Consider This from NPR - Ramadan In A Time Of War

Episode Date: March 11, 2024

The holy month of Ramadan begins this week. It is a holy month of worship for Muslims during which they worship, study the Quran, pray and fast from sunrise until sunset.It is a time of light, but Ramadan feels different this year, especially for Palestinian-Americans, says Eman Abdelhadi. She is a professor at the University of Chicago, whose research focuses on Muslim-Americans. Abdelhadi says "every moment of joy feels stolen and elicits a sense of guilt." The guilt she describes is connected to the mass death and suffering in Gaza. What does Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza mean for the holiest of Muslim holidays? For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Ramadan begins this week, and so we asked some of our Muslim listeners to share what they are praying for this year. Hello, my name is Iman Sada. My wish for this Ramadan is that we will achieve a ceasefire, and there will be no more bombing and shelling on top of civilians in the Gaza Strip. This is Meredith Spano. I think that the whole Ummah this year is going to be praying for Palestine. I personally will also be praying for my sister this year, who's expecting her first child in June.

My name is Sultan Minhas. I think especially during the holy month of Ramzan, when we are going to be praying day and night, our prayers will always include the people of Palestine. Ramadan this year feels different, especially for Palestinian Americans, says Iman Abdel Hadi. She is a professor at the University of Chicago

whose research focuses on Muslim Americans. Every moment of joy feels stolen and elicits a sense of guilt. Guilt because of the mass death and suffering in Gaza. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed in the Israel-Hamas war, and many more are starving. To now fast knowing that hundreds of thousands of people don't have that meal at the end of the day, and that it's an

entirely avoidable situation. That is so painful to sit with. That's a sentiment shared by Leila Al-Haddad. She's a Palestinian author based in the U.S. My family members are all scattered throughout Gaza. Several of them are in Gaza City in the north, completely cut off from humanitarian aid trucks and from the rest of our family members who are in the south. And they are literally struggling to survive and feed themselves. El Haddad has lost family members in the war between Israel and Hamas, and she says there's a feeling of helplessness as a ceasefire still seems unattainable.

Family members in Gaza have sent her voice memos, like her cousin Heba describing their desperate search for food. People are using animal feed to try to bake bread and foraging for wild greens. Gaza is literally destroyed. There isn't any kind of food, no flour, rice, canned food, vegetables, fruit. We have forgotten these things a long time ago. It does make, as a Muslim, make you reflect and think and focus kind of all your energies on prayer and patience. Al-Haddad's four children are excited about Ramadan.

We have a calendar that we made a while ago and we put chocolate in there and sort of good deed tasks. And so they've been asking about getting that out. But it's difficult to balance feelings of joy and gratitude with anger and grief. Her cousins in Gaza are also trying to celebrate Ramadan in any way they can. We have been through really difficult times and saw death with our own eyes.

But God has destined us to stay alive. They're all saying, please, Lord, help us see Ramadan, help us observe Ramadan, right? So they're anticipating it and they want to fast it. It's not something people want to avoid. Despite this all, they're asking for forgiveness and for ease from the hardship. And they're asking that they survive enough to be able to observe and see the month. Consider this. What does Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza mean for the holiest of Muslim holidays.

From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Monday, March 11th. It's Consider This from NPR. Ramadan starts this week, and for Muslims observing the holiday, this year's celebrations feel different. Ramadan is a month in which we are to connect to God and to become overall more conscious about Him and about ourselves and about the people around us and about, you know, the suffering of the world and the blessings that we take for granted. That's Imam Omar Suleiman. He is the founder and president of Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research outside Dallas, Texas. The happiness that you typically would feel at the holy month arriving and the sadness at the death and destruction that we've seen over the last five months. I asked him if the tradition of fasting during Ramadan takes on a different significance with widespread hunger and starvation in Gaza.

I think so. You know, when COVID hit, we talked a lot about how we used to take our, you know, social gatherings for granted. We used to take our communal worship for granted and just the sustenance that comes through being in the presence of people for granted. But this year, I mean, we're seeing what it looks like to have everything that could possibly happen that is terrible to a person happen to a population and the world completely unable to stop it. And so I think that for us, it has opened our eyes to the meaning of life, the meaning of solidarity and the meaning of empathy. And I think it gives us an added layer to our worship this year. We always tell people to pray for others and to use what they are gaining in terms of the nourishment of the soul to physically, emotionally, spiritually nourish others. I think that for this year, our prayers, I hope, will be more sincere.

I hope that our supplications will be deeper. But I also, I hope that we actually see tangible difference on the ground in Gaza. You are Palestinian-American, and I know you talk about Gaza in your sermons, and I'm sure your congregation in the Dallas area includes Muslims of many different backgrounds. And so how do you integrate or balance your identity as Palestinian with your role as a religious leader to a broad, diverse community of Muslims? So here's the thing. In my community, we have people that have lost 20, 30, 40 members of their family in Gaza. And they're coming to the prayer every day, even outside of Ramadan.

And so my entire congregation is immersed in this right now. I think that it's very important for people who perhaps don't go to a mosque regularly or don't interact with Palestinian Americans regularly to know that the entire Muslim community is absolutely immersed in what is happening in Gaza. And I think that there have been a lot of political miscalculations in reading the Muslim community and media miscalculations and not understanding just how much this weighs on our conscience as a community. And so when I walk into a mosque or when I walk into any Muslim community these days, I feel like everyone around me is Palestinian because everyone has seen that sadness, either in their own families or people that have become like family to them over the years because they've worshipped side by side for so long.

And now they are seeing that brother or that sister that they used to pray next to on a daily basis is coming to the prayer every day. And you can tell they've been weeping for the last few hours. That has been the case for the last few months. It's been a lot of sadness. It's been a lot of heartbreak. And there are Palestinians in pretty much every Muslim community in the United States. And every Palestinian has a story of loss right now, unfortunately. And I think that the entire community has felt that loss and embraced that loss and is all thinking about how we can come together and not just make ourselves feel better with what is happening, but channel our community sadness into actually bringing about global solidarity with the people of Gaza. And so when a member of your congregation who has lost so many family members says to you, how do I practice the joy that I'm commanded to experience during Ramadan this year, what do you tell them? I tell them that there are different meanings of joy.

There is the joy of celebration, and then there's the joy of perspective and knowing that your family members have gone to a better place and that there is ease after hardship, there is light after darkness, that Ramadan teaches us that after deprivation, there's fulfillment, and that your joy doesn't have to look like laughter and smiles,

but that inner peace and contentment and knowing that the God that you worship has not forgotten your relatives and your family that leaves from this world, even in the cruelest of fashion, will be embraced by the most compassionate and that we will continue to strive together for those that are still alive to make sure that they're able to once again find joy in this world. I've spoken to you about your role as a community leader, as a Palestinian American. What about just your own personal celebration of Ramadan with your family this year? How are you feeling about it?

Well, you know, my wife and my children, my father, who is a Nakba survivor, was born in 1943 and has painful memories. And so I think that with my children, this has been a learning experience, an experience of growth for them as it has been for us. Thankfully, every year in Ramadan, as a family, we have gone to homeless shelters. We've done things in our backyard with refugee populations that have left some of the war zones that were otherwise so distant and exposed our families to our broader community, our broader Muslim family, our broader human family. But I think that for this year, look, I've shown my children that it's okay to cry and that tears don't have to be tears of despair, that we always have hope, and that part of that hope is in our ability to continue to strive in whatever way God has allowed us to strive. Just like every Ramadan,

we know that we can't solve world hunger with the small acts of kindness that we do. We can't solve the crisis overnight that has been visited upon our brothers and sisters in Palestine over all these years, but the small acts of solidarity will go a long way, especially when you have so many people around the world that have woken up to this reality for the very first time over these last five months. Imam Omar Suleiman, thank you so much. And Ramadan Mubarak. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. This episode was produced by Brianna Scott and Lina Muhammad. It was edited by Patrick Jaron Watananan and Courtney Dorney.

Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.