Ramadan: a time for Muslims all around to connect with Islam on a deeper, more spiritual level than in typical day-to-day life. Participants abstain from food and drink from dawn till dusk for 30 days straight, and at the culmination, a massive celebration, Eid al-Fitr, ensues.
From the outside, it looks like torture, but in reality, Ramadan teaches humility, gratitude, and self-control. It is the ultimate mind-over-matter scenario. It is instinctual to eat food; your body needs it. Overcoming your body’s urges and disconnecting yourself from them allows you to transcend and think and act on a new level. Turning into a person who isn’t controlled by their urges shows true maturity, and it is the pinnacle of the human experience.
I take the month very seriously, as I believe that if you can successfully complete Ramadan, it puts other things that seem hard at the moment into perspective.
It also teaches me to be grateful for everything I have and continually opens my eyes to realize my fortunate position. Being Muslim at Haverford is definitely rare, but it is something that I take pride in.
What I have enjoyed the most this year is how curious many students are about Ramadan. Every day, I would have friends and peers come up to me and ask me how the fasting had been going and how I felt, whether on late-night FaceTime, weekend hangouts, or passing each other in the hallway. I have seen just in the past two years the increase in support for Muslim students; this year, I had people even offering to fast with me for a day or two.
The first week is always hard, but after getting into a routine, I found peace in the month. I also found that it was not that hard to keep up with work, as I would use my lunch period to get homework done, as I wasn’t going to use that time anyway.
Socially, Ramadan messed up things a bit, as I couldn’t interact with kids I didn’t have a class with, but overall, it was worth it. I even had teachers offering up their rooms for me during lunch.
In the future, I would love to see the school have some programming teaching people about Ramadan and Islam as a whole since there isn’t much Muslim representation in our school.
Such programming would be a great way to nullify the stereotypes that people often have about Islam and would show the many similarities between all the Abrahamic religions. Essentially, they are all the same thing.