It is difficult to conceive of a time when a Muslim feels closer to his Creator than during the month of Ramadan, a month not only of reaching out, giving, sharing and thanking God for the bounty that He has put on our table as we break our fast, but a month of spiritual poise and moral reflection.
Last Thursday, well into the first week of this blessed month, I broke my fast in Washington - my home for the last 27 years with a group of friends who were not Muslim. They too, these third-generation American friends of mine, were "partakers of God's plenty," since it was coincidentally Thanksgiving Day.
Why, they wanted to know, do I still observe the rituals of Ramadan after all these years of living away from the old sod.
Let me explain the irony implicit in their innocent question. And why shouldn't I be able to indulge in a first-person reflection or two in this column today? Is Ramadan not, after all, a time of contemplation and soul-searching, when we see in the particular of our personal lives the universals of the community we belong to?
Though I am an Arab and a Muslim, who was born in Haifa, when Haifa was still a Palestinian town, and spent my childhood in a refugee camp in Beirut, I actually grew up in Australia and have lived in the United States for the last three decades.
I came of intellectual age in exile, with my view of the world mirroring the fact of banishment, of the chaotic ferocity of the 1948-war, when one's homeland was dismembered and one's name was lost in the historical shuffle.
In my college days (and bear with me here), I searched for my self-definitions, and for a key to the apparent turmoil of our history, via the winding road of the Western intellectual tradition, mostly Hegelian phenomenology (heck, that's what they called it), not via the rich heritage of the culture from whose bosom I grew. One can imagine the confusion wrought upon the mind of a young Muslim Arab, living in Sydney in the mid-1960s, striving to discipline or tame within himself his native bent toward poetry, literature and the aesthetic of words, that are rooted in his archetype, in favor of Marxist metaphysics.
Yes, youth is indeed wasted on young people.
It did not take long for me to realize that however much I sought to guard myself within the mastered intimacy of a new paradigm, there was, as it were, a rift in the wall. I was speaking and defining my sense of "ownhood" in the borrowed dress of a culture, a tongue and a mythology of hope other than the one bequeathed to me by my faith and my history.
We carry a cargo on our back, those of us banished from Palestine. We can no more unload it than we can jump outside our own skin. That is a common parable of estrangement, is it not, of the exile unhoused, who finally, like a prodigal son, reintegrates himself back into the culture whence his ancestors had struck root, and returns to the "place" where he had made his original leap to consciousness.
Moreover, what is man without faith, faith being a necessary function of our human condition? For have you noticed how there is not now, and there has never been in history, a single community anywhere in the world, regardless of how "primitive" it is, without possessing a religion to believe in?
Thus I am today the sum total of being a Muslim, an Arab and a Palestinian, and these are three equivalent centers of my identity.
Yes, Ramadan is a blessed month indeed, when we break our fast after the sun sets, expansively "partake of God's plenty" with those whom we love and, where possible, those who are less fortunate than we are, and feel more intensely than in other months how Islam is a humanizing force all around us, and that its spiritual energies are transferable to those of personal conduct in our everyday lives.
Ramadan, in other words, is the month when, more than in any other time of the year, we feel closer to our Creator, thankful to have a faith in which to anchor our vision of the now and hereafter. For without one - and I bear witness to this from my youth - we can never comprehend or master the workings of our destiny. Without faith, you raise your hands up over your head, and cry out for justice, explanation or meaning, and the sky will thunder back with its mute clamor. Without faith, even progress in the spheres of reason, science and technology will not enlarge their relevance.
As my friends and I finish our combined Ramadan-Thanksgiving dinner last Thursday, there's one thing they want to know. I consider being a Muslim, Arab and Palestinian to be three equivalent centers of my identity, they say, but what about being American? Aren't I American too?
Ah, the existential ravages we confront as we live in the diaspora.
