Page 7 - North Star 2024

God Under the Rubble
by Adeeb Chowdhury
They say the night is darkest before dawn.
The all-too-familiar buzz of my alarm jolts me awake. I let myself sit on the edge of my bed for a moment, my groggy mind teetering on the precipice of falling back asleep. Whispery strands of moonlight cast silhouettes against the walls of my dorm room. Outside my window, Rugar Street is silent, still, and soulless.
It is 4:30 a.m. on a Ramadan night. My friends and I sometimes joke that this feels like waking up in the Twilight Zone-- a sliver of time and space when nothing feels quite real, as if stuck in a crack between worlds. The lingering pre-sun quietness renders the typically bustling college campus an eerie liminal space of sorts. Yet, during Ramadan, this silence feels neither stifling nor spooky. It feels liberating. It feels like I’ve shrugged off the plastic artifices of a materialistic, man-made planet and stumbled upon the world as it once was, as it was meant to be. Gone are the contrived anxieties and worldly responsibilities that slip away into the blackness of the late night. They will inevitably come back up with the sun, but for a couple hours, in this peaceful calmness, I can hear God a little better.
I wolf down a box of fried chicken and rice – carbs make it easier to fast, as my father had taught me – and gulp down several bottles of water until I can almost feel it sloshing around inside me. This is, aer all, my last food and drink for the next fourteen hours or so. Around 5:30 a.m., my phone buzzes again to signal Fajr, the first of the five daily prayers. I perform the obligatory full body cleansing - wudu - under a warm shower, running my fingers through my scalp and between my toes, as if literally rinsing out the impurities of my soul. By the time I make it back to my room and unravel my prayer mat onto my floor, the blackness of night has started to give way to the blue and orange hues of dawn.
Allah, I offer you two rakats of Fajr. Hands to my temple. Arms crossed. Bow. Kneel. Forehead to the ground.
The prayer ends with facing to your right and then to your le, and saying Assalamu Alaikum wa rahmatullah: “Peace and the mercy of God be upon you.” It is meant to be said to the people praying on either side of you, as they would in a mosque. The oneness and unity of the