With no cease-fire in Gaza, Muslims like me struggle with guilt and rage this Ramadan
CHICAGO — According to a tradition attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, “God is with the brokenhearted.” That idea may provide some respite for many of us on the eve of Ramadan, those entering this Muslim holy month with shattered hearts.
Even as someone who has done his best to avoid social media, I turned on NPR the other day long enough to hear the wailing of Rania Abu Anza, who had spent a decade and three rounds of in vitro fertilization to become pregnant. Last weekend, her 5-month-old twins and a dozen other relatives were crushed to death under the rubble in Gaza after an Israeli airstrike.
Rania and her family were seeking refuge in Rafah because it had been declared a safe zone by the Israelis, who have driven most of the 1.7 million displaced Palestinians like her into the very space they are now bombing indiscriminately.
Every day, our emails, WhatsApp groups and social media feeds are flooded with dozens of such accounts. Motaz Abdullah, a Palestinian American father and my friend in Chicago, and I have talked about the guilt, helplessness and rage that have driven many of us to some very steep emotional edges since Oct. 7.
“I’ve sobbed more in the last five months than I have my entire life,” he said.
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My conversation with Motaz is not unique, as I have spoken to dozens of other Palestinian American friends and family expressing similar sentiments. At this point, I often find myself easily triggered and brought to tears by any encounter with stories, voices and illustrations of trauma and injustice.
A few weeks ago, I experienced one of those encounters toward the end of a tour at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Somewhere between the holograms of actors taking on the persona, story and voices of formerly enslaved people and the exhibit on mass incarceration, I broke down and had to be consoled by a colleague. Perhaps it was the very familiar and often invisible stories of mass incarceration that I hear and experience as the executive director of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network.
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Maybe it was the video of the Rev. Martin Luther King delivering the last few sentences of his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech the night before his assassination. Something about those prophetic words appealing to a beleaguered community to hold on to the vision of a “promised land.”
Most likely, it was a combination of everything.
If the carnage continues during the monthlong Ramadan, we are bracing ourselves for more searing impact on our souls: Fasting from dawn to sunset, by many accounts, increases one’s emotional sensitivity and empathy.
More than 30,000 Palestinians lie dead in Gaza and thousands remain missing, most likely buried under the rubble. The Gaza Strip is in utter ruin, and even a complete cessation of violence would still come with the tremendous emotional burden of confronting the actual extent of the decimation funded by our tax dollars.
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Yet, with no cease-fire in place, we are preparing ourselves for more images of children strewn out on the floors of emergency rooms, covered in debris, or dying of starvation.
Perhaps consolation in our painful brokenness comes from prayer and the opportunity to bring parts of our fractured communities together this Ramadan. These are spaces often pried open by our young artists, activists, dreamers and spiritual seekers who still believe in the integral power of bringing us together to hear and identify with each other’s pain.
Such gatherings occur in intimate halls or large outdoor arenas, similar to the venue where young hip-hop artist Marcus Morton, known as Redveil, performed in November. Toward the end of his set, Redveil asked his DJ to screen the names of thousands of Gazans under the age of 4 killed in five months of bombings: “Nobody on this ... list made it to the age of 4. Not one. ... It’s not complicated.”
If it takes a 19-year-old Maryland rapper to stand in the middle of our broken human family and defy all our “complicated” reasons not to be accountable for Palestinian suffering, then so be it. Maybe the wisdom in confronting our broken hearts this Ramadan is to see the opening in the breaking.
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In his poem "Of Beauty & Breaking," Grammy-nominated poet Amir Sulaiman lays this out:
"Who would want their heart broken
But now that mine has been split open
I wonder who would want their heart closed
Ever
Can you drink from the coconut without striking it
Can you smell the aloeswood without lighting it
So much sweetness is violent
So much beauty in breaking
Can you birth without bleeding
And crying
And breathing
And dying"
Can our hearts breaking lead to an identification with suffering that provides any hope to Rania and the tens of thousands of grieving mothers like her in Gaza?
Can it lead to further unified action to get this U.S. president to take serious accountability for his complicity in the genocidal assault on the people of Gaza?
Can it push our elected officials to demand a permanent cease-fire agreement?
Can we get our president to leverage the billions we give Israel to demand compliance with international law?
If so, then maybe all that heartbreaking is the spiritual healing and medicine we need during this Ramadan.
Rami Nashashibi, a MacArthur Foundation fellow, is founder and executive director of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: As Ramadan starts without ceasefire, Gaza genocide breaks our hearts