Four sweet, dark-haired, dark-eyed girls crowded around me and asked, almost in unison, “Can we go to the media center during lunch?” It’s Ramadan, and my four Muslim students (three are from Afghanistan and one is from Syria) are eager to avoid even the sight of food while they are fasting. They cluster together throughout the whole day: the guidance counselor purposely made their schedule so that they have almost every class together since they feel safest with each other.
Of course, I agreed for them to go to the media center: growing up in a strange Christian sect that borrowed all the Jewish festivals, I had to fast one day a year during Yom Kippur, though our sect preferred the translated name, the Day of Atonement. I have a slight sense, then, of the challenge my Muslim students face, though only a very slight sense: we didn’t go to school or work on the Day of Atonement, and it was only one day. I can’t imagine what it would be like to fast all day and to go about one’s regular schedule at the same time, so I’m certainly sympathetic to the difficulties they face this month.
When we got back from lunch, the girls were waiting at the classroom door. They came into the room and immediately asked if they could go pray. “If we don’t pray while we’re fasting,” one girl explained, “it doesn’t count.”
I looked at them quizzically: “Why didn’t you pray while you were in the media center during lunch?”
“It was too early,” another of the girls explained.
The skeptic in me wondered if they will start asking questions at some point. Would a truly good god be so upset that you prayed a few minutes early? Would a fair god be obsessed with females’ modesty in clothing while ignoring males’ modesty? Would a wise god really be all that worried about what animal you eat? These were the same kind of questions I asked myself years ago, and when I dallied in Catholicism a few years ago, I didn’t find resolution to these issues; I just temporarily stopped thinking about them. But once they’re there…