I.
Most professors are fake accepting of Ramadan. They’re accepting adjacent and the border is firm. This means they’ll nod empathetically when you say that you’re fasting, but won’t try to make things easier, nor will they send out an email acknowledging the month. After all, you should’ve planned for this, right? Done all of your shit, outlined all of your papers in advance? Shopped for multivitamins, meal prepped for the first week, journeyed down to Bay Ridge for Arab groceries, enrolled in a Ramadan therapy support group, listened to last minute Islamic lectures, all while fighting off the monster that pulls you in a dead trajectory towards the bed?
A disclaimer: I don’t really write about Muslim-American things anymore. After all, I spent so long doing it, and very publicly. learned that to write about religion, and have it published at least, was to be one-note, formulaic, succinct. It was to avoid the actual religion bit, which no one seems to like actually. “X Current Event Happened and This is Why It’s Islamophobic” I used to mourn. “I’m Deeply Sad about Y Islamophobic policy!” I would yell into the void. “Z is an Example of Ongoing Islamophobia,” I sighed to no avail.
II.
Any world, work-world, school-world, family-world or otherwise, that demands your constant “off the clock” attention is not one flexible towards spirituality, or any logic that doesn’t serve its own purposes. Last time here at One Thing, we spoke about how capitalism shapes individual subjects, touching every facet of their lives and affecting their abilities to love.
It seems to me that Ramadan is directly incompatible with the way that we are expected to live, which is why I think attempting is especially heart-wrenching, beautiful, utopic. It’s not just the fasting all day, or the waking up at 4 am for suhoor, or the engaging in night prayers until then, or punctuating “productivity” five times a day, or trying to avoid the vices that surround us. It’s the idea that it might be possible to maintain an aura of spirituality throughout, connectedness to a power other than our selves.
All I’ve managed this year (so far) is the fast, the occasional prayer here and there. The variety of Ramadan experiences that exist simultaneously becomes clearer to me with each passing year. I know Muslims that fast while their non-Muslim partners do not; I know Muslims that struggle with Ramadan daily because of eating disorders, health problems, difficult reckonings with faith; I know Muslims who look forward to this month all year.
III.
A friend from Bahrain who lives in Denver gives me advice. He is also doing Ramadan alone this year. His family, like mine, is also in another country at the moment; his friends are also predominantly non-Muslim. Every year, he makes these friends, predominantly white because Denver, fast with him. Every year they end up cheating, he says, but still show up to the elaborate iftar meals he prepares. Although I admire his approach, the iron will it must take to build a Ramadan community out of Not Much, I know that I do not have the energy to fight like this.
More than that, I do not want to be a liberal sob story. I do not want to invite meaningless “check-ins”; I don’t want to explain, cajole, or even ask nicely; I don’t want to apologize for not texting; I don’t want to explain why This Time is Really Difficult; I don’t want to describe Ramadan in other countries, the social function, the solidarity, the loudspeakers in the street.
IV.
During the first days of Ramadan, I monitor myself like a doctor would an EKG. I look for signs of spirituality, dips and peaks in my will to connect outside of myself. I probe for epiphanies like one would for a pulse, but it is too soon. I struggle with caffeine withdrawal, with sleep. Some nights I only sleep from midnight to 4am, some days I slip in and out of naps, wondering if I have some sort of nutrient deficiency, how much of this jihad is mental. Day after day, it is too soon to make a call.
V.
I debate against writing this piece at first. What if I am perceived to be “playing the Ramadan card?” What if I am playing the Ramadan card?
But then I think of a younger me, showing up to my elementary school classroom year after year on Eid, because it was not a legal holiday in New York City until 2015. I think about how my parents might’ve felt sending me to school on those mornings, caught between an impossible choice, knowing that their only holidays might always be disrespected, ignored, met with dumb stares. Try explaining Eid to a full grown adult and tell me it doesn’t feel like gaslighting—what if Eid is just an Arabic word, bastardized in transliteration, and not a holiday at all? What if it doesn’t exist, what if you don’t exist, or shouldn’t, in the form you do?
VI.
As a freshman in college, I was briefly obsessed with sociology. For class I read Weber, Durkheim, Bellah, and DuBois with enthusiasm as I tried to make sense of the world. Bellah’s 1967 piece Civil Religion in America stuck with me especially. Bellah argues that American nationalism is a religion with “its own seriousness and integrity” that “requires the same care in understanding that any other religion does.” He shows that, like any religion, American nationalism has “a set of beliefs, symbols, and rituals.” It claims “its own prophets and its own martyrs, its own sacred events and sacred places.” It is used at pulpits to justify invasion, violence, death, the curtailment of liberty; an example that immediately springs to mind is the 2001 Patriot Act, and the legal scaffolding that has long upheld the “war on terror.”
Recently I’ve encountered a similar ideas. Religion can be anti-capitalist, but also, capitalism can be religion. Arguably, it is religion, and has been for a while. Walter Benjamin writes about this in a short 1921 piece titled Capitalism as Religion. At one point he writes: “Capitalism is entirely without precedent, in that it is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction. It is the expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation.”
VII.
There are forms of Islamophobia that cannot be put into words, I think, or tied to political crises; there are the forms we inflict on ourselves, while knowing the consequences. There are things that we pray for that are not good for us. There is peace in admitting, in surrendering what is out of control, in trying to be better each time we fail ourselves.
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One Recommendation
Young Americans, Durand Jones & The Indications
Beautifully done. adore you