Is Co-existence Possible?

You Know You're in the Middle East When...

Mara and I are house/babysitting for friends, and when the Arab electrician came to repair the boiler (hot water heater) I was privy to a unique phenomenon. Ziyad went back out to the car to fetch a part, and his trusty sidekick in broken Hebrew asked if by chance we had a spare prayer-rug as now was tfilah time. "Sure," I offered throwing together a door mat and some newspaper which seemed to make the grade. He then proceed to kneel down and prostrate on the living room floor - despite all the raucous of homework, YouTube, telephones, and of course electric work on the boiler.
This of course has been going on for close to 1400 years, but the question that proceeded to intrigue me is in regard to a hypothetical reciprocal occurrence. Would a religious Jew be able to go in to an Arab/Muslims home [in Jerusalem] and explain that he needed to daven minha? And they would be ok with it? Of course religious Jews have a stigma among Jerusalem Arabs - especially in light of the on going debacle in Sheikh Jarrah, but religious Muslims have no less of a stigma among Western Jerusalem's Jews? What about fear of terrorism? Of course not all Muslims or Arabs are terrorists - not even close. But have all terrorists been Muslim or Arab. Basically, yes. Have there been incidents when service providers, who even maintain a long standing relationship with their clients, turned and committed acts of violence? Unfortunately, there have.
The moral of the story is that maybe, just maybe, last Thursday afternoon we caught a glimpse of co-existence. He finished his prayer, sat entranced momentarily, ate a few cookies that we offered him and packed up. The boiler switch was fixed and the kids who bore witness to the whole thing acquiesced, muttering a "yeah, ok, that was kind of weird, but also kind of cool," and went back to the computer.