Sorrow, Fear Cast Cloud on Ramadan : Religion: Muslims celebrating the holy month here find it difficult without relatives. Others say the daily fasts have a new meaning.

The tears came when Lubna Nashashibi recalled the thunderous cannon that would signal the end of the day’s fast during Ramadan in Kuwait.

After sunset, family and friends would gather together, swapping stories over a hearty, Thanksgiving-style feast. Children were allowed to stay up past their bedtime, sipping on a special concoction of peach-flavored juice.

“My sister and I were watching television, and we started crying thinking about the good old days and what it was like,” Nashashibi, 31, said recently. “It’s not easy.”

This year, the Islamic holy month known as Ramadan comes on the heels of the Gulf War at a time when there is little cause for celebration in the Muslim community. Many people have not heard from relatives who are missing in Kuwait and Iraq. Untold numbers of innocent men, women and children have been killed. And, for the survivors, the suffering is just beginning.

“I have all my aunts, uncles and cousins still over there,” said Nashashibi, who moved to Anaheim from Kuwait three years ago. “I’m thinking, they’re there and they can’t even get any food and water. As a religious family, I know they are fasting now, but what happens after that?”

Both of her parents, Palestinians living in Kuwait, became stranded in the United States when the Gulf War broke out. By a stroke of luck, she said, they had come to Anaheim for the birth of her second child when Saddam Hussein marched his troops into Kuwait.

She and her husband, Tareef, are among about 20,000 Muslims living in Orange County, many of whom are observing the rituals of Ramadan. The Islamic holiday, marking the month when the Koran, Islam’s holy book, was revealed to the prophet Mohammed, is a time of religious renewal, self-discipline and charity.

It falls during the ninth month of the lunar year--consequently at different times on the Gregorian calender. For each day of the month, devout Muslims abstain from food, alcohol and other pleasures from dawn until sunset. Ramadan ends April 16 with a prayer and a feast. Traditionally, the holiday has been a time for celebrating good health and prosperity with family and friends. But this year, there is an atmosphere of mourning and a growing sense of dread about the future in the Middle East.

“Thousands of people have been killed and millions and millions are suffering from the destruction of the land and the environment,” said Muzammil H. Siddiqi, the spiritual leader for the Muslim community in Orange County. “Some people have some satisfaction that Kuwait is liberated, but at what cost?”

While many Americans are celebrating the safe return of their loved ones from the Gulf, caught up in the euphoria surrounding a U.S. military victory, the Nashashibis are anguished by daily news reports of the slaughter of Palestinians living in Kuwait.

According to U.S. and international human rights officials, the bodies of about 30 people have been found tortured or shot to death, and many more are feared dead in reprisals against suspected collaborators by Kuwaiti military and resistance forces. The Palestinians are being targeted primarily because of the PLO leadership’s support of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein during the war.

As long as such human rights abuses continue, the Nashashibis say, the war is far from over.

“To us it isn’t over because they are still killing our people,” said Tareef Nashashibi, 33, a general contractor. “There is a sense of despair in our whole community, for Muslims and Christians.”

He is spending Ramadan organizing a nationwide letter-writing campaign to draw attention to the plight of the Palestinians who remain in Kuwait. According to official estimates, the country’s once-flourishing Palestinian population is now believed to be less than half of the 350,000 that it numbered before the war.

For Nashashibi, the images of destruction and suffering that flash across his television every night are difficult to watch.

“What’s happening now is what happened in Lebanon with the indiscriminate massacring of Palestinians,” he said. “I watched the news one night, and I got so depressed, I sat down at the computer and decided to do something.”

He has transformed his kitchen into an office, generating hundreds of letters to the President, senators, congressman and anyone else he can think of, urging them to use their influence to stop the killing in Kuwait.

“My prime objective is to show the world what’s happening to my people,” he said. “I’m not sure what it will accomplish, but at least I feel like I’m doing something.”