The loneliest Ramadaan
JULIE ZAUZMER
ALI Muhammad’s days are quiet now.
Most years, Ramadaan is overflowing with activity – a month of nightly break-the-fast dinners with friends and family, and weekly Friday prayers that leave the mosque almost bursting at the seams.
Most years, Muhammad spends his time during this holy month at Masjid Muhammad in Northwest Washington, US. It’s the place he found his faith, found his purpose in life, found sobriety, found friends, found his soulmate.
Muhammad and Mary Clark married there just three months ago, before the coronavirus pandemic hit Washington, in front of a small group of family and friends on Valentine’s Day. That day, he pictured that when Ramadaan began, they would congregate together with their friends at the mosque, then go home for the delicious iftar dinners that Clark would cook from scratch. They would enjoy their first holiday living together, and make plans for a huge party to celebrate
their marriage with the friends and relatives not at the ceremony.
Instead, Muhammad found himself spending a silent Ramadaan alone.
The coronavirus pandemic brought his daily activities to a stop. At the age of 70, and on immunosuppressant drugs after a kidney transplant, Muhammad feared getting the virus if he so much as left his flat. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Well, I’m not afraid of the virus’,” he said. “I have absolutely no immune system whatsoever.”
And his work stopped. Muhammad’s company taught computer classes, mostly for senior citizens in their residential buildings and libraries and churches.
“It’s just brought everything to a halt, period.”
Then in late April, Ramadaan began. Muhammad loves Ramadaan. He tries to read the whole Qur’an, always hungry to learn more about his adopted faith. He became a Muslim in 2001, by happenstance or by something deeper and more fated. He was riding the 96 bus, as he did every day. He was sick and tired of drugs and alcohol. The bus passed Masjid Muhammad, and he found himself getting off. He walked inside; the men were friendly. He came back.
After many more visits, and many more questions about what those men believed, Muhammad solemnly spoke the words: “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger.” Now he was a Muslim too. He went to the courthouse to change his name. Arnold Mack was officially gone. He was Ali Muhammad now.
One of the people who always seemed to have answers was Clark. He fell in love with her wisdom and her patience and the way she was always taking care of people, including her elderly aunts and uncles.
They stayed inside
for
their first night of Ramadaan as husband and wife, eating an iftar dinner that she cooked.
And then she started coughing. She grew so weak, hardly responsive at times, that Muhammad insisted on taking her to the George Washington University Hospital even though she didn’t want to go. Mary, 77, tested negative for the coronavirus, but she had serious pneumonia.
Days later, a doctor called Muhammad to tell him that his wife’s kidneys were shutting down.
As the first Friday of the holiday approached, Muhammad was optimistic about praying from home.
“I can live-stream what we call the jummah prayer and the speech and everything on my TV – I don’t miss that at all,” he said.
A split second later, he thought twice. “Do I miss it? Actually, I do. I have all my friends. All my buddies sat in the front row. I miss that a lot. I miss the camaraderie. Still… I can adjust to that.”
He counted more than 35 friends who were calling and texting, always asking how he was. But the one person he wanted to hear from was too weak to call. Her yarn was everywhere, the couch still piled with the hats and kufis that she knits to sell at the mosque. The doctors kept calling with bad news – she had fluid in her lungs, then a blood infection.
Finally, Clark had the energy for a phone call. They both cried, and she said she was constantly thirsty. He drove over to the hospital with a case of purified water.
She moved from the hospital to a rehabilitation facility. Their phone calls got longer.
He kept reflecting on what it meant that this holiday would happen now, of all times.
“Sex, partying, all that – everything that we used to do, we give up during the month of Ramadaan. I look at this year’s Ramadaan as a sign from Allah. Every human being has to fast with us and give up something. Right now, everybody is practicing Islam.”
This weekend, the strangest holy month of his life will come to an end. Soon after a silent Eid – the celebration of Ramadaan’s conclusion – he hopes his wife will at last be home. | The Washington Post