KPCC intern Yasmin Nouh rose long before dawn today to observe the start of Ramadan. As she writes, it’s not as easy to observe the Islamic holy month in the United States, with its frenetic pace of life, as it is in places like Egypt and Iran, the countries in which her parents grew up.
But there are ways – and the Internet helps.
Photo by reway2007/Flickr (Creative Commons)
An end-of-Ramadan feast, October 2008
Starting today, Muslims around the world will forgo food and drink, including water, and pray more than usual with taraweeh, which in Arabic means long, extended night prayers. We’ll eat after sunset, with the next dawn marking the start of a new fast. And we will continue to do this for thirty days. It’s a time of spiritual discipline and renewal.
Sounds grueling? It can be. In majority-Muslim countries, Ramadan is like a month-long Christmas – minus the feasting part – throughout the day. In Cairo, Egypt, for instance, schools are out, shop owners close their stores during daylight hours and families decorate their apartment balconies with colorful lanterns that light up the city at night.
Ramadan is different for the United States’ 1.8 million Muslims. While fasting is not meant to be an excuse to slack off in our work, the month is tough, especially when our lives continue at the same pace – traffic, work, meetings, summer school classes, deadlines, and so on. It sounds burdensome, but Muslims look forward to this month every year.
And here, the Internet helps. Through social media and other online avenues, Muslims in the U.S have found ways to address common challenges often faced during Ramadan. There are blogs that offer tips, online planners and more. A few examples:
Food and fasting
During this month, Muslims are encouraged to break their fast with a simple meal in the spirit of disciplining our food intake. Nonetheless, along with a long day of fasting comes a larger evening dish that often takes longer than usual to prepare. Coupled with a day of work or taking care of kids or both, it’s not an easy task for those preparing it. Cleanup is also tough, with only a small window – an hour – between sunset prayer and the extended night-time taraweeh prayers.
Enter My Halal Kitchen, a blog that offers recipes and culinary advice. It recently featured several entries on kitchen efficiency, i.e. ways to speed up cooking iftar, the evening meal, without leaving a huge mess. Blog editor Yvonne Maffei also offers Ramadan menu planners, which aid in planning out what to cook every night and having the ingredients ahead of time.
Social media and the Quran
It was the tradition of Muhammad to read the entire Quran by the end of Ramadan. Today, some people use Twitter during Ramadan to tweet their favorite messages from the Islamic holy book. Hussein Rashid teaches Islamic Studies at Virginia Theological Seminary. A recent story in USA Today noted that in 2009, Rashid started using the #Quran hashtag on Twitter asking Muslims to tweet their favorite verses from the Quran. He expects there to be more posts this year.
