Muslims Seek Common Ground with Fellow-Americans in Ramadan

You can also read the article here in the San Jose Mercury News

Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting from dawn to dusk (mid-May to mid-June this year), arrives at a difficult time for Muslim-Americans. Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center that tracks hate-crimes in America reports that faith and race-based attacks against Muslims, Jews, Blacks, Hispanics and immigrants have risen significantly since the election of Donald Trump. The Supreme Court’s decision to hold hearings on the president’s Muslim travel ban has given the anti-Muslim animus a boost, forcing many of us to rethink what it means to be an American these days. And with president Trump moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem that has already resulted in the death of at least 58 Palestinians, the move ‘blessed’ by a pastor who said in the past that “religions like ‘Mormonism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism’ lead people “to an eternity of separation from God in Hell," the future looks grim indeed.

Despite these dark developments, Muslims will welcome Ramadan with hope, humility and optimism. This is what the month is about: Confidence that the clouds will disappear, and the sun will shine again as we strive to affirm God’s living presence among us and unite to serve the common good of the country, no matter how daunting the challenge.

What is it about fasting that inspires this confidence? The Quran explains: “Fasting is prescribed for you, as it was prescribed for those before you, so that you may learn self-restraint.”

Self-restraint has two parts: What it forbids and what it encourages. The former includes abstaining not only from food and drink (often the easier part, even if for fifteen hours or more) but more importantly, from such vices as anger, arrogance, backbiting, lying, schadenfreude, solipsism, religious chauvinism and money mania. The latter includes a combination of gratitude, magnanimity, empathy, humility and moderation but above all, patience. Patience is the key virtue, which is why sabr, the Arabic word for patience, occurs over 100 times in the Quran.

Living up to the moral and spiritual demands of fasting is a struggle, especially when we recognize that God has no use for our hunger and thirst if we don’t curb our wayward thoughts, bad habits and dark desires. For me, patience is the elusive goal. Even when alone, I sense the need for patience, as when I am tempted to speed through a yellow light about to turn red. This may seem a minor trespass (although a $500 fine for running a red light in San Jose is hardly minor!) but I find that being attentive to small things makes loftier goals more attainable. Patience gives me a keener sense of the value of time. Tolstoy was on to something when he said the two most powerful warriors were patience and time. Honoring time has helped me fast from the small screen and social media while gaining a deeper insight into ‘Memento Mori’: Remember, you will die.

If we claim that practicing self-restraint in Ramadan makes us better human beings, it must reflect in the way we interact with our families, communities and the larger society. Given the current political climate, meaningful engagement with our fellow-Americans from all walks of life and spanning all faiths is critical.

A day before Thanksgiving in 2016, our Evergreen Islamic Center received a hate mail warning about the “new sheriff in town – President Donald Trump” who will do to us “what Hitler did to the Jews. You Muslims would be wise to pack your bags and get out of Dodge.”

When word leaked out, we were overwhelmed by the support we received from our neighbors, activists, reporters, politicians and law-enforcement officials. Their support continued into the 2017 Ramadan months later when larger than usual number of them joined us for community Iftar (breaking the fast) at sundown on Sundays.

This year we expect to host even more Americans during the Sunday Iftars. We particularly hope those who have misgivings about us and want to ask the hard questions will join us. We don’t have all the answers. All we know is that discussing concerns honestly and openly in mutual respect can remove fear and prejudice.

If nothing else, we hope they will come just for the food, for one of the most heartening lessons of Ramadan has been that few things in life forge friendship more fiercely than food, spicy or not.

The million-dollar question, of course, is: How long do Ramadan’s virtuous practices last?

I wish I could say they last from one Ramadan to the next for me, but they don’t. My resolve to become a better human being begins to fray by the fourth or the fifth month. I hurry past an octogenarian on a wheelchair without pausing to greet or offering to help. I become judgmental. I use unkind words. Instead of smiling at people in the elevator, I stare at my shoe. I splurge on clothes even though I have plenty. At the traffic light, I begin to live at the edge of yellow bleeding into red.

Yet I know that without the reflection and the renewal I experience in Ramadan, I would lose my center, my purpose. Without purposeful fasting steadying my sail, my boat would be adrift on the sea of life.

Instead of attempting quantum leaps, I will seek incremental improvements in patience, compassion, charity and respect for a textured truth. I will strive to answer the question the Quran asks, “So, where are you going?” by separating the signal from the noise and nurturing the values that give my life meaning. And I will try to summon enough spiritual stamina to sustain the effect of Ramadan for a month or two more than in the past, before forgetfulness enters the heart and I risk becoming a captive to my cravings. If I sincerely work at being good, tempered by humor and humility, perhaps I will even glimpse the ineffable and the transcendent.

Ramadan in a World Gone Crazy

You can also read the article here.

Evergreen Islamic Center, San Jose, CA

Today, Saturday, May 27, 2017, is the first day of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, one of the five pillars of Islam. For Muslims in the Northern Hemisphere, the 30-day period is marked by anywhere from 14 to 16 hours of fasting, during which the throat gets parched and the stomach complains as adherents seek to strengthen their acquaintance with the Divine. 

Because the Islamic calendar, like the Jewish calendar, is based on lunar months, Ramadan advances through the seasons by about 11 days every year. So while Muslims in places like Australia will fast several hours less than us, we will switch times in years to come.

For the more than 3 million Muslims in America, Ramadan this year will be different in one particular way: We will be thinking more deeply about the fate of our country and its direction.

During the presidential campaign, then candidate Trump made no bones about maligning Islam and Muslims. “We have a problem in this country; it’s called Muslims,” he said at a 2015 town hall in New Hampshire. “I think Islam hates us,” he said at another time to the media.

He repeatedly promised to close mosques and create a Muslim registry in America if elected. Within a week of becoming president, he signed an executive order blocking Syrian refugees and travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States, orders that, for now, remain blocked by the judiciary.

Given the history of his inflammatory rhetoric, I was curious to hear what Trump would say in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam and the first stop of an overseas tour that also took the president to Israel and the Vatican.

In a speech to more than 50 Arab and Muslim nations and their leaders, Trump asked Muslims to “purge the foot soldiers of evil” from their societies. “This is not a battle between different faiths, different sects, or different civilizations,” he observed. “This is a battle between Good and Evil … We are not here to lecture. We are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be, or how to worship. Instead, we are here to offer partnership — based on shared interests and values.”

This was in the spirit of Ramadan, I thought. I nodded in agreement (because that’s what Muslims like me have been saying all along).

But, then, action speaks louder than words! This is what Trump said in a meeting with the Emir of Qatar before the speech: "One of the things we will discuss is the purchase of lots of beautiful military equipment because nobody makes it like the United States."

During his stay, Saudi Arabia reportedly signed an agreement to buy “beautiful” American arms worth $110 billion, arms that is likely go toward the civil war in Yemen, a conflict that has yielded untold suffering and allegations of potential war crimes that could ensnare the United States alongside Riyadh. It also threatens to deepen the conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, between Sunni and Shia, making the Middle East even more volatile.

Bu violence has already erupted. A British Muslim of Libyan descent blew himself up with the sole intention of killing children at a concert in Manchester, killing 22 people, including an eight-year-old. In Egypt, extremist Muslim militants forced Coptic Christian pilgrims from a caravan of buses and killed 28. And in Portland, Oregon, a few hours before Ramadan was to commence, a white supremacist ranting against two Muslim women wearing Hijab on a public bus attacked three good Samaritans who came to their defense, and killed two of them.

It doesn’t look good! The sanctity of Ramadan, for Muslims a month of reflection, charity, restraint, self-discipline and compassion, is threatened by extremists everywhere.

Muslims are required to abstain not only from food and drink in this month but also from such vices as anger, impatience, or arrogance. The food part is relatively easy; it is the cleansing of the heart that is harder, particularly in these troubled times.

And while there is no estimate of what percentage of Muslim adults fasts - because fasting is considered a personal pledge between a believer and God – what is undeniable is that mosque attendance goes up dramatically during Ramadan, its social aspect most evident at ‘Iftar’ (Arabic for ‘breaking the fast’) just after sunset.

At San Jose’s Evergreen Islamic Center, we invite neighbors, co-workers, local politicians, police officers and anyone curious about our faith, to our weekend Iftars. Polls show that most Americans who harbor negative opinions about Muslims have never met one. If people can break bread together, we expect hate and enmity to recede. And it indeed does, based on what we have experienced, despite the occasional hate mail and taunts of “go back home.”

Many of the employers I have encountered, moreover, are aware of the demands Ramadan makes on believers and are sensitive to the needs of their Muslim employees. By the time we complete the special nightly prayers of Ramadan called ‘Taraweeh’, for instance, it is often past midnight. That means that many of us have to do with no more than 4-5 hours of sleep per night during workdays. If you find your Muslim colleagues sleepy or slow during working hours in Ramadan, you will perhaps know why.

Indeed, I have found nothing but empathy from colleagues and co-workers. When I worked in the tech industry, my co-workers avoided eating in my presence and gave me space to offer my afternoon prayers. It’s the same in the college where I now teach, where students sometimes ask me to slow down and conserve my energy while I am trying to explain a difficult concept in, say, algebra.

Ramadan is the believer’s gateway to the ineffable and the transcendent, when Muslims make an effort to pay more attention to the little things around us (which often turn out to be the big things), smile from the heart at friends and strangers, make more charitable donations.

So I find myself focusing this year on Ramadan’s message of hope, its rejection of despair, and the generosity of the average American. What keeps me awake is knowing where violence may erupt and who will fall victim to the nihilism of psychopaths. We will pray and be alert, to the extent that it is possible, so that no one who claims to be a Muslim can give Ramadan a black eye by engaging in violence and killing innocents.

Holiday Giving

Mark Zuckerberg’s recent $500 million donation in Facebook stocks to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation created a stir in the world of philanthropy. The Facebook co-founder was following up on his pledge to donate half his wealth to charity as part of the “Giving Pledge” campaign inspired and promoted by billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffet.

Reading about mega-donations by billionaires can cause the average American to suffer from some kind of an inferiority complex. After all, in these difficult times, many Americans will be hard-pressed to come up with a $500-dollar donation to worthy causes.

A perspective comes from Ted Turner. Fifteen years ago, in September of 1997, the billionaire Cable News Network founder made a “spur of the moment” gift of $1 billion to the United Nations for programs to help refugees and children, clear land mines and fight disease. It was the gift that launched not a thousand gifts but several high-profile multi-million and billion-dollar gifts from entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and now, Mark Zuckerberg.

Talking recently to the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, Turner said that people should not be overwhelmed or intimidated by the dollar amount donated by the rich. “You don’t have to have any money to make a difference; you can pick up trash walking down the street, and I do that all the time,” he said. “You can volunteer your time. You can be a big brother or a big sister.”

This is a deeply moving and practical dvice. The key words are “making a difference.” After all, anytime we donate even a dollar, we fervently hope that it will have the maximum impact for good in the recipient. The most common mistake we make is to think that unless our charity is a hefty amount quantifiable in dollars or pounds or euros, it will not make a difference, even though, intellectually at least, we know better. This is the unfortunate byproduct of minds brought up in a capitalistic environment. But hearing a capitalist like Ted Turner extolling charitable acts rather than dollars offers a much-needed reminder. Notice also the example Turner gives about doing something while walking down the street. Most often we think that removing thorns (or nails or sharp objects) from the path of pedestrians is the only worthwhile act of charity we can do. Not so. Pick up any trash. Sweep or gather fallen leaves in bags. Clear a neighbor’s driveway of snow. Smile at strangers. There are hundreds of acts of charity you and I can do simply by walking a few blocks in our neighborhoods. By being alert and observing what others are doing can also open up creative ideas for charity.

A few months ago, while stopping by to pick up some toiletries from my local pharmacy, located in a mini shopping center packed with restaurants, a bank, a fitness center, a dentist’s office and the quintessential Starbucks, I noticed an old man poking into the various garbage bins with a stick. As I watched, I realized he was looking for recyclable cans and bottles. Every time he located one, his face broke into a triumphant smile. His bag was about half-full with the collection.

When I came home, I collected all the bottles and cans I was going to dump in the neighborhood recycle center. Like everyone else, I have been doing this for years but I had no way of knowing where all these “capitalistic wastes” were going and exactly how they were being recycled. But now I had found a greater purpose for them.

Two nights later, around 8 PM, I waited for the old man at the same spot. I had almost given up when, about 45 minutes later, I saw him begin his round at the dumpster behind the bank. He walked slowly and patiently. I had time to read the sign nailed into the outer wall of the pharmacy: “No skateboarding. No Trespassing. Violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

When he came around, I offered him my collection. He seemed stunned for a moment and then thanked me profusely. “Not at all,” was all I could mumble as I quickly left. I was already feeling guilty in thinking that I was engaging in an act of charity.

I now see the old man once a week. We don’t talk much although I want to tell him the privilege is entirely mine when he looks me in the eye and says simply, “thank you.”

I am sure you have all seen someone at a gas station or a shopping center intent on making something out of the bottles and cans we carelessly toss away. We are talking at most a few dollars here but just the act of gathering your recyclable stuff and handing them over to a particular person isn’t something that can be quantified. Thank God for that. Do it and see how it transforms you and spills over into other areas of charitable and holiday giving.