IF

For the past 17 years of my life, I have fasted somewhere between 27 and 30 days every year in observance of Ramadan. I started to fast all the days much younger than everyone else in my family. My first time embracing the full burden of the third pillar of Islam was in the fall of 2005, I was in the fourth grade. I had awoken after Fajr for the first day of Ramadan and was not able to eat suhoor. I went to school and skipped lunch, macaroni and cheese with ham cubes. Being muslim, I would have had to eat the unappetizing vegetarian lunch so fasting hardly felt like a sacrifice. The biggest hurdle was that my teacher had given me a strawberry-kiwi blow pop and I had been unable to enjoy it at the same time as the rest of my classmates. I put it in my pocket and took it home. When I got home at 3:45 PM, my mother was eating and I was confused. She said that the moon had not been sighted and Ramadan would not start until later that night. I nodded, neglected to reveal that I had starved myself through lunch and broke my illegitimate fast on my strawberry-kiwi blow pop. Ramadan had begun as planned later that night and I had begun full-time fasting the next day. If I had to say, a strawberry-kiwi blow pop is still the worst thing I have broken my fast with. 

The most common food I have broken my fast with throughout my life are dates. When I was a kid, I hated dates. I thought they were hard in the wrong places and squishy in wronger places. Before I had tried them, I thought they were extra large raisins, another food that I detested. As I got older, looking at the pile of room temperature dates on the flimsy foyer tables in the masjid reminded me of a mountain of dead roaches. I couldn’t understand why the hungry men at the masjid circled the table around maghrib time like depraved vultures. Dates were nasty? The hunger made the men even nastier. They were unkind to me, so I relegated myself behind them and drank the lukewarm water rather than tempt fate and risk eating a roach. 

Eventually, when I was in high school, I ate a date to break my fast. And I ate one the next day. And the day after that. I didn’t like them. But I kept eating them, despite the sticky texture. By the third week of Ramadan I had become a date eating machine. Dates had become delectable through trial and trial and trial. I had initially taken my disdain for them as an error but I had failed at nothing at all. Today, I love dates. I especially enjoy them pitted and split down the middle with a sliver of cream cheese. I often enjoy them as a snack even outside of Ramadan. I never feel closer to God than when I eat dates. 

PROBABLY

This year is my first year not fasting full-time for Ramadan. At least I am not fasting from food, for health reasons. I hardly feel like it’s Ramadan, a feeling that has persisted through all of the COVID Ramadans. But I feel like my lack of Ramadan festivity has been exacerbated by the fact that I am not around any other Muslim people. I am especially missing my family. Ramadan has always been a big time for community for me. Even though I hated going to the masjid so often as a kid, I grew to enjoy the routine and the fact that we were all banding together in an effort to improve ourselves. Whenever Ramadan ended, I generally felt intense longing. An emptiness along with the strangeness of being able to eat during the daylight of hours. Part of the reason was because I hated Eid Al-Fitr because of the way it made my mother stress and be shrill as well as it was one of the only times I was reminded how much we truly did not have in comparison to other families. This Ramadan however, has been nothing but longing and emptiness. I probably should not feel this way but I can’t help it. Come to think of it, I have probably never felt more alone than I have since Ramadan started. 

The oldheads in my community loved to say that if you fast from food during Ramadan and still treat people poorly, you aren’t fasting. Just starving yourself. I normally try to fast from more than just food. I pick something, whether it be abstract or concrete, and try to completely eliminate it from my life within a month. My mother loves to say that it takes 21 days to form a habit, so we should use our time wisely to guide the rest of our year. The first time I shifted my routine with my fast was in 2012. I fasted from World Star Hip Hop. I had made a habit of checking their website every morning. I swore them off during Ramadan and I have never returned. I try something new every year with varying levels of success. Aside from food,  I never have sex during Ramadan, I try to keep a clean mind, and I make an effort to be kinder to people. This year, I decided I wanted to fast from negative thoughts and starve my poor self image. I have objectively lost this battle. I have been very unhappy. This is probably the most difficult Ramadan of my life and I have not fasted from food a single day. God and my family and the entire world has never felt further away from me. I’m on an island, thinning to bones. 

MAYBE

Fasting is a prescription. That’s the main explanation I was given for why we do it and that’s the reasoning I give when asked why I participate. I genuinely enjoy fasting now, it feels like a test. Selfishly, I look forward to the opportunity to flex my self-discipline. On a grander scale, I know it makes me a better person by the time the allotted time had passed. Fasting has been prescribed to Muslims to refocus us and give us a platform from which we can launch into our best selves. The hunger is not supposed to be important, just a physical reminder that you are working on yourself. Sometimes the hunger takes over. I remember when I was in middle school, I was eating Iftar with my brother at the masjid. This middle-aged man sat at the table with us, hunched over his food. My brother got up to go to the bathroom and very soon after, the man had snatched pita bread from his plate. 

“He not that hungry,” the man said. 

I watched, shocked, mouth agape. The man finished his plate and got up to get seconds of the free food and my brother had returned. I told him what happened and he was angry. But we were both kids so he just fumed and went about with his meal. Maybe some people are hungrier than others. And maybe the hungrier people have more room to grow. Maybe they need more medicine? I think I’m pretty hungry these days. Probably no hungrier than anyone else, but my fast feels less whole because I am not doing it the way everyone else is. I feel disconnected, disjointed, and invalid. I am going through an identity crisis because being Muslim and belonging to a Muslim community has always been a big part of who I am. Now, even though I am still Muslim, I feel as though I am neither. Sure, the easy answer would be to go find a masjid and pray more and read more Qur’an and find a wholeness in that. But it’s not that simple. I have a hunger and it’s eating at me from the inside. I feel myself becoming more hollow everyday. The answer has to be inside of me? Maybe there’s no answer at all. Maybe some people are meant to be hungry. 

I hope I am not one of those people.

🦋

published April 15, 2022