Glimpses of Ramadhan from the inside

As non-Muslims (and Kiswahili students, to boot), our experience of Ramadhan lacked the spiritual intensity that it has for many Zanzibaris. Perhaps oneday we will return to Zanzibar during Ramadhan, and we will have a deeper experience of the month, when we will know people here well enough to be included in the evening festivities and when we will be acclimated enough to our new environment to try fasting along with them. (We had earnest intentions of fasting for one day, but the best we managed was to eat a very light lunch most days; the not drinking water proved impossible for us as novice equatorial citizens.)

We did have several glimpses of what I find most admirable about Ramadhan, and that is the sense of community and spiritual focus. We saw that most intensely during the first few days of Ramadhan. On the first day, we were living in our first apartment, above a Muslim family with small children. At dusk, when the family and other families across the city broke their fast, there was an almost palpable hush over the building and the city outside. Everyone, it seemed, was focused—not just on the food, but on the act of breaking the fast together and being aware of the moment and its meaning. That night, we went out to the Night Market to be with other people eating after the day’s fast, and everyone was more cheerful and welcoming than we had seen on any day before that. And everywhere our greeting “Ramadhan Karim” (borrowed from President Obama’s Ramadhan address) was greeted with a smile.

Later during Ramadhan, we were treated to some samples of the delicious foods that are eaten during the nights of Ramadhan. We exchanged treats with our landlord’s family (their Ramadhan kaimati—small, syrupy donuts—for our cake donuts; their cassava in coconut milk with tuna, for our Elvis pudding). And we attended a veritable feast with students and faculty from the Zanzibar Academic Student Centre, on the occasion of a visit to Zanzibar from Lisa Ferrari and Mark Ferrari (board members at International CATALYST Fund, the NGO that helps support ZASAC). The women of ZASAC prepared about 20 different dishes, all of which were available at each of the four stations along the long men’s busati (eating mat) and at the one station of the smaller women’s busati (see the picture of us as we were helping to set up—note that everyone has taken off shoes when walking on the busati). When the air siren sounded to announce the sunset, we joined in the prayer (Brady, Mark, and the boys with the men, and Lisa and me with the women). And then ate until we were full of delicious dishes too numerous to list but including fresh tuna, cooked green bananas, several kinds of donuts, chapatti, dosa, a dish called “caroni” that is basically chili-mac, cassava in tomato sauce, boiled cassava, vermicelli, bananas with custard, and more. To drink, we had water, chai, juice, and a thin porridge called uji. We felt honored to have been included in the special event and walked home in the darkness as though we were walking on air (or we would have felt like that if we weren’t so full!).