BY ABEER BARAKAT
WORLD
Ramadan has a special place in every Muslim’s heart. We wait for it all year. As a small child, I remember my excitement at hanging colorful lanterns on the house. My parents taught my siblings and me to abstain from food and drink from dawn to dusk. But the holy month of Ramadan started early for Muslims in Gaza this year. In some sense, we’ve been fasting since October.
The idea of fasting is to train yourself to be patient, to elevate your soul from mundane desires, to try to free your mind from evil impulses and do good deeds for people around you. Nothing could have prepared me for Ramadan this year. I wasn’t sure I would even survive until Ramadan—at least 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed since the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, according to the health ministry in the Strip, and 80% of the population has been displaced amid Israel’s ongoing bombardment. For those of us lucky to still be alive, fleeing from place to place, we have undergone a partial fast for months, not wanting to eat the scant food of the families kind enough to shelter us, unable to find food to purchase in the markets or to afford what can be found.
Since the war began, my life has been turned upside down. My home in Gaza City, where my children and I used to hang Ramadan lights, is now destroyed and my family scattered.
I WOKE ON MARCH 11, the first day of fasting, an hour before dawn to prepare the pre-fast meal known as suhour. This is usually a moment of profound joy and spirituality, but this year I could not hold back my tears. The mosques lie in ruins, so neighbors all around performed the call to prayer on their own initiative. This suhour consisted of stone-hard bread, which I baked from barley, corn, soy, and even bird feed that we managed to find and ground together. The sand-like taste was tempered by the fact that we were able to dip it in the olive oil we had pressed from our own olive trees before the war, which I found in my father’s deserted home in Gaza City. It pained me to not be able to offer food from a plentiful table to our neighbors, as is customary, and instructed by the Prophet Muhammad.
For our first meal after fasting, I had saved two small bags of pasta. Though it was infested with weevils, I managed to clean and boil the pasta, and serve it with tomato sauce for iftar. I used to partially prepare the next day’s iftar the night before, so that my fasting hours could be focused on worship. With so much scarcity, this is now a faraway dream.
In years
