Ramadan 1973, 1974...,2024-5
In the midst of Ramadan of 2025, this text from last year remains valid... for those who no longer have access and for those who have not yet read it. It's worth it!
In 1973, Ramadan coincided, partly, with the October War, a conflict initiated by a joint Syrian and Egyptian attack against Israel. The war was at first an Arab success, a powerful response to the 1967 Arab armies debacle. Then the Egyptian President, Anwar Sadat, took a path other than the one agreed with the Syrians, the USA stepped in, and the victory became a tie…
That Ramadan also coincided with my arrival, at the age of 6, to Lebanon. I and my older sisters were to live and study there. I was so busy contemplating my new future, getting to know my grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, becoming acquainted with our village, and then with the school where I was to live and sleep during the weekdays, that I did not become aware of the fact that a war was going on in the region. And I don't recall being aware of the fact that Ramadan was taking place.
The next year, 1974, Ramadan, as determined by the Islamic lunar calendar, arrived ten days earlier, in September. For some reason, whether a holiday or just a regular weekend, I was at my grandparents home.
The house was not too far from our boarding school. On Sunday nights, it would take us maybe 10 minutes to walk up the street, enter the school gate and cross the sports court - at this point I would always ask myself, in an unconfessed state of terror, whether someone had remembered to lock the German Shepherd away - and go into our dormitory.
There were very few Muslim kids in the school. Besides myself and my sisters, I was aware of only four sisters and maybe a boy who was even younger than me. And there were few Muslim inhabitants of the city that had been historically an Orthodox Christian stronghold. My grandfather had served the Army there and had stayed on after retiring.
I cannot say, for all these reasons, that Ramadan was in the air around me. But I strongly felt its presence during a couple or more days I spent at home that September. Nobody would eat during the day, everyone would break fast at sundown, and then, in the middle of the night, before the sun came up, my grandmother would prepare the food, set the table and then wake my grandfather and aunts and uncles up and they would all share the meal.
All I wanted was to take part in that experience. I wanted most of all the get up in the middle of the night and eat with everyone else!
My grandmother, however, who used to fulfill my every wish, and who would have I delighted laugh at every instance of my ill humor, thought I was too young and too small to suffer the daylight fast and to be woken from my deep sleep, no matter how much I insisted.
I decided I would fast anyway. I got out of the house and went about the business of a child. At some point during the day, however, I found myself at the neighbors house. The neighbor being a very nice Christian lady, and very generous, she insisted I treat myself to chocolate sweet. My love for sugar was such then that I did not even remember my Ramadan determination… It was only when I told my grandmother about my day that she made me notice that I had broken the fast. That same night, she did not wake me, once again, and I have never observed Ramadan since then….
It is true I had discovered in that instance the limits of the strength of my will, but I always gave myself a discount considering my young age. I could have tried again. But, since I have never been an observant Muslim, and since I have always asked for consistency, from me as from others, it seemed a little hypocritical to observe partially and to ignore partially.
I saw in the fasting and exercise of empathy and of solidarity, an invitation for us to thing of those who are hungry for lack of food, but did not want to use, maybe misuse, a religious commandment for such practical purposes.
Fifty years go by….
In 2023 I decided to see whether I would be capable to stand the experience. It was a partial success, even though no kind Christian neighbor could be blamed for an excess of generosity this time.
Now, in 2024, the developments that have followed the 2023 7th of October attack on Israel by the Palestinian Resistance movements, an attack that more than one person has likened in its importance to the 1974 October war, have lasted long enough, more than six months, to encounter this year's Ramadan.
This year, as so many children have so little to eat in Gaza, I am trying again, even if its just not to be allowed to forget about them. My record is not perfect, nonetheless.
It is true, still, that sometimes I am ashamed to eat, not only because children do not have access to food, but also because they do not have families to fast with and to break fast with, no parents or grandparents to wake them in the middle of the night to share a piece of bread and olives…