Ramadan: A time to think of others
May 15 marks the beginning of the month-long annual observance
The world’s Muslims have been admiring the moon these evenings with hopeful anticipation.
Night by night the waning crescent moon approaches a new moon, and at the very first hint of a new crescent just after dusk in the western sky will herald the start of the ninth Muslim lunar month: Ramadan.
Ramadan begins on May 15 this year, and Hamilton’s Muslims will join the 1.6 billion Muslims around the world and fast from an hour before sunrise to sunset.
During these marathon 17-hour-aday fasts, Muslims will not eat, drink, smoke or participate in intimate relations with their spouses. This will continue for a period of 29 or 30 days, until June 15, depending on the sighting of the next new moon.
Those who are young or ill are exempt from fasting, though young Muslims still choose to perform the fast in solidarity with their parents and older siblings. Many elderly and ill Muslims still choose to fast as they don’t want to miss the blessing of this special month. For those unable to fast (e.g. for medical reasons), feeding a person in need for each day of Ramadan missed is recommended (called fidyah, or “expiation”).
During this blessed month, Muslims strive to increase their devotion and remembrance of Allah (God), to restrain their anger, to develop patience, and read the Qur’an — the Islamic scripture — as much as they can.
Muslims are also the most charitable during Ramadan, donating to charities that help combat hunger and poverty locally, here in Hamilton, through participation in local food banks and food distributions here in Hamilton, and to those suffering around the world.
On June 2, the 19th fast of Ramadan, regardless of the heat of summer, about 50 fasting Muslim youth volunteers with Mishka Social Services will prepare food baskets for more than 350 vulnerable Hamilton families out of Hamilton Mountain mosque. The project called “Barakah Box” has been operating like this on the first Saturday of each month for the past three years.
Indeed, each year, nearly all mosques across Canada collect food donations during and outside of Ramadan to help feed the hungry and poverty stricken in their cities.
Outside Canada, as many as 900,000 Rohingyan Muslims, stateless and in dire poverty have been displaced from Burma into a massive, crowded, squalid refugee camp at Cox Bazaar in neighbouring Bangladesh. Their situation is one of desperation to escape the genocidal campaign of rape, torture and murder by Buddhist gangs and the Myanmar army. Many were shot in their backs by Burmese soldiers as they fled down roads to escape, littered with landmines that maimed hundreds.
The Rohingya have lived in this camp since August 2017, and this Ramadan they face catastrophic monsoon rains which will threaten their flimsy homes and wash away entire neighbourhoods of Rohingya living on the tree stripped hills. Flooding and great loss of life is expected. Yet, they too will fast Ramadan with what little food and subsistence they have.
In Yemen, the nearly three-year-old Saudi-led military campaign supported by British and American militaries are using hunger as a weapon. This conflict has resulted in 17 million Yemenis who are food insecure, according to the World Food Programme. The 2017 Yemen Humanitarian Response Plan reports that about 3.3 million children and pregnant or nursing women are acutely malnourished.
Certainly, hunger is not a phenomenon that exists in obscure, faraway lands.
While many of us may enjoy food truck festivals here in town this summer, we cannot turn away from the grim statistics in the most recent Hamilton Food Share “hunger count.”
On any given day, Hamilton’s food banks and hot meal programs give out enough emergency groceries to provide a minimum of 6,300 meals per day throughout Hamilton. The report states that people fear the loss of their housing due to poor income. Feeling powerless, they worry that they won’t have enough food and exchange more nutritious foods for lower cost, poor quality foods, or skip meals and go hungry to help their food last. They must make tough choices: pay the rent, utility bills, clothing — or eat.
Let us not forget the Spec’s 2010 “Code Red” series which found that people living in poverty are sicker, have more health emergencies and lower life expectancy than people living in more affluent neighbourhoods.
Eight years later, what has changed?
Ramadan comes year after year. The number of hungry here at home and in the world is increasing each year. The number of malnourished children and women is increasing year after year.
Whether you are fasting or not, let Ramadan be a regular reminder for all of us that hunger, poverty and suffering knows no religion and that we need to stand together as brothers and sisters in humanity to fight it.
Raza Khan is a Hamilton born and raised family physician. He is a board member of Islamic Relief Canada, the largest Muslim NGO in Canada and member of the Humanitarian Coalition.
While many of us may enjoy food truck festivals here in town this summer, we cannot turn away from the grim statistics.