On Monday, more than a billion and a half Muslims worldwide started their fasting month of Ramadan, a month when Muslims unapologetically celebrate their traditions and religion.Through the years, Muslims in America have celebrated their holy month with family and friends, in community gatherings under tents, in restaurants and in mosques. Since the 9/11 tragedy, they’ve been in self-cultural exile. Living in America as a Muslim has been a challenging ride and a constant struggle, every day stumbling over the bumps of the Islamophobia landscape, racism and the MAGA version of domestic terrorism. Even so, Muslims have celebrated the holy month of Ramadan in Times Square in New York, the city most associated with the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Thousands of Muslims proudly descended on the iconic square to celebrate their tradition. They prayed the “Taraweeh” Ramadan evening prayer surrounded by flashy, gigantic Madison Avenue billboard ads. Muslims also have gone mainstream here in Minneapolis, with the call for prayer (adhan) now allowed to be broadcast from speakers from mosques, bringing the community together to pray freely. This Ramadan, however, comes under a cloud — the slaughtering of Palestinians in Gaza. For more than five months now, the people of Gaza have been enduring constant bombing, ethnic cleansing, massacres, disease, hunger and starvation masterminded by the Israeli armies and by its Western allies, especially the Americans, providing the weapons, ammunition and political coverage. The people of Gaza are trapped among a Zionist racist ideology establishing a jewish state that is trying to behead a nation of natives, and a Western world that is accomplice to the slaughter, and an Arab Zionist leaders that are sitting on the sideline waiting for the Israeli to finish the job and finish Hamas. However, these brutalities and human travesty didn’t stop the people in Gaza from celebrating their Ramadan traditions. If the world has abandoned the Palestinians, Ramadan traditions could help them to raise their spirits, to survive.
Continue reading HOW RAMADAN CAN SAVE GAZA!!
Tag: Islamophobia
ISRAEL, FROM A WATCHDOG TO A MAD DOG!!
The Palestinian majority at the time was 95%; however, according to Belfour’s declaration, the Palestinians were called the non-Jewish people, and according to the racist Zionist ideology, they didn’t even exist; with the myth, the Jews, people without land were given land without people, the Palestinians, according to the Western racist ideology, then and now.
I grew up in a small village in the heart of the delta in Egypt, Meet Swaid; my town has only one street, mosque, cemetery, river, and elementary school. The village students had to go to the city a few miles away for middle school. We walk to the train station every morning to go to city school. Every morning, the village dogs follow us to the train station. As the slow train takes off, going through the skinny railroad in the middle of the fields, the dogs start chasing the train, barking and racing to catch it, once they catch up with the train, the dogs look at each other, confused, not knowing what to do; they could not jump on the train, bite the train, or even take selfies for memories; they were not selfish then. The dogs stop, turn around, and slowly walk back to the village, disappointed and tired. Everyone on the train laughs at the village dogs who chased and caught the train but couldn’t do anything with it.
THE HAMLINE TRAGEDY
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the tragedy wasn’t so much the killing of the father; it was the son’s bad decisions that resulted in the end killing of everyone involved: the son, the uncle, and the queen! Here at Hamline University, lots of bad decisions resulted in the tragedy. It started when Erika Lopez Prater, an adjunct professor at Hamline University, showed a 14-century image of the prophet Mohammed in her art class, resulting in a professor losing, as the Times puts it, “her teaching gig”; A student lost her safety. A Muslim community leader lost his focus, and the Hamlin university lost its credential. President Fayneese Miller’s blamed the media for the assault on her institution under the rubric of academic freedom. Not exactly, as is always the case, western media framed the debate as a war between backward Islam and the Modern West binary. As a Muslim and adjunct professor who taught at Hamline.
