Story highlights Islam in most Muslim countries is increasingly defined in rigid term, writes Cawo Abdi

Confusion, shame and victimhood might define the future memories of Muslim children

Cawo Abdi is author of "Elusive Jannah: The Somali Diaspora and a Borderless Muslim Identity." Abdi is associate professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota and a research associate in sociology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. The views expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) My most treasured childhood memories are colored by beauty associated with what Islam was in the society that I was born in and raised.

One vivid memory of this childhood involves regularly sitting on the edge of my father's prayer mat, made from goat-skin that became supple over years of usage in nomadic hamlets in central Somalia.

Cawo Abdi

I can still feel the texture and smell of the hide, though my father passed on over 30 years ago. My father and his three brothers were Koranic teachers in central Somalia, traveling from hamlet to hamlet, teaching children, mostly boys, to memorize the Koran, and often returning with goats that were given them as payment for their labor. In addition to teaching, which carried great prestige for both teachers and disciples, these men of religion performed marriages, tended to the sick and performed burial rituals.

The Islam that shaped my childhood also included my mother who could neither read nor write Arabic, who memorized few verses of the Koran, and whose daily life was consumed with the financial and emotional needs of her family. My mother's work in a meat market in central Somalia required extremely long hours, with prayer rituals a luxury that she and many of her female co-workers could never afford. But this lack of "practice" was devoid of shame, nor was there any articulated distinction between a Muslim and a practicing Muslim.

Life in Somalia, until my teens in the 1980s, defied this dichotomy, with Muslim identity being part and parcel of being a Somali, regardless of adherence to any particular ritual.

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