Worry About Missing Relatives Clouds Ramadan

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 feast. Children were allowed to stay up past their bedtime, sipping 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 shortly after the Persian Gulf War and at a time when there is little cause for celebration in the Muslim community, estimated to number more than 300,000 in Southern California. 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, with her husband, Tareef, 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 eight months ago for the birth of her second child when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein marched his troops into Kuwait.

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.

Don Bustany, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said that, despite the suffering caused by the war, the holiday is continuing as usual because “Islam is much larger than the war in the Persian Gulf.”

At Los Angeles’ Islamic Center, spokesman Iffa Abdul Rahim said many local Muslims are striving to put the war behind them and get on with their lives. A planned trip to Mecca sponsored by the center is expected to draw 900 local worshipers, he said.

Ramadan 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 the military victory by a U.S.-led coalition of nations, the Nashashibis are anguished by daily news reports of the slaughter of Palestinians living in Kuwait. The Palestinians are being targeted primarily because of the PLO’s support of Iraq 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 fewer than half of the 350,000 that it numbered before the war.

Times staff writer Marc Lacey contributed to this story.