Minority Eid Report

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Caffeinated and crashing

We went hard last Wednesday on the first day of Eid. Got up and wore our finest to rush to the mosque for morning prayers. Came home to our caffeine and sugary breakfasts. Left again to go to the community Eid Festival put together by an incredible team of volunteers and held every year in one of the city’s biggest conference centres.

Bouncy castles and bubble soccer and food food food and tables and vendors and usually a magic show and treasure hunts and running into friends you haven’t seen since the last Eid fest. Delighted shrieks as you spot each other across the crowd. Hugs and updates. Exclamations of, “we have to make time to see each other. We’ll make plans, yeah?” Knowing the plans will probably fall through but that we’ll be back same time, same place next year, insha Allah.

The boys are bigger now. Big enough that you slap the entry bracelet on their wrists, tell them not to leave the building and watch them run off into the fray. When they return, they’ve collected 4 other friends and you’re led to their parents, your adoptive extended family, the people who fill the empty spaces for immigrants and children of immigrants. You find a recently relinquished table, chat in the middle of interrupting children, take a selfie or two.

The boys run past you in intervals, their faces progressively redder and redder, the effort of playing apparent in the sweat that trickles down from their hairlines to their chins. All that sugar, all that hype has to go somewhere!

Your alarm rings and you corral them and hurry to the car for the ride to your uncles’ house. More cousins, more love, more food, more conversations you haven’t had in too too long. There are plates to fill and other people’s kids to marvel at - they’re so big when did that happen!

Photo by Martin Zangerl on Unsplash

As a child, the lure of the majority was strong. The lure of extended family as far as the eye could see, going back generations. Classmates whose families were never asked where are you from? Classmates whose answers would have been, right here, even if they had been.

I imagined Christmas the way it looked at the beginning of Home Alone. The biggest house, gifts overflowing, aunts and uncles and cousins and trips to Paris, no biggie.

An immigrant doesn’t have those cousins around until generations later, if ever. The diaspora is like spilled milk: it spreads out. There is no containing and keeping in one place.

Majority Eid

My niece was 3 the first time she moved to Dubai. She bubbled over with excitement as they dressed to the nines and went out to the morning Eid prayer. When they got home, she burst into tears, all that expectation crushed. “What’s wrong, sweetie?” They asked her.

”I wanted to go to Eiiiiiiiiiiid!”

And then they understood. In Dubai, as in Egypt, as in Lebanon, nobody plans a big festival to help Muslims feel at home, because they’re already at home. There are no bouncy castles and magic shows. There’s no clown passing candy out to expectant little fingers. My niece had dreamed for her minority Eid and found herself in a place where she belonged to the majority.

In Dubai, as in Egypt, as in Lebanon, you go to pray at your local mosque, and then you come home, take a nap, and visit family. I imagine this is what people here in North America actually do on Christmas, rather than taking trips to Paris and hatching plans to torture incompetent burglars.

We’re back at school and work now, sugared out and in that lull after a holiday. We’ll ebb and flow for a few more days, and then find our rhythm, insha Allah. I’m trying to be mindful, not to miss the passage of time. I don’t want to blink and find myself in June. Ramadan is so intentional, I’d love to carry that intention with me year round.

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Let’s chat in the comments:

1. Do you celebrate holidays or special occasions with friends and family? How do you celebrate?

2. Are you holidays well-known where you live?

3. Have you ever found yourself wishing to be part of the opposite group, in terms of majority/minority? Why?

I’m continuing to share resources about the situation in Gaza and the West Bank. This week I’m sharing two resources.

The first is this poem by Palestinian activist and writer Mohamed El-Kurd. I’ve shared his words before and I keep coming back to them again and again because they are so powerful and direct, with a bite of macabre humour.

poetryisnotaluxury

A post shared by @poetryisnotaluxury

The second is this article in Time Magazine by Dr. Hala Alyan, a Palestinian author, psychologist, and professor at New York University, about The Power of Changing Your Mind. The whole piece is worth a read, but this quote especially stood out to me:

“The truth is that people believe all sorts of cognitively dissonant things about themselves. Deeply militarized societies are filled with people who consider themselves—and their nation—to be peace-loving and valuing of life. Populations that are marked with extreme economic and racial inequity speak sincerely, unironically, of freedom and equality of all.”

The Silk Road Institute is running a literary workshop series with Dr. Hala. More information and tickets can be found here.