or when you were with a group of Muslims who had no. such leader, the oldest or most learned man among you led the prayers. For Islam is democratic, and it forms its leaders from within its own membership. It is a pious faith that breeds men of ability. These childhood memories put you in touch with a larger world, a world of trancendental reality. They taught you other things which all men should know and must respect. Many times as a child, you thought about your father's and your mother's words, and connected them with something higher and mysterious, with lofty things you felt things you felt but could not fully understand: the distant sky that matched the tiled blue of some mosques, the beauty of nature, the joy of living, and the love of your parents, of your relatives and friends. But most of all, they brought your feelings back to your place of worship, to the mosque; and they brought the ever-recurritlg name and attributes of God into your mind. Something about public worship was different from everything else on earth. People were different when they came to pray together. Book HAD YOU BEEN BORN A MUSLIM Growing Up a Muslim author : T.B. lrving