Many Muslim Egyptian men have prayer bruises on their foreheads.<\/p>\n
Some of them are quite large and pronounced.<\/p>\n
I have spent some time looking at people as I sit in public places, and I have watched men pray.<\/p>\n
From what I know of physics and my observations of the topography of some men’s foreheads, I fail to see how these bruises could be formed in the shapes and sizes that are exhibited.<\/p>\n
There are many here who are quite convinced that these bruises are enhanced. I have heard many explanations as to how this is done. The most painful sounding one is with a hot iron. Ow<\/strong>.<\/p>\n These bruises are referred to, somewhat derisively, as zebiba (prune) by those who have no bruise. Either “secular” Muslims or Christians.<\/p>\n The largest bruises are on lower income individuals, though one will sometimes see one on a well dressed, more weathly looking individual.<\/p>\n And most of the bruises are on men 40 and younger. Again there are exceptions.<\/p>\n We have now visited 3 other mainly Muslim countries (Morocco, Qatar and Jordan) and have not seen these on any other Muslims other than Egyptians.<\/p>\n If my suspicions and the comments of others are true, and these bruises are enhanced, it is obviously some sort of display of piousness.<\/p>\n Interesting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Many Muslim Egyptian men have prayer bruises on their foreheads. Some of them are quite large and pronounced. I have spent some time looking at people as I sit in public places, and I have watched men pray. From what I know of physics and my observations of the topography of some men’s foreheads, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-differences"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cairochronicles.com\/jack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}