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Fasting toward understanding
By Zoë Wiliams
williamz@mscd.edu

Since deciding to participate in sawm, the fast of Ramadan, I have dealt with endless confusion from friends.

My comrades want to know what would make me, a white atheist kid with little interest in holidays, care about a month of religiously inspired and disciplined deprivation. What must be understood is that my decision is an ethical one made after considering the aftermath of Sept. 11 and what Islam means in this nation.

While this is the land of free religious affiliation, one’s choice of spirituality may grant others permission for extensive harassment and even imprisonment. The prejudice is very specific, though. Pagans or Amish folks may be ridiculed, and your average Christian Joe may not understand the Judaic tradition, but Muslims are the only religious group being strategically attacked and demonized.

To my fellow citizens, Islam is a target for extensive racial profiling. This past August, a Muslim physician was removed from a United Airlines flight for praying. In more dire cases, like that of Binyam Mohamed or Khaled El-Masri, Muslims have been arrested without warrants, taken to secret overseas prisons, tortured and held for years without attorneys in a process called extraordinary rendition.

Pope Benedict provided another example of Western ignorance and prejudice toward Islam last week as he quoted a 14th-century emperor who called Islam “evil and inhuman.” While the Pope apologized, he merely stated that his speech was not interpreted the way he had intended. While there is room for misinterpretation within his Papal words, I am unsure.

After all, Bush and his neoconservative chums frequently echo such language when they pump out jargon like “Islamic fascism” to whip up frenzied support for U.S. tirades in the Muslim world. This country’s gullibility to such language has allowed for a new era of war crimes and human-rights atrocities. The victims are Arabs and Persians, the predominant followers of Islam.

Several weeks back, I found myself brooding over such racism and ethnocentrism while reading right-wing blogs. I began searching for ways to show solidarity with Muslim communities both in the United States and abroad and stumbled upon the idea of fasting through Ramadan.

I have chosen to join hundreds of other people who are not Muslim in fasting this Ramadan. We come from many nations and many religious groups and have chosen to take a stand against anti-Muslim sentiment, racism and jingoism.

We fast for the people in Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan plagued with the consequences of conflict. We fast for the people held in both secret and known prisons, enduring torture and a complete disregard for their essential human rights. We fast to show solidarity with the world’s poor and forgotten. We fast to test our ability to abstain from the excess of U.S. culture. We fast to better understand.