Are You An Infidel?
“My name is Dana,” she said.
“How old are you?”
“I am 9.”
“When is your birthday?”
Confused, she switched to Arabic.
“We don’t have that in Saudi Arabia,” she said. “That’s an infidel holiday.”
Shocked, her father asked where she had learned that, and she fetched one of her government-issued textbooks, flipping to a lesson that listed “forbidden holidays”: Christmas and Thanksgiving. Birthdays had been part of the same lesson.
Another time, I met a religious friend for coffee, and he brought his two young sons. When the call to prayer sounded, my friend went to pray. His sons, confused that I did not follow, looked at me wide-eyed and asked, “Are you an infidel?”
- Ben Hubbard, NYT
Originally published at oxalic. You can comment here or there.