Ramadan Lessons
By Mona Eltahawy
I’m from Cairo, a city that during the day is home to an estimated 18 million people. Driving through the city – I should say megapolis – is the nightmare you would imagine and crossing the streets requires a strong heart, some would say a death wish.
Which is why what happens every evening during the month of Ramadan is nothing short of a miracle. To say the city turns into a ghost town wouldn’t even begin to describe the transformation.
Ramadan is the month when Muslims fast from sunrise till sunset, which these days is around 6:15 pm. It is customary to break the fast with your family or with a group of friends because Muslims are taught that you gain extra blessings for feeding a fasting person and so invitations crisscross as relatives tug at you to join them for the iftaar – the meal that breaks the fast.
So about an hour or so before iftaar – if you are lucky enough to get away from work that early – you could easily get caught in a nasty traffic jam that feels as if someone had thrown you into the middle of those 18 million people who fill the city during the day.
But as sunset approaches, it is as if someone has taken an eraser and wiped clear the huge city squares of their people. The streets seem to get wider as they empty of cars and pedestrians and the cacophony of horns and conversations conducted at three times their normal volume level just so that you can be heard, all of it dissipates. It is as if every building in the city sends out a collective hush in eager anticipation of one sound: the call to prayer, or adhan, announcing the evening prayer and the go ahead to break the fast.
The stillness, the silence and the emptiness of those sunset moments during Ramadan in Cairo are incredibly moving. Hungry and thirsty at the end of the day-long fast, you feel you could hear the angels whispering and the slightest act of kindness encapsulates for me the lessons of Ramadan: self-control and generosity.
Sometimes, in a mad rush to get home in time to eat with my family, I’d jump into a cab that was miraculously available and whose driver was eager to push the speed limit to get home quickly as well. We didn’t always make it in time and as we sped through the empty streets of Cairo we’d hear a dozen adhans – Cairo is after all the City of a Thousand Minarets. The driver would reach into a bag of dates he’d brought with him just in case he was out driving when it was time to break his fast and he would turn around and offer me the first one. It was hard to fight the tears of gratitude and connection as I gladly accepted one.
Looking around the city, I could see bus drivers whose vehicles were long ago empty of their loads, parking their buses and getting out to eat at the Tables of the Merciful, tables full of food that wealthy families in each neighborhood provided for the poor and those who needed to break their fast while still out.
I live in New York City now, another crowded, cacophonous metropolis. And as the setting sun turns the sky into a palette of lilac and rosy pink, I look out the window and remember those sunset moments of kindness and generosity from half a world away.