Prayer rugs as individual as owners

Different weaves for different needs

SEATTLE (RWN) - Redbeard, the fearsome head of State Security who needs no last name, prefers muted colors and weaves. The President is a little grander, preferring the deep colors provided by velour. And Safuh McCain, whose song "Not me, Bible Belt," topped the charts for 15 straight weeks this year, prefers a riot of colors and patterns on his.

We are defined, it seems, by our prayer rugs.

Like Tom Anders, a businessman from Kirkland, Wash., who uses one of the new foldable rugs. Simple, easy to carry in a satchel and easily washed, it perfectly matches the lifestyle of an electrical engineer who doesn't know where each prayer time will take him.

"The other day, I got an emergency call to head over to Bremerton," Anders said. "There was a problem at one of our shipyard clients. So I'm on the ferry and the call to prayer comes. The ferry system provides their own prayer rugs, but I was wearing nice pants, you know, slacks. I didn't want to get on something that drunks use to sleep in. I pulled out my foldable and did my duties."

Anders' foldable is a muted brown, very quiet. "Totally my personality," he said.

"We're living in a much less individualistic society than they did in the old regime," said Roger Thomson, a cultural history professor at Syracuse University for Good Muslims. "There are - and this is not a bad thing - fewer opportunities to express ourselves than there would have been in that old sinful society. So we take our expressions where we can get them. I have a few different prayer rugs myself. I have one in my office, which is very understated, very professorial. I have one at home with an image of Jill Stanton (the actress whose public conversion kicked off so much of the reawakening) on it. I have one in my travel bag that has a little compass attached to it, so I always know which way to face for prayers."

The compass-rug was last year's hottest selling item among business travelers, according to a survey in BusinessWeek magazine. Its designer, Zahid Clearwater, was inspired by a trip he had to take to Alaska.

"I was in Fairbanks a few years ago," Clearwater said from his Santa Barbara studio, "and it was December. There was no light at all. I had a watch with alarms on it to tell me when the prayers were, but I was totally disoriented and didn't know which way was east. I had to keep asking, and it made me very self-conscious. I came back to California and figured out how to incorporate the compass into the rug."

It was a good decision. Clearwater Designs sold more than 2 million of the rugs last year.



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