We Are Not Numbers x MuslimMatters – Faith Is Our Way Of Resistance

by Dima Shamaly

[Connie Charles, mentor]

March 19, 2024

When we see the crescent moon

   As you know, every year we are aware that Ramadan is approaching by the sighting of the crescent moon. When the crescent moon appears, children’s voices become louder in the streets, and decorations fill every street and every house. 

   Each of us goes to the markets and malls to buy delicious food and necessities for the month of Ramadan. We seek out the foods that distinguish Ramadan from other months. Dates, for example, qatayef, and many other things. 

   The days of Ramadan are filled with remembrance of God, prayer, reading the Qur’an, and then preparing food for Iftar. After sundown, we eat only when the family gathers around one table, filled with all kinds of foods. 

  You hear the sounds of Tarawih prayer while sitting in your home, a fragrant recitation from an imam who has a golden voice in reading the Qur’an. Your heart is filled with humility and reassurance in every rak’ah you perform. Once you stand before your Creator, you feel that the whole world is nothingness and that you want to spend the whole night praying.

This is what I wrote during the month of Ramadan last year to my friend who lives in New York. She was feeling consumed by exile, and wanted reminders of the atmosphere of Ramadan in Gaza so that she would feel a little reassured and could return home in her mind.

This year is different

This year, on March 3, she sent me a message asking whether my family and I were alive or not. She wanted details about how we would keep the month of Ramadan. I remained silent and did not respond. I did not know how to tell her that I had lost my ability to speak. I could not tell her any details. I was unable to say a word. How could I talk to her about all that I was experiencing? I had no words.

Spending Ramadan this year, in the Gaza Strip, is like being in the desert for a long time without enough food or drink. Each of us spends the day without doing anything, with no work to distract us, without study to be preoccupied with. We do nothing. Our faces show the bottomless fear and worry that each of us is feeling.

This year, we spend every day waiting for it to end, just to be over. At Iftar, the food for a family of no less than seven people is two cans of cooked beans or peas, tasteless and odorless, as if you were eating air. Canned food is the only thing available, that an individual in the Gaza Strip can find to buy. Other foods are for sale in local markets, but no one can afford them. 

Lack of control over sellers has made the prices of all goods in Gaza rise dramatically. I may go to the market carrying a hundred shekels—a good amount of money in normal circumstances, enough to buy a large amount of food—and all I can buy with it is a small bag of vegetables, enough for one salad plate, four bottles of water, and a box of dates.

Yet, we persist

Along with this situation beyond our control are the sounds of continuous bombing that come to our ears instead of the music of the call to prayer or the cannons, and along with Iftar this year there is the stench of the phosphorus bombs being dropped on us.

The thing that reassures us all is our unshakeable faith. With everything that happens, you will still find every family gathering in front of their tent to pray Tarawih prayers together. When those prayers are finished, everyone prays to God to be relieved of this horror we are living through. Every tent has its own supplication, and all tents have a common supplication. Any thought that God would abandon us or leave us without hope disappears simply by praying.

Even the elements are against us

On the seventh day of Ramadan this year, the weather in the city of Rafah, to which I have been displaced, changed from summer and sunny to continuous winter and bitter cold. Being cold in our tents seems to be the final way to make us feel pain, and it becomes worse when you have nothing to wear or to cover yourself with.

We are all bearing up, but we never thought it would get so bad. And now, the sound of the wind hitting the nylon of the tent is more difficult to endure than even the sound of continuous bombing, and there has been rain pouring on us in the night making us even more miserable. Yet we were able to sleep through the night, and were satisfied that it was God testing us.

Then, just a half hour before suhoor. I woke to the sound of my mother screaming, “The tent has fallen! Ya Allah, please have mercy on us.” I thought she was exaggerating, but opening my eyes and trying to sit up, I realized that wood and nylon were on top of us. 

We left the tent and spent the rest of the night out in the cold. My mother never complained or expressed doubt in God’s rule. She prayed till dawn, imploring God with all her strength to save us from the crisis we were in. I was amazed by my mother’s strong faith and firm belief in everything. 

I also prayed, asking God to reduce the affliction on us, or to get us out of this situation, to at least return us to our home. My 14-year-old sister, Farah, prayed too, saying, “Ya Rab, bring us back to our home and we will be satisfied with anything else. Bring us back to our home, and let them continue their war. Let them kill us, but while we are at home.”

Our faith gives us all we need

When morning came, I wanted to reach out to my friend in New York, but I knew I couldn’t say all of this to her. Something inside me prevented me from calling her, even though she was one of my closest friends. 

To my surprise, I found a message from her saying, “There is something in common between you and homeless cats. You are all in God’s care and protected in His eyes.”

Receiving this message was like a refreshing rain in the desert in which I had been without food or water for a long time. I realized that I was in God’s care and protection, and that my mother’s strong faith was not in vain. My sister’s prayers came out of her deep pain and her great hope in God. 

Faith is the strongest and the most enduring thing we have. Through all of our pain and suffering, we have faith. Whenever life gets tough and nothing makes sense, we have a refuge in Allah. We know that Allah is with us. Allah sees all that is happening and will never stop being with us and for us. Faith is the best thing my people have, and we are famous for it.

Related:

– We Are Not Numbers x MuslimMatters – MuslimMatters.org