Background: Due to my presence at $tarbux almost daily, I tend to run into people repeatedly and get into conversations with them. A few weeks ago, I struck up a conversation with a man and his companion about the nature of sin and baptism and all that.

Today: I walked by a man who I thought was the companion and waved. It turned out to not be the companion but an Egyptian professor of economics at UC Irvine and several other Egyptian men, one of whom was quite effusive and kissed my cheek when I was telling him about Daniel. (This is about the time I realized that these were not the men I had spoken to before.) We had a great conversation about Islam and how people have corrupted it with politics and they seemed sorry to have to leave.

The poignant thing about the conversation today was that they all individually felt like they had to assure me that they were not terrorists. I laughed and told them that I knew that they weren’t, but it saddened me that they felt that they had to tell me that. (It possibly might have had something to do with the bombing of the Coptic church in Alexandria.) Do we Americans come off as being so stupid that we see any Muslim as a terrorist?

Still… it was strange to shake hands with them because usually it’s considered taboo for Muslim men to touch Muslim women. They were tickled pink when I told them that if I had known that they were Arabic speakers, I would have greeted them with the word “salaam”.

Still… an interesting encounter and one that definitely made my day.