By the Pen, By the Spoon: Serving God

This is Day 9 of Hindtrospectives’ #MyMosqueMyStory series for Ramadan 2015

By Eman Hassaballa Aly

If you want to see the dark side of a community, feed hordes of fasting people. It’s like they’ve never eaten before in their life. Ramadan means a lot of things to me, but for this piece, I’m going to focus on the food part. I want to talk about how I’ve been spending my Saturdays for many years with food, lots of food. But before that, I have to go back to before I was born.

My family emigrated from Egypt, and there is a sizable group of Egyptian immigrants in Chicago. I know because I’m related to a lot of them. In the 70s, in Chicago, they used to get together on Saturdays and called themselves Nadi al-Masry. A Nadi is the equivalent of a country club in Egypt. And as these families started growing, they wanted to start teaching their kids religion. So the Nadi became a Saturday School.

Our group was awesome. We held classes at the American Islamic College, the Schaumburg Library and we ended up (and fizzled out) at Islamic Foundation, a large mosque in a western suburb of Chicago. I attended classes there until I was in college. We used to have report cards, custom t-shirts and graduations. It was glorious, I have so many precious memories from those times. This was our community, and since it’s demise the community doesn’t really exist, except for Ramadan.

I can’t really remember how it began, but my mom and her friends would organize Ramadan iftars (break-fasts) instead of classes. It was so much fun, because we didn’t have to worry about memorizing verses from the Quran, or doing Arabic homework. We would just eat and play in the parking lot while the parents performed extra devotional prayers in the Mosque. The mosque would even help fund it, and the rest of the money was collected from the community.

All the Aunties would get together and cook, and each lady was in charge of a dish. The dads would help serve, carry heavy things

and clean up too. At first, we first just fed ourselves, but soon the rest of the local community around the mosque would join. And as we got older, the younger generation helped set up, serve food and clean up. It has become well known in the local community as the Arab iftars. But it wasn’t all fun and games.

I remember one girl, she would be one of the first people in line to get her food. And she would come back with a food-stained plate for seconds by cutting in line. I would lose patience with her and I would start yelling at her to get to the back of the line. And the worst thing was when we cleaned up, we threw away full plates of food because people’s eyes were WAY bigger than their stomachs. And mothers would make giant plates of food for their three-year olds instead of taking from the kids food. There were times that we ran out of food, but still threw out dozens of pounds of it anyway.

The youngsters, led by me, would try to revolt in different ways. We tried pre-portioned plates, but people would grab four and five plates. We tried to hide the food until after the sunset prayers, but people started praying downstairs in the Banquet Hall, and then ran to stand in line. We suggested to move the meals to homeless shelters to serve the truly needy. I even boycotted for a few years. My excuse was I grew tired of losing the reward by being so nasty to and angry at the people we fed. I thought if I took a stand, they would see I was right, and they would do what I thought was best for the community. I felt like everyone was missing the point. But I think I was the one missing it. I boycotted two or more years, but the work went on without me, and I find myself returning to the ranks, reclaiming my job of filling cups of juice and serving rice or salad, because they never trusted me to serve the meat. And frankly, I wouldn’t want that job. I don’t want to get in between a fasting person and their meat.

I know I was wrong, and what I’ve come to learn is it’s my place to earn the reward and the rest is up to God. I’m fortunate that I can call any mosque my own, but Islamic Foundation always will be my mosque because it’s the place where I learned to use a pen and a serving spoon to learn about God.

Eman works in social media research and counsels at the Heartspeak Institute. She can be tweeted at @emanhaly