Ramzan is simultaneously about self-denial and self-indulgence. For sehri, the pre-dawn meal, we grew up eating vermicelli noodles with milk and honey, greasy flaky paratha, eggs with turmeric and onions, chicken mince. At sunset, the iftars would be even more decadent. We started with two dates that burst in your mouth and made you realize, very suddenly, your thirst. After those two dates, so dizzy with sweetness, you almost want to stop eating. But we kept eating, of course, because iftar would be puffed rice with spiced chickpeas and potato covered in yogurt and tamarind sauce, or crispy samosas, or fluffy gram flour battered onions/spinach/eggplant, or chickpea fritters in yogurt sauce. We drank mango lassi, or rose syrup milk to cool ourselves down. We only ate these foods in Ramzan, deep-fried and greasy and glorious. They’re exactly what you want when you’ve been leading your hunger around all day.

During those days, Ramzan was in the summer, so the fasts were from 4am to 8pm. Ramzan meant something different to me then. I convinced my parents to let me start fasting in elementary school, way too early, but I loved it. It was an accomplishment, it was something to do with family, it was celebration, it was togetherness, it was ritual, it made the delirium of Eid so worth it. It was never just quite about the rewards of it all, the heaven of it all. Heaven is the part of Islam that always made the least sense to me, the part that felt the most trivial. In that way, I follow the philosophy of the Sufis, who deride the idea of a heaven that isn’t the one we make of our own hearts.

Ramzan has changed for me since moving away. I can never be the Muslim my parents want me to be, so I’m the Muslim I want to be. There are some years when I choose not to observe Ramzan, when I need all my strength with me. And then there are years like this year when I crave that emptiness. I’m tired and I’ve gone too long not feeling my own heart behind all its veils. I’ve guarded myself too well. I want to take handfuls of snow and wash myself of myself. I want to feel myself burn incandescent, a human lantern, a brief ember in the universe. I want to feel cosmically small and impossibly significant. I want to press my forehead to the ground and feel wonder so powerful I feel angry at not feeling this strongly all the time, letting this gift of a life go by without letting it ruin me. It’s a month where I take nothing for granted, and my mortality feels like something precious moving through my fingers. What am I doing with my time here? What am I doing? What do I want?

This year I’m taking zakat very seriously. It is one of the five pillars of Islam: Muslims are required every year before the end of Ramzan to give away 2.5% of their wealth to those who need it. I try to donate throughout the year regardless, but I like doing it in this month, with purpose, with prayer, with intention. It reminds me that everything I own is meant to be given away. And maybe it reminds me that I am not a good citizen of the Earth despite being Muslim, but because of it.

When you tell people about Ramzan there’s so much focus and incredulity on the physical aspects of it. No food? No water? No sex? Denying yourself in the name of religion is regarded as freak behavior, incomprehensible. And it’s true that fasting can be hard at times, but there’s a certain euphoria that comes from solidarity. For the span of this beautiful month, from one moon sighting to the next, my hunger isn’t only mine; I share it with many others. Even when I feel hungry, I feel sated in other ways, ways in which I’ve forgotten to feed myself. I have felt burdens in my life that have felt impossible to bear. This has never been one of them.

I wrote the first part of this newsletter last week and put off sending it in a fit of self-consciousness. Oh well. It is what it is. Since then, my Ramzan has changed. I’m feeling the fatigue, the sleep deprivation, the loneliness of breaking my fast and beginning my fast alone. Wonder comes to the surface more readily, but so does irritation, so does desire. I got what I wanted; the veils of my heart have been stripped. My body feels like an open door I can walk into.

Every year, I forget that Ramzan means more atrocities committed on Muslim civilians. Is this just a feeling I have, or is it a documented trend? When I tried looking it up, I instead came upon an article discussing whether Muslims (the word used was “terrorists”) were more likely to commit jihad while fasting, and this sickened me too much to keep looking. So for now, it will remain anecdotal, understudied, and easily dismissed, like many other aspects of Islamophobia.

As of writing this, it is the 14th of Ramzan, a little less than halfway through the month. The moon hangs full and luminous in the night sky. At dawn every day, I read a few pages of the Quran aloud before going back to bed. I’m out of practice. There are specific rules to recitation which differentiate it from reading everyday Arabic. It is recited melodically, like singing. The tonal texture and rhythm of recitation depends a little on personal style, a little on the tradition you have learned. I grew up hearing Somali recitation in my local mosque. I love the sound of Sudanese recitation.

Recitation is very beautiful, when done well. It takes all of my concentration to do it passingly. The order of letters dictates where in the mouth a consonant comes from. How a word is pronounced depends on the vowels of the word preceding it. Breaths can only be taken in certain parts of a verse, at the end of a phrase. To recite Quran fluidly, your mind has to be reading the next few words while your mouth is still speaking the words prior. There are people who make recitation of the Quran their entire vocation, their entire craft.

I like reciting a lot. I feel lucky that I can. I like that I have parts of this book memorized. I am not a hafiz by any means, that person who has memorized the entire Quran and become a human library, but I know those who are. I feel lucky to have a few of its pages inscribed into my heart. In high school, I read Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. At the time, I would hear stories about people burning Qurans. I remember thinking, don’t they know, even if they burned every single Quran and erased every digital copy for good measure, there are so many of us who could recite the whole thing by heart anyway? Don’t they know the first word of the Quran, uttered by an angel in the month of Ramadan 1400 years ago, was “Recite”? And so we recite. When a child finishes reading the Quran in its entirety for the first time, you throw them a big party, like it’s their coming-of-age.

I’ve been looking for clarity this month, and so far all I know that I will be a student of creation for the rest of my life, gladly. It’s said that God spoke from the mouth of the Prophet: “I was a hidden treasure. I loved to be known. Therefore, I created the creation so that I would be known.” And then in my favorite qawwali “Tum Ek Gorakh Dhanda Ho” sung by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, which is lowkey an anthem for grad school that I wish I had found earlier, he sings “You are incomprehensible! Your magnificence manifests in every atom. But my mind is bewildered by what you are. You are incomprehensible!”