Page 8 - North Star 2024

global Muslim community, irrespective of creed and color, is a crucial principle of Islam. You pray shoulder-to-shoulder with humans you have never met but have a duty to love and protect all the same. This soaring feeling of togetherness was what Malcolm X described in his letter from Mecca, Islam’s holiest site, in his famed autobiography: “ [During my pilgrimage] I have eaten from the same plate, drunk from the same glass, and slept on the same rug - while praying to the same God - with fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white. . . We were all truly the same.” So powerful and life-changing was this experience that it directly led to him disavowing his ties to antisemitic, racially divisive organizations and embracing a more holistic respect for all of humanity for the rest of his life. The global Muslim community, the ummah, is one family, with a responsibility to uphold the dignity of humanity as a whole.
This oneness is something I feel on a profound level despite praying in the dark solitude of my dorm room, thousands of miles from my homeland of Bangladesh. Maybe it is precisely because I am so far from home and yearn for the warm familiarity of family. Maybe it is because the Internet Age has allowed me to connect with Muslims observing Ramadan alongside me in places as far away as Brazil, Rwanda, Norway, and Japan-- cultivating a sense of unity that was simply not possible a generation ago. Maybe it is because I only wholly embraced religion in college, and I am now eager to explore and embrace a part of my identity I had stifled for years.
Maybe a combination of all of these factors has forced me to grapple with a deeply unnerving reality. I am praying in the comfort of my dorm room, bloated from the food and water I had just consumed, fully expecting to return to the warmth of my bed soon. I will fast comfortably throughout the day, eventually breaking it at sunset with a large meal I will share with my friends. I will call and wish my family a happy Eid, a day of celebration. I am living in joy. I am living in luxury. I am living in safety. I am living.
And yet I call myself part of the ummah, the worldwide family of Muslims, when the same month of Ramadan has ushered in new phases of untold, unfathomable horror for so many. Gaza has been described, rightfully, as a living hell. It is an apocalyptic, nightmarish landscape. The silence that I said made me feel closer to Allah is a luxury that Gazans cannot afford-- their nights are humming with the sounds of airstrikes, sirens, and screams. Their darkness is not limited to the late hours of the night like mine. The military blockade on their land has cut off power and plunged hospitals into blackness, forcing them to salvage electricity by deciding which