when our hearts need it most 🌙
Ramadan as a ritual of resistance
Every reminder of time’s passing fills me with resentment — seasons changing, holidays celebrated, the calendar flipped to a new month. I do not understand how time and life goes on while genocide is underway. I do not understand how evil of this magnitude does not halt the world on its axis.
Ramadan begins in a few days and I feel the same inclination towards resentment, towards heartache. I fear for the Palestinians of Gaza who will know a Ramadan of violence, starvation, and death. I am angered that the challenges of this month will be exacerbated by the most horrific of conditions.
I think back to the several Ramadans I observed in my years in Gaza. It’s in Palestine where I learned to embrace Ramadan and the tradition and togetherness of fasting. It’s there where the power and inner peace of the month clicked within me. In the days leading up to Ramadan, homes and businesses shine with crescent moon-shaped twinkly lights, brightly colored tablecloths, and lanterns hung in the windows. It’s in Palestine where I learned that the ritual of sacrifice could be something so marked by joy.
The other day on Instagram, I saw photos of Palestinians in Rafah decorating their tents to welcome the start of Ramadan. It made me exhale, made my heart expand. It humbled and inspired me—like Gaza always has. If the Palestinians of Gaza are eagerly welcoming Ramadan, then who am I not to?
The photos from Rafah whispered a reminder to my soul, a saying I picked up when I lived in Gaza: Ramadan comes when our hearts need it most.
Through the pain and exhaustion of witnessing this genocide, I look to Ramadan with hope. Ramadan, at its core, is a rejection of capitalism. By abstaining from food and drink during daylight hours for an entire month, we train our bodies and spirits to divest from consumerism, addiction, and impulse. Space gets created inside our physical bodies and instead of filling it impulsively with food and drink, we are guided to fill it with a consciousness of the divine. Every pang turns us towards compassion for whom hunger and thirst is not a choice. We are reminded of the mercy of knowing that the sun will indeed set, and of our privilege that our fasts will indeed be broken with ample food and drink. These reminders compel me to extend privilege and mercy onwards as ripples into the world. In so many ways, Ramadan fuels the spirituality that is inherent to resistance.
I bring into this Ramadan many questions. What does it mean to fast alongside those who are being actively starved? What happens when we replace the material with the sacred?
I deeply believe that collective liberation cannot fully be realized without personal liberation. Many of us in the movement look to protest and disruption as our main tactics, and while those outward actions are vital, they alone will not create a world beyond the cruelty of Zionism and every form of supremacy it represents. Only we— individually and collectively—can create that world. But that world first needs to be created within ourselves. If our inner worlds are rife with barriers that keep us from knowing the fullest expression of love for ourselves and others, how can we fully dismantle those barriers that exist in the outer world?
When there is no comfort to reach for externally, Ramadan forces us to go inward to find answers, to find resolve. It forces us to put our faith in a higher power that we will be provided for. My empathy deepens for our people in Gaza who have been denied material comfort in such a stark and cruel way, who look to God for answers and for resolve.
Ramadan is also about community. We gather to break fast and gather to pray. We are compelled to feed the hungry and share our wealth with the poor. While I find myself deeply missing celebrating Ramadan in Palestine among a majority Muslim population, I am grateful for the community I’ve found myself in these days. I’ve stepped away from so many in this time of revolution, but stepped towards many more. I think about the friends who protest with me, organize with me, who do not bypass my grief and rage, but hold it with me. My friendships have become deeper, more meaningful. In a time of soul-sucking pain, they give me life.
What is more joyful than gathering in the spirit of liberation? What is more joyful than rebuilding a world characterized by communal care and love? I get to taste that world to come by practicing these values with my community in the here and now. This is where I find relief these days.
I step into Ramadan with a spirit of resistance. I step into Ramadan in complete solidarity with our people in Gaza, who have shown us that faith is a formidable weapon against the most pronounced acts of cruelty.
My friend Miriam who observes an Ethiopian tradition of Orthodox Christianity said that Lent coincides with this year’s Ramadan. She spoke to me of how powerful it feels that so many people of faith will be fasting at the same time, praying for a better world at the same time. “I have zero faith in our government,” she said, “but I have faith in God.“
It’s with a shattered but determined heart I step into this Ramadan. May we see this month through with increased conviction for our resistance, increased commitment to rebuild the world as it should be. May it stitch our hearts back together in ways that allow us to hold a love more radical and more powerful than ever before. Inshallah, Ramadan will fix all of us. ❤️🩹
Please consider contributing to this mutual aid fund run by my friends in Ramallah and Gaza. Among other initiatives, they are delivering food through local networks to people in the north of Gaza who are acutely suffering from starvation.
These expressions of suffering of a beautiful people and what humanity ought to be, made me cry. I then took a deep breath of hope in the faith that Ramadan is indeed that time when the cosmos asks us to shed the chains that limit our potential. Ramadan is the opportunity to reach the height that God ordains for humans. To become the best among His creation, we must humble ourselves with love and compassion, with selflessness and service, and with loving our neighbors as we love ourselves.
Ameen, may Ramadan fix us all. It comes when we most need it, a reset and reconfiguration of priorities. Loved how you weaved so many different threads and conversations together in this one piece. I hope you find renewed resolve and hope in the work that you do, too