A Good Satan

Today we went to Tangier, Morocco for a day trip. Because we weren't sure of what traveling to Morocco would entail, we booked a day tour, which, much to our surprise, was quite wonderful. One part of the trip was a visit to a carpet store, which, of course was to encourage all of us tourists to part with our euros. Since Wayne and I are traveling for two more months and had no desire to lug around a rug, I tried to stand apart from the crowd and carpet sellers. Suddenly, in the midst of the din, I heard the Muslim call to prayer. It was 2 pm and the call to prayer reached out to me.

A friendly sales person came over to me. "Which way is Mecca?" I asked, the last question he expected to hear from me, a white Western woman.

"It's this way," he responded, pointing both of us towards the East. "What can I show you to buy?"

"I don't need a thing," I said, except time to pray." In truth, I really wanted to be left alone to hear the call to prayer again.

"Then you should pray," he said, and then added, "Maybe you should become Muslim...it makes everything so much easier."

"Really?" now it was my turn to be surprised. " how is that?"

"You know who you are because you know who God is."

We talked for a little while about God, and then somehow he shifted to talking about how Satan (Shay-tawn is the way he pronounced it) exists in all of us-- a good Satan and a bad Satan and when the bad Satan appears between the people, then we have all of these kinds of problems." I asked him if the war between these two forces was part of what jihad was, and he said "yes."

My tour leader motioned that it was time to go. My would-be salesman-turned-theologian suddenly clapped my shoulder. "I like your heart. There is a good Satan inside of you. ..".

From my Western Christian Unitarian Universalist perspective, there is no such thing as a "good Satan," but it's something that I expect to ponder well beyond the walls of the carpet shop where I found so much more then I had bargained for.

Location:Tangier, Morocco