Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Eid Fetr

Eid Fetr is one of the most important holidays in Islam. We celebrate our accomplishments over a month of fasting, worship and prayer ... and if you're a grad student at SIU, tons of reading (I'm not sure if that last one is as fun as the others). With all the hardships I faced this Ramadhan as a religious minority, I would say I couldn't enjoy the banquet of God quite the way I dreamed (or the way I used to enjoy it in Iran); although I tried to make it somehow more enjoyable through a sense of community.

Last night, I felt so sad about the end of my annual banquet of God which was rendered not very enjoyable by a combination of sleep deficiency and unreasonably heavy loads of reading. To simulate my Iftars in Iran, I began to listen to my collection of Iftar prayers near sunset. And I was so carried away that I forgot about eating long after Iftar time. Quite an experience.

In Iran, we celebrate our holidays with cookies, cakes and all sort of sweet stuff. Unfortunately, thousands of miles of land and sea and a single-entry visa separate me from those delicious Iranian cookies (and many other good things in Iran). But still, cookies are cookies, even if not Iranian. To celebrate the Eid, I put some cookies and cakes in our grad lounge. It was an interesting experiment. It gave me a statistical sense of sweet preferences of my class mates and fellow students. Some cakes were quickly gone and some cookies (including my favorite) remained on the table. Now, I know what to buy next time.

And it appears that multiculturalism in a liberal school is mostly about awareness about sexuality and not necessarily diversity of religion. Over past 2 months I've been inundated with info on rights, protection, awareness, resources etc. for LGBT (LGBTQ, LGBTQA or other variations of the sexuality alphabet soup). I would say much more than my entire time in Toledo. And that's not all; we've got a month of LGBT history awareness in October.

And yet, I've got only one Email on Ramadhan from ISS (still, better than nothing). And that's while we have a decent number of Muslim students here. And while we have a Saluki Rainbow office in our nice student-funded Student Center (claiming to be the largest student union in the nation), there's no prayer room for Muslim students. Oddly enough, there's a Wuzu facility, but I wonder what should we do after making Wuzu. We had a room in our old classic Student Union at UT, not a nice room, but still better than nothing.

To be fair however, there is one of our liberal professors who (through her frequent visits to Bangladesh) has good awareness about Muslim concerns; she even brought some stuff for Iftar over her late afternoon seminars. And she greets us Muslim students in an Islamic way (especially over Ramadhan). And near the end of Ramadhan, she invited us to an Iftar dinner organized by IDSA. But that's about it. Nothing much from school or even our department. And when she saw me in the hallway, she greeted me in the Islamic way for this holiday: Eid Mubarak!

No comments:

Blog Directory - Blogged