First, let me say I composed this entry starting from SFO airport en route to Philadelphia. This means I can no longer control formats and things like marking foreign words with italics. I think some people know that in my past life I was an academic. So things like format and italics make a difference. But I can’t get what I want with the Ipad, as far as word processing goes. That may be a blessing in disguise. I mean, I can always blame things that get miscommunicated on the Ipad itself… Oops!
Second, although I wrote about spiritual solitude or retreat yesterday, I am not actually going to the East coast for that. Nope. I’ve spent the first two-thirds of Ramadan basically alone. No one else in my household is fasting. My extended family out here in Cali is not fasting because my daughter is nursing. And I am still a relative stranger, having moved to my present location from Indonesia only a few months ago.
Thus, I go to be with people. Not to be in retreat from them. I’m clear on this and I thought I should be clear with you. This makes last night just the cream on the cake; or is that cream of the crop? Icing on the cake? Anyway.
I wanted to call this entry “The World’s Tallest Muslims” in honor of my brother Ibrahim and his son Isa, but I realized I forgot to give the general explanation about iftar. Last night was surely my most funnest iftar and what better way to share the other (need I say it, more academic) details? I also got to see all my family before I departed. So, I’m in a good place (not the airport/airplane—more on that perhaps another time.)
Professor Ibrahim and I only go back a few years. He invited me to the Bay Area to give a public lecture; as it turned out, we immediately entered into the politics of Islamic Studies in America. I was one of several speakers, but I was going to be the one least paid. Thankfully my brother said uh-uh and we’ve been buds ever since. Well that alone would not endear me to him for a lifetime, but it is who we are, where we are, and what we do in Islamic Studies that creates an unbreakable bond.
I have to call a spade a spade, so to speak, in order to paint the right picture here. There is a special category of Islamic studies academics who are grounded both in the international or global nature of Islam and the history of identity politics in America. All of the madness hits us double. (I think Tariq knows what I’m talking about too, right!?)
We are not supposed to be both black and fluent in another language (or two). We are not supposed to think abstractly, live spiritually, and still play in the street. There is a cost not to claim all these parts of ourselves. But the much greater cost is in claiming them. To live fully. To live wholly, but still to be able to say “girl you have to get yur hur did” is beyond the scope, I’m sure, of many of you readers. But that is what it is.
Because Prof. Ibrahim and I are also in the same age group, we really have a lot more to work with. It’s almost like we grew up together. We can academize and hang. Even having iftar together was par for the course. He just got back from Turkey and went right into teaching a weeklong 8-hour-a-day intensive course. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise, including to just invite them over for fast-breaking as I had intended. Then yesterday afternoon we were finally able to talk and created a rough ad hoc iftar plan between what was left in my fridge and what he picked up (some fried chicken from a fast food place).
I did mention that iftar is observed at the end of the fasting day, at maghrib, sunset. At no other time in the year is this minute so closely watched. Imagine: even in the busiest cities in the world, if they have majority Muslim populations, everything stops. My first time living in Cairo I left during Ramadan, and the night before my departure (because I was on my vacation days), I literally walked down a silent major road and said out loud “goodbye, Cairo!” because everyone else was inside breaking fast. I got to have the city all to myself for a brief moment, without the hustle and bustle to get in between us. Even the driver on our campus bus would stop for a few minutes. It was great for me because I was breaking fast too; but I have no idea what the other, non-fasting students thought.
But fast-breaking is not observed with the same uniformity of say the tarawih prayer. It is this diversity that I want to share. The “tradition,” what the Prophet did, is to eat a few dates. Then perhaps a cup of water. Now that tradition lives on, but every culture pretty much creates its own variation to accompany (or in lieu of) the dates. Some like hot spicy soup. Some like sweets and pastry. Some have young coconut. Some have special dishes cooked only for this occasion.
I’ve created my own tradition. In my family, we have a fresh, chopped fruit salad. I admit, there is something extra special about handling the fruit while fasting. All that slicing and dicing into tiny bite-size pieces is almost as delicious as the first bite after the fasting day is over. Sometimes when I break fast somewhere else, I feel like something is missing; even if the dates are there to simulate uniformity.
Now these small variants are not the deal here, as far I’m concerned. The real deal is whether the full meal is eaten after the maghrib prayer, before the maghrib prayer, or instead of the prayer. Being Muslim by choice, I didn’t know there could be a variation on this; at least not during my first five years as a Muslim. Just like the date thing, I thought you had to do it just a certain way: break fast with 2-3 dates, say a du’a (“oh Allah, I have fasted for You, and I believe in You, and I trust in you, and with what You have given me, I break my fast”), then pray 3 quick rakat. After that, we sit down for our meal.
The first time I experienced a variation from this was when I was breaking fast with my neighbors while living in Libya. We had our traditional date and a bit of water, then I was offered a choice: sit down now and finish off the hot and delectable food and then pray, or pray now and let the food wait a short bit longer. In that household, they were divided: the mom said pray first. The son, the daughter, and the dad said sit first; there’s plenty of time for the prayer afterward. And so there is—all five prayers have a time range of at least an hour and a half, so one could be said to have prayed “in the prayer time” according to the Hadith.
Praying immediately when the adhan is called or at the start of each prayer time is a plus, but not a mandate. So, I went with the majority. Boy was I sorry. After the days empty stomach it was a heavy burden to go straight into all those movements following the large meal. I was never tempted to do that again—at least not by choice. Sometimes you are with people who do it that way. Iftar is not a special but small meal before prayer with a real meal after prayer. The real meal is iftar.
And of course some people do not pray, or circumstances make it difficult to do the prayer (like in a restaurant with no set-up for prayer).
On the other hand, those situations that linger overly long after iftar—including completing the prayer but not making the meal available immediately—these too are equally off-putting. This includes those the international conference settings when something small is provided for fasting Muslim attendees but the real meal is scheduled after a plenary session or some such. I feel like saying, “I’ve gone all day without food for Allah, so why would I want to go longer for you?”
So last night, I had a perfect balance—at least for me, anyway. All of my California family was there (even if some of them didn’t partake of the chicken) along with the company of a friend whom I am so happy to know, who helps me keep sane in an insane world and I just want to give a shout out to my home boy!
Thank you and your son for your company, and give my love to Katherine whom I missed, ’cause she chose to stay in Turkey this time around. Oh yeah, and a word of dhikr—“huuuu.”
