The United Arab Emirates is a devoutly Muslim country. Nearly everything we do here comes with a backdrop of Islam. The ubiquitous mosques, the electronically amplified calls to prayer, the holidays, the moral code, the legal code …

So the idea of a few practicing Christians in this mix makes for some curious juxtapositions, the sort we notice during particularly Christian holidays.

Like Christmas or Easter.

I went to a Maundy Thursday service the other night.  I like Maundy Thursday. It’s a pregnant moment on the Christian calendar. The Last Supper, with Gethsemane coming up in a couple of hours, and the long night of Jesus shuttling between various arms of the Jerusalem legal system, and then Pilate and Golgotha … well, Maundy Thursday is the starting point for all that.

I went, again, to the Anglican church, St. Andrews. If you want to go to church in Abu Dhabi you have basically three choices: The Catholic church, the Anglican church or the American-style pentacostal-ish church.

All three are located within about a 200-yard radius about a mile from me. To my knowledge, they are the only three churches in a city of a million-plus people, and if you don’t live in the interior of this one particular block, you wouldn’t know there are any churches here at all.

To walk past them is not to be sure what goes on inside. The American church could be a community center with lots of windows. The Anglican church could be a school or a strangely conformed apartment building.

I don’t know if this is the law, but none of the churches have a cross visible from the street. None have a bell tower. None have a steeple.

I assume the idea is to avoid rankling the strongly Muslim population, people who take their religion very seriously. (One of the seven grounds for capital punishment in the UAE is … conversion away from Islam.) The churches are located in the middle of a blue-collar neighborhood, and it is safe to say most of the residents are not Christians.

St. Andrews is a collection of low-slung buildings that seem always to be crowded. Some high number of Christian groups (like, 30) meet in various places there, and I could hear singing in what might normally be described as the parish hall, and I could see what seemed to be an Eastern Orthodox priest (he certainly had the beard for it) setting up chairs in a patio.

The Anglicans continue to use the main sanctuary, even if their numbers don’t always justify it. It is their church, after all, and it appears to hold perhaps 300 people, if the balcony is filled.

Perhaps 60 people gathered for the 6 p.m. service on Thursday, most of them from the subcontinent. The minister (I think Anglicans prefer the word “priest”) is a Briton who has a British female aide, and the two of them ran the service. A little choir of about six was singing quietly as I came in. The church has an organ and a guy who can almost play it.

The Anglicans are a little high-churchy, for me. Lots of genuflecting, which is not normally an American Protestant mode of behavior. On Maundy Thursday the clergy do the “washing of feet” thing that comes out of the Last Supper reading. They produce some buckets and towels, and a half-dozen or so people in the congregations have their feet washed. I didn’t volunteer.

English hymns, surprisingly to me, are not the same as American hymns. We sang six, and four of them I didn’t know. At all. Two I recognized as “camp fire” sorts of tunes.  This strikes me more at Christmas; who knew the Brits had their own Christmas hymns?

The minister (ahem, priest) gave a sermon in which he suggested that the first European Christians to arrive in the area came on a Portuguese ship in 1506, and that they spent their time burning the local Arabs’ ships and committing a massacre over on what is now the east coast of the UAE, at a town named Khorfakkan. The point? Perhaps to suggest we should be grateful that Christians are allowed to gather in the UAE.

But I digress. The point here is that Christians are allowed to practice their religion. Up to and including communion with wine — in a country where consuming alcohol is illegal.

The arrangement seems to be … go ahead and do what you do, even that wine thing, but don’t make yourselves too obvious … and don’t even think about proselytizing.

That last part must be a little difficult for Christians who, like Muslims, are taught to think that everyone should believe as they do. But churches here are about knowing their limits.