Kaffah

In the Netherlands we have few champions, or even excellent sportsmen and women for running, jumping and other sports/. We now have Daphne Schippers, the top or running the one hundred meter. One we have Sifan Hassan for longer distances, speciality 800 and 1500 meter. She is one of the many migrants who arrived during the last decades. She was born in 1993, 15 years when she fled from Ethiopia (2008), received her Dutch passport in 2013 and is now a famous Dutch personality.

She gave an interview to daily newspaper De Volkskrant and  did not tell much about her background, nothing about her parents. She only has some contact with her grandmother. She must have had some special reasons, because she received asylum in the Netherlands. She prays and has a somewhat longer shirt than many female athletes, but does not wear the veil. The journalist said to her: If you win a run you make a prosternation and it looks as if you thanks God. She said: 'Indeed, but I cannot really pray with shorts and my ass so high (laughing)'. The journalist: 'What ismore important: to wear the veil or being a good person for your fellow people?' Hassan: 'It does not work like that, you must be a good person as well as wear the veil.' Is this the idea of kaffah: the rules must be fulfilled without discretion between important and not?

This week I also saw a nice YouTube movie about the new church built in Calais by Ethiopian Christian refugees. They say their prayers standing, with prosternations, quite similar to the Muslims. The church is an empty place, no chairs.