On Ramadan
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I love Ramadan. I always have. Some of my fondest memories of childhood are during the holy month. I think, because, it was usually a time where everyone was a little softer to each other, where hunger made us more observant and thus considerate of one another. I love being Muslim and I am lucky to have been raised with a reverence for my faith, which oftentimes felt so deluded that I had to mask it. So, despite having a deep connection to God since childhood, I have recently been reckoning with how much internalized Islamophobia I was steeped in as a kid, and this is long before 9/11.
I hated having a different religion that felt weird and archaic and yet nothing made me happier than being in a mosque. There’s such a particular feeling to prostrating on the soft plushness of a janamaz (prayer rug) and arriving to God with my head to the ground. I miss the feeling of praying circuits with a room full of people, shoulder to shoulder, while the smell of freshly fried food like peyaji (onion fritters) waft through my neighborhood mosque as we all collectively await the moment our mouths could touch the cool glass filled with freshly squeezed limeade, sweetened with date syrup and eat with rapturous delight.
As I’ve been living away from my family since I was nineteen, I had to find the customs of Ramadan on my own again in my adulthood. When I think of the Ramadan of my childhood, there’s a particular sadness of not being able to break fast with my father, of not being able to stand in prayer with my sister. There’s an acuteness to the feeling and it’s painful, but these days I remind myself of how the reverence of this month is always about considering goodness over greed and accepting one’s path, one’s own life, as a journey of Ramadan. Being in the remembrance of all that you have brings such grace to the days.
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The last two Ramadans, since the pandemic started, have felt strange and dark. Since Ramadan began this year, there’s been the murder of Daunte Wright, Ma'khia Bryant, the mass shooting in Indianapolis, killing four members of the Sikh community and last week India reported it had hit the highest daily increase worldwide (314,835) in Covid-19 cases since the beginning of the pandemic. Meera Navlakha wrote for gal-dem, “Hours later, India’s capital, Delhi, announced there were just 26 vacant ICU beds across the city. And, despite India being the largest Covid-19 vaccine manufacturer in the world, the country is facing a dire shortage of jabs as it is forced to fulfill export contracts to the US and Europe.”
To sit with these realities is also so much a part of the experience of Ramadan. To sit with the multitude of traumas palpable in this current moment, to remember how important it is to be present with other people’s living realities and to give back, to feed others, to prioritize others and to love others by holding their pain. Of being generous, first and foremostly. With the full moon in Scorpio, I spent my Monday sending love, focusing on relationships that had hurt me, or relationships that had left me in confusion. I reminded myself that I never know what anyone is going through and that the only thing I can do is to move with love. To forgive and move forward with that made me realize that moving with love actually means moving with love all the time, not sometimes, or when it’s convenient, but always. It’s so convenient to remember that we are always transforming into wholeness. Ramadan makes me so aware of that.
How there’s a wholeness I cling to and long for, and that filling in the gaps of self feels like the circuitous motion of prayer. Up down, hands to the knees, up down again, hands to the knees, up down and head to the side three times and repeat. Being whole means holding everything, it means looking and relooking, it means sitting in contemplation, it means head to the ground—gratitude for your life.
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My friend Aditi sent me this recording of a three-hour recording with historian Ali A Olomi on Queen Buran, the first known female astrologer. She was also a Muslim and the wife of Caliph al-Mam’un, the seventh Abbasid caliphate. Learning how early caliphs used astrology to determine everything—like war; similar to how the i-ching was used by Ho Chi Minh for tactical support (Astrology has often been used in making major cultural and societal decisions. So much of the ancient world did that: the Egyptians, the Zoroastrians, the Greeks)—synthesizing all of this early knowledge and literally queering it. Olomi mentions how it was quite common for the Caliphs to be gay/queer, though of course this is rarely discussed. It does, however, demonstrate how this period of Muslims (~from 800s to about 1400s~) were thinking outside of unknown terrain. They were devoted to both Qu’ranic inquiry, and thus the nature of the divine and furthering the mind, pushing space in an existential sense, and redefining and defining the first word of the Qu’ran—read—and what that truly meant for Muslims.
During the reign of Queen Buran astrology was a tool for discovery, and her, as well as other astrologers of her time (including the caliph who had a vested interest in being a student of the stars) gathered their own theories: Cancer Rising was a sign of a Muslim leader; Mercury in Scorpio was the strongest position to have for Mercury; as well as Mars in the 11th house because it gave you detachment as well as a global thinking. They studied the planets and so much was revealed about culture and humanness through these undertakings of the soul. The sign of Islam is the crescent moon and stars, which feels apt.
They were also investing in everything book-related, mainly translations, asking anyone to bring books from villages so they could be translated. Queen Buran and the caliph co-created the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Ḥikmah) together, also known as The Grand Library of Baghdad — yes, you know, the same Baghdad that’s been under U.S occupation for a fake war since 2003, killing an upwards of a million Iraqis in less than twenty years. That’s the same Baghdad. Once a beacon of enlightenment for an entire civilization. The scholarship here was for the advancement of medicine, science, philosophy, optics, astronomy — and they were hungry, to learn, to grow, to expand their positionality as Muslims. The House of Wisdom became a space to hold it all.
The most famous Muslim might be Rumi, though the West really tries to take him away from us. Coleman Barks, the most well-known Rumi translator, has been infamously called out by Persian Poetics (read the thread, it’s scintillating) for literally misinterpreting the verses of Rumi to make them more sanitized, and thus away from their natural God-loving nature. “Jawid Mojaddedi, a scholar of early Sufism at Rutgers, told Rozina Ali in this magnificent piece in The New Yorker a few years back: “the Rumi that people love is very beautiful in English, and the price you pay is to cut the culture and religion.”
I’m saddened by how great my people were. How much they offered the world and gave and yet look at where my people are now. Do we really think that the fog of war thick like an ocean mist wasn’t entirely orchestrated to keep us so down that we spent a millennia fighting each other only to keep forgetting who we are?
Fuck that shit. Our histories are laced with such big bright gems and during this holy month I remember it all, I hold these lineages close to my heart.
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I haven’t fasted this Ramadan yet. A couple of years ago I realized it triggered my body dysmorphia (which then always triggers my dysphoria) and that it wasn’t actually useful for me to fast because I spent too much time uncomfortable in my body. As a CSA survivor, the more I articulate that, the more I actually realize how it’s impacted so many parts of my life. I see this level of survivorship akin to finding hidden black mold on the wall, because when you see the mold all of a sudden all the mysteries make sense. When you begin to distinguish a before and after, the reality check also kicks in. You begin to understand certain behavioral idiosyncrasies: why i’m so freaking blunt, or why wild noises are so penetrating, or why being with my body can feel like punishment rather than joy.
This last year I’ve been trying to enter my pelvis with my mind by bringing awareness there. I told my therapist a few weeks ago that I could finally feel the muscle that holds my thighs to my stomach, something that’s such a recent discovery. For so long the bottom half of my body has felt like it was hidden under a hazy soundscape, every time I entered it (and I mean mentally) I’d have to be slightly disengaged, blurring over it at rapid speed.
A couple of weeks ago I went in for a massage. After the end of the massage the therapist I’d never worked with told me something so chilling that I asked her to email me exactly what she said so I wouldn’t forget. She wrote, "Yes, QL (quadratus lumborum) was more engaged on the left. It attaches from the top of the pelvis to the bottom of the ribs. What I’ve found is that when this muscle is more engaged on the left side, the person feels like they can’t present as their full self; like they have to make themselves smaller in some way to be accepted/received in certain situations." Exacting an attention there is something that I’ve avoided given that region my whole life, yet this is also a part of my Ramadan journey. Sitting with all that Allah has given me, and trying to understand why, so I can liberate myself fully.
Yesterday my sister sent me this womb healing workbook from Shakira Sabira of Barakah’s Doula. I’ve started reading it and maybe this Ramadan you can, too, alongside me. I’m sitting with the grief of my life, of all of life, while holding all that I have. It’s a duality that is incredibly humbling. I thank Ramadan for this reminder.
How To Cure A Ghost is a free (almost) weekly newsletter. If you find value in what I write and read this regularly, please consider financially supporting its creation by becoming a paid subscriber or Venmo or PayPal me. If you find value in what I write but can’t financially support its creation, please share.