The Sheikh in Yemen had praying beads between his fingers all the time. He prayed and even we heard him say the Quranic verses in his prayers during a scene. In this time and era, this was an extra ordinary movie showing some Muslims in positive lights.
There were some scenes when people spoke Arabic but I couldn't decipher a lot of it. I'm not sure if they were actually speaking Arabic. Funny I was trying to understand what they said on the same day when I made an effort to speak Arabic! It was when in the airport I tried to help a poor old woman who didn't know how to find her gate on her way to Cairo and asked me on my passing. I said I didn't know in English, and showed her the departure monitors on the other side of the salon then I saw her face drop. I thought she might not know English at all even to read "Cairo." I turned around and motioned her to follow me. She quickly started scampering behind me while taking something out of her purse. Her boarding pass. OK. Cairo. 15:30. Found it. C33. "C33". And she responded in inaudible Arabic. "C thirty three" I repeated slowly. Blank face. So I showed with three fingers "thirty" and closed and open the same three fingers "three". She smiled and said something but I was not confident she got what I said wondered if she thought C3. Suddenly I remembered I knew some Arabic! "Saales ashar saales". She quickly repeated "thalis 'ashar althalis". Yeah! We both smiled. I pointed her to C gates and walked away. Just followed her by eyes and last I saw she was on her way. I hope she found her gate fine! Enshala!
Such a fun and cute story. Made me happy to read it!
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