Reflections on Ramadan

On the first full day of Islam’s most sacred month of Ramadan, the faithful who have gathered at the Masjid Ibaadillah in South-Central Los Angeles are filled with decidedly down-to-earth questions.

If we fast from dawn to dusk during Ramadan--a duty prescribed as one of Islam’s five pillars of practice--can we use mouthwash or toothpaste to sweeten stale breath? One woman declares her love for televised wrestling matches, a man for jazz. Are those off limits, too, in keeping with dictates to fast with eyes and ears as well as mouth?

Later, one man confesses that his toughest challenge during Ramadan is to keep his thoughts pure and wandering eyes in check. “Society puts out these women who are half-naked,” he says. “Let’s face it--women are beautiful!”

The exchanges during this Ramadan discussion are blunt, joyful, spiritual, real: a reflection of the eminently human struggles that millions of Muslims around the world are undergoing during this lunar month, as they strive to contain base desires, learn self-restraint and show compassion in service to Allah, the Muslim name for God. The holy season of Ramadan began with the first glimpse of the new moon on the night of Dec. 19 and will continue for the lunar cycle.

“Ramadan is the greatest opportunity for us to get near to God,” the questioners are told by Saadiq Saafir, the imam, or religious leader, of this Jefferson Avenue mosque. “Wrestling, TV . . . all these things will prevent you from fasting. In fasting, your mind should be totally focused on Allah.”

The message is Islamic, but the style and personal stories in this mosque are home-grown American. As they should be, for Saafir and most of this congregation represent the largest face of Islam in America: that of African Americans, who are estimated to constitute more than 40% of all Muslims in the United States.

Like Muslims around the world, the faithful here perform the prescribed prostrations and prayers. They pepper their conversations with Arabic greetings and phrases, such as inshallah, or “God willing.” The women drape themselves from head to toe and sit partitioned behind the men.

And they all speak devotedly of Ramadan as an opportunity to rise above the demands of the flesh to reach the higher treasures of the soul. In doing so, they say, they rejuvenate their relationship with God.

“It’s an opportunity for me to renew my life, my spirit and oneness with the Creator as I strive to clean up my life,” says Mahasin Salih Karim, who rose at 4:30 a.m. Sunday--the first day of Ramadan--to eat a light breakfast of oatmeal, pray and read her weathered Koran before embarking on her 28th Ramadan fast.

“Fasting is the most spiritually rewarding thing I’ve done in my life,” she says.

“You feel more humble, more kind, more gentle, more fearful of God,” says Tawwab Salaam, who embraced Islam in 1960. “When you pray and fast, only good thoughts flow through your mind.”

*

But although their religious practices may be similar to those of Muslims around the world, their stories are not. Unlike many of those born into the religion or raised in Islamic countries, most African American adherents converted to the faith. The spiritual journeys they share often have traversed the tough terrain of heroin addiction and armed robbery, discrimination and disempowerment, Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam’s early message that white man was the devil.

Herbert Muhammad, for instance, made the New York streets his home at age 15, was hooked on heroin at 16 and lost his father to drink at 17. His mother was overwhelmed by the struggles of raising six children on welfare and could provide little direction. Finally, he was pushed toward Islam by his sister.

Saafir, the imam, and Ayman Abdul-Mujeeb, the assistant imam, were youthful revolutionaries of the 1960s, looking for ways to empower themselves and their people. If the political structure was dominated by whites, so too, they felt, was their childhood religion of Christianity.

“The idea of Jesus Christ as white . . . is psychologically debasing,” says Saafir. “It gives you a subconscious [feeling] that somehow, there are other people closer to him than you, and then you begin to believe it.”

Those thorny questions of race also troubled Abdul-Mujeeb’s wife, Ibtihaj. A student of Christianity at the time, she asked a white pastor: “If we’re made in God’s image, is God black?” The pastor never answered, she says, and she abandoned the church.

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, Muhammad, Saafir and the Abdul-Mujeeb couple all ended up in Nation of Islam temples, listening to the fiery teachings of Elijah Muhammad. The leader of the nationalist black Muslim movement declared that God was black and the devil was white. He promised that Allah would bring them friendship, new cars, nice homes.

Ibtihaj Abdul-Mujeeb says she was suspicious of the message, having been taught that you can’t get something for nothing, but the men found it electrifying.

“I was emotionally charged,” Ayman Abdul-Mujeeb says.

As the converts embraced the African American Muslim movement, it underwent a dramatic change. In 1975, when Elijah Muhammad’s son, Warith Deen, replaced his father, he prodded black Muslims away from nationalism toward universal Islam, based on the tenets of the Koran and the example of the Prophet Muhammad. The Nation of Islam, headed by Louis Farrakhan, still maintains much of Elijah Muhammad’s message, but most African American Muslims today are affiliated not with it, but with orthodox Muslim groups.

The change prompted new converts, such as 81-year-old Euvia McNeese, to flock to the faith. McNeese says she never believed that Jesus was God, but resisted converting to Islam, as her daughter had, because of what she called Elijah Muhammad’s “talk of hatred.”

“The teaching I had was that if you love the true God, you can’t hate nobody; it doesn’t matter if your skin is white or black or blue,” says McNeese, a bird-like wisp of a woman soft of voice but steely in conviction.

Those turbulent times are behind them; on this Ramadan day, the Islamic message of peace, mercy and compassion fills the masjid, Arabic for mosque. Throughout the day, nearly 100 people will gather here, dropping in to pray, socialize, study. Two people convert, declaring before the crowd: “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger.”

Saafir delivers an impromptu sermon of spiritual passion and stinging social commentary. He takes on Santa Claus as a blasphemous hoax that misleads children into thinking this mythical character is omniscient like God, Americans for spending money they don’t have on Christmas presents they probably don’t need, President Clinton for his post-impeachment speech decrying the “politics of self-destruction” just days after condemning innocent Iraqis to death in U.S.-led bombing raids.

One moment, Ayman Abdul-Mujeeb is calling the faithful to prayer in hauntingly beautiful song; another moment, he is helping a brother struggling to read his Koran in Arabic. “I want you to stick with this, because you can do it,” he tells the young convert.

Cheers fill the masjid when one woman gives a rousing pep talk about fund-raising efforts to fulfill the congregation’s dream of a new mosque to replace this aging storefront, which has housed the faithful since 1986.

On the women’s side of the masjid, the sisters talk about family and faith. Safiyyah Muhammad, 21, pats her pregnant belly and says Islam led her to her most immediate goals: to be a good mother and wife to her husband, Herbert. Such duties are spelled out in the Koran, she says, along with detailed instructions on everything from prayer to women’s rights.

“I had never run into any religion where the criteria were set out so strictly; I liked the direction,” says Muhammad, who converted last year after, she says, Christianity failed to answer her burning questions about the nature of Jesus and what she viewed as biblical inconsistencies.

“I was getting tired of going out and hanging out with people who woke up and wanted to party, smoke weed and drink.”

By 4:45 p.m., the sun is sinking and dusk is settling in. The faithful prepare to break their 12-hour fast. With dates and water in hand, they pray:

“O Allah, for you do I fast.

“And with your sustenance do I break my fast.”