By Mahjabeen Islam, MD, via e-mail
This is indeed one of the most unhappy Eids I have been through. It was ironically heartening that I was not the only one that felt that way today at the Islamic Center. A very dear friend of mine, a lawyer, cried and cried during the dua. She is of Palestinian descent.
I personally do not remember an Eid when Muslims all over the world were essentially under siege as they are today. If imagination is to be extended hardly any part of the world with any significant Muslim populace comes up where people are not facing troubling times.
Maybe I’m jaded but a month of fasting with finally that great cup of tea in the morning which usually made me smile, this time brought no joy. How can I rejoice when Muslims are being bombed and bulldozed in Palestine, when Eid to Afghanis means carpet-bombing, when incalculable generations of Iraqis are condemned to congenital malformations, malnutrition and death in relative youth. When entire families in Kashmir are burnt to death in their homes.
And if that were not enough the supposedly more blessed group of Muslims here in the United States observes Eid with the sinking feeling that it tries to push out of its mind, that with each passing day we are collectively headed toward third-class citizen status. I am accused of hysteria when I say that the internment camps for the Japanese-Americans after World War II are not just a blemish on the history of America and that it is entirely within the realm of possibility that history will repeat itself.
How can it not when we have the Law of Secret Evidence and the Patriot Act? We are “at war” don’t you know? We can and we have rounded up people on the presumption of guilt because they have names such as Mohammed, Ahmed, Hussain, Khan ad infinitum. They are deprived of legal counsel, except in instances when someone has made a lot of noise, and worse, they are not told what their crime is.
How do I smile when the orphan I had adopted through the Holy Land Foundation, looks forward only to an uncertain future, cut off completely from life-sustaining assistance? I used to feel moved when I would get her photographs and letters on each Eid and how she had grown from a toddler to quite the pretty young lady. The letters and photos were always a surprise to me, for in the busy-ness of life, one forgets. Now I will look for them, and I cry, though not the tears of joy I did.
I don’t want to go into the whys and the hows and that Muslims deserved it and it was inevitable, and what do you expect, and etiologies and rationalizations. I just want more than a few moments of sorrow for what we have lost and anticipatory grief for what we most likely will.
But I guess they don’t say Eid Mubarak for no reason. They mean that MAY Eid be Mubarak for you. For once each time someone said so, I inwardly said Ameen, and desperately wished that Inshaallah it will be.