Dear editors,
I spend a lot of time around people who talk seriously about institutions. In seminars, they reference Tocqueville and Burke, or discuss the decline of civic life and the fragility of democracy. At dinners, they debate whether America is entering some late-imperial phase. But their lives also require constant movement. Someone is leaving for a finance job in New York, someone else for graduate school in London. Apartments are temporary, cities interchangeable, the places they grew up in returned to only during holidays. The expectation is this: build your life around one opportunity until the next appears elsewhere.
Traditions come up as objects of analysis, things to discuss, critique, or admire from a distance. It’s rare to see anyone actually structure their life around one. When traditions aren’t living forces, it is easy to believe there is nothing left to conserve. When communities turn over and routines are reorganized every few months, inheritance looks abstract. Without time, repetition, or permanence, they start to feel thin and aesthetic.
When I arrived in the United States for college, almost everything about daily life changed at once: language, food, and the pace of the day. People rushed from classes to meetings to libraries that stayed open all night. But the rhythm I had grown up with persisted. Five times a day, I needed to stop and pray. Sometimes I found a quiet corner of a library floor, sometimes an empty classroom between lectures, sometimes a patch of grass. I washed in a bathroom sink before prayer, laid a jacket or scarf on the ground when I didn’t have a prayer mat, and kept track of the sun’s movement during days otherwise scheduled by syllabi and calendars.
I did not decide to pray the way I had decided what to study or where to live. It was something given to me by my father, his father, and the community in which I grew up. College was the first place I understood I could either carry it or set it down. Not without difficulty, and not always understanding what I was carrying, only that setting it down felt like a kind of forgetting I was not ready for. Prayer was simple, but it required the same thing every time: stop, step aside, repeat the words, bow, kneel, stand again, then return to whatever the day had been asking of me.
Practices like this make something simple visible: Traditions do not survive because they are admired. They survive because someone continues performing them, in particular places, at particular times, whether the surrounding world makes it convenient or not. This does not require rejecting modern life. It only resists flattening everything into preference or dinner table conversation. It is possible to go somewhere new and still carry something that does not change.
But what withstands a crossing—into a new country, a new life—is only what you treat as binding instead of optional, even when untethered from the community and the place that once held it in shape. Inheritance is conserved wherever someone repeats a practice long enough for it to stay alive. And the people who still know how to do that are often the ones who arrived carrying something fragile with them.
Faithfully,
Mariam ElNaggar
Image: Henry Osawa Turner, Woman at the Entrance to the Casbah, gouache on paper, ca. 1912 (DuMouchelles, Detroit).