MONDAY 11th MARCH 2024
‘Twas the night before Ramadan - again
It felt very strange coming into work with my lunch bag when I’d mentally prepared for a full day of fasting.
However, another day to prepare is never a bad thing and of course we ended up at the supermarket to buy the dates I’d forgotten to pick up on Sunday. I’d apparently been the least organised faster because when we arrived there wasn’t a date in sight. Not even a raisin. After an embarrassingly long time searching, a sales assistant stepped in and brought us the last box of dates in Manchester.
In the spirit of giving and sharing we ended up at my mothers-in-law’s to collect a bowl of sewai she’d made for our suhoor and we couldn’t resist staying for dinner when we saw a bubbling pot of salan on the stove (for years I thought salan was a specific type of curry and kept calling it salan curry, which just translates to ‘curry curry’). Not the first, and I doubt the last, of my cultural faux pas.
There’s always the debate in our house about whether it’s best to stay up for Fajar (the prayer that is done at dawn before fasting starts), or to go to bed and wake up for suhoor and Fajar. It always ends the same way; go to bed far too late and groggily get up with little to no time to eat suhoor, do wudu (a cleansing ritual that is an important part of purity and cleanliness in Islam before praying) and then complete the first prayer of the day. I’m not sure what the majority do, but I assume it’s more organised than us. In the end we decided on a late night with a bowl of sewai and a slice of cake before setting our alarms for an early start.
It’s a big change going from 3 regular meals and the odd snack to your morning meal being at a time when you’d normally be asleep, and a whole day without food and water (yes, even water) until late in the evening. Fasting is more than a personal challenge. For many Muslims, it’s a month to become closer to God and the community. It also allows the person fasting to empathise with those, for who this isn’t a choice. We’re unbelievably lucky, and this is emphasised further during Ramadan. How lucky am I, to be choosing not to eat or drink, but with the knowledge that if I became unwell, I could so easily make a quick snack or grab a glass of water? Charity is a huge part of this month, and many people celebrating Ramadan focus on charities dedicated to battling poverty and starvation around the world. It’s an awful reality that many people around the world will start their Ramadan tomorrow without the choice of fasting - for them it’s the only option.
