Azanta Thakur (Sargent’20) prays before breaking her Ramadan fast at her Florida home. Photo courtesy of Azanta Thakur

Student Life

Observing Ramadan Remotely, without Campus Community

BU Muslim students plumb the holy month’s lessons for these difficult days

With her family longtime residents of nearby Malden, Mass., Aya Zeabi anticipated observing Ramadan, falling April 23 to May 23 this year, both with BU friends and at home. Her parents have hosted or attended dinners to break the holy month’s daily fast “for as long as I can remember,” Zeabi (Sargent’20) says. ”Half the month, we didn’t even cook, because we were invited to dinner elsewhere.” Plus, there were the community iftars (fast-breaking meals) and other events hosted by the Islamic Society of Boston University (ISBU).

Of course, Ramadan is turning out to be quite different this year. Along with her campus peers, Zeabi lost her collegiate community when the COVID-19 pandemic required students to move home. She also works as a communications coordinator at Massachusetts General Hospital, where her floor has COVID-19 patients. She dreads bringing home the virus to her folks or her 18-month-old sister. Taking precautions has kept her family healthy; meanwhile, working 12-hour shifts ending at 7 or 11 at night makes it hard to break her fast.

“It’s difficult to get away from the craziness and have a meal,” she says. “Normally I end up just drinking some water and eating an energy bar to keep me going till I can go home and have a good meal. I also get more tired during the day when I am fasting, but it’s manageable.”

Ramadan has become the third celebration of the Abrahamic faiths, after Passover and Easter, to be upended by social distancing and bans on congregating, forcing the faithful to adjust their accustomed rituals of worship—and to plumb this sacred time for spiritual insights for coping with the pandemic.

Revered by Muslims as the time when the Prophet Muhammad received the revealed Koran, Ramadan has been robbed by the coronavirus of traditions beloved by students, like bringing home-cooked food door-to-door for Faraz Zaidi (CAS’21) to help Muslim residents in his Queens, N.Y., apartment building end their fast. Zaidi enjoyed sharing his home practices with BU friends, and he helped organize last year’s campus observances, from iftars to taraweeh (night prayers) for them.

“Usually during the night the Koran was revealed, known as Laylatul Qadr, Muslims stay up the entire night together, joining in special prayers and supplications in synchrony,” he says. “This was one of my favorite parts of Ramadan, as it helped me feel especially spiritually uplifted, but unfortunately, that also will not happen this year.” 

For other students, even online iftars together are out; scattered to different time zones, they break their fast at different hours, depending on when sundown is where they live, says Azanta Thakur (Sargent’20), ISBU president. “Plus, eating dinner over Zoom can be a little awkward.”

Yet she and others are plumbing Ramadan’s spiritual insights to cope with the straitjacket the pandemic has imposed on their religious life, and life in general. Fasting, Muslims believe, activates the Koranic insight that self-denial heightens awareness of God, while also enabling empathy for the needy. “Fasting isn’t just about abstaining from food and water from sunrise to sunset,” says Thakur. “It’s about taking away worldly desires, including sexual relations, to focus on your faith completely and your relationship to God.

“Perhaps this pandemic will give us all a chance to walk away, after these 30 days, closer to our religion and our faith than ever—and that will be completely worth it,” she says. “I’m still grateful that I have the ability to spend time with my family at home in Florida and that we have the ability to set food on the table every night. I’m still connecting with my friends every evening or afternoon and even connecting with friends I haven’t spoken to since I was in high school.”

“Many people have experienced suffering, grief, and loss amidst this pandemic,” says Nada Shalash (CAS’21), ISBU incoming vice president, “and it is more important now than ever to be compassionate and be there for others, in the true spirit of Ramadan. We really are all in this together.”

Shalash has participated in her New Jersey mosque’s live-streaming of Koran recitation and spiritually focused webinars. “This situation in many ways has actually brought us closer together, even though we are physically apart,” she says. “People are trying to stay connected and be there for each other, especially during Ramadan, which is really heartwarming to see.”

“This is the first time we are all forced to observe Ramadan in solitude,” says Reem Shaikh, BU’s Muslim chaplain. “This gives us the opportunity to focus solely on the worship of God and our connection with Him without any distractions.”

As fasting reminds Muslims not to take their blessings for granted, Shaikh says, “this pandemic has helped us understand the power of God, and how we should never take our realities for granted. 

“As for illnesses and death, we believe that difficulties in life are a natural part of life to test our faith and patience, and we are meant to trust God’s process. Ramadan allows us to strengthen our spirituality and build our connection with God, which helps build our trust in Him.” 

Zeabi has undergone a personal change this Ramadan as she juggles her busy hospital job. An obsessive planner who has always scheduled herself to the last minute, the pandemic has taught her to slow down.

“I realized that I don’t want to go through life looking at my calendar,” she says. “I just want to live in the moment, enjoy my friends, my family, the good times, and all the memories because this life is not guaranteed and anything can happen.