anti-muslim violence during ramadan
This morning I woke up and saw the news about Al-Aqsa, about the Israeli forces that came through during Jummah prayer, while people were praying. This happened during the month of Ramadan, which is the holiest month of the year for Muslim people, during Jummah prayer, which is the holiest prayer in the week. Seeing the images of the IDF coming through, with guns and shields, while people are literally on their knees in prayer, is heartbreaking and devastating. It’s also not new: Al-Aqsa, which is one of the most important mosques and holy sites in Islam, is targeted every year, every Ramadan.
Imagine: every single year, Palestinian Muslims are attacked for praying at Al-Aqsa. Every year those images are spread. And every year, the international community does nothing about it.
I remember, nearly twelve years ago, being in Palestine at the Al-Aqsa mosque. I remember how holy it felt to be near that gold dome, how much I learned from being in Palestine and seeing the ways that Palestinian people were treated in comparison to Israeli people, the separate roads for Israeli and Palestinian people, and by my own frightening encounters with being detained and questioned by IDF at the borders, and when I was pulled over at checkpoints and worried about something happening to the Palestinian family I was staying with. To have to constantly live in a heightened state of fear and hyper-vigilance, to never fully feel like you can relax, to fear at any moment that something might happen to you or loved ones— including a Mosque being attacked by the State during prayer time.
Earlier this week, in India, Muslim communities were brutally attacked on Ram Navami, which speaks to every increasing violence against Muslims in India during the rise of right-winged Hindu Nationalism. How quickly this day turned into violence against Muslim people—including mosques being attacked, buildings being set on fire, and physical assaults on Muslim people and communities.
The violence against Muslim people in India has a long and complicated history, but can be traced to the creation of India as a nation-state in the aftermath of the 1947 Partition, which created India and (at the time) East and West Pakistan—now Pakistan and Bangladesh. At the time, leaders were citing the “two-state solution” in Palestine as a reference point for the creation of Pakistan and India, where Pakistan would be a home for Muslim people and India would be a home for Hindu people. Partition was one of the biggest refugee and genocidal crisis of the century, resulting in 14 million refugees and 2-3 million people murdered in the span of a few months due to the religious-based retributive genocides and progroms that occurred. This is a very complicated history, built with so many factors: caste, religion, gender, indigeneity, power and land grabs. But for the sake of this newsletter, this is a very simplified abbreviation of the history in large sweeping strokes, for context.
Growing up in the West, I was always taught that the end of colonization in the Indian subcontinent was nonviolent, led by Gandhi. But, the generational pain in my own body and my family’s stories didn’t line up with that—my mom (who died when I was very young) and all her siblings were born in Kashmir before Partition. In my own body I could hear the silences of what wasn’t being said, and the way that the West tried to re-write us; how the narrative of non-violence served a myth that benefited them.
How could 14 million people being displaced and 2-3 million people being murdered be considered non-violent? How could Cyril Radcliffe, the British official who had never previously been to South Asia, carving up a map to create new countries, not be violent? How could the British mass-leaving South Asia after they realized the mess that they created, and how many people were going to die, not be violent?
It's what we know: because violence is only counted as violence when it’s against white people. Or when white people can talk about it to justify how uncivilized people of color are.
Right now, in both Palestine and in India, what we see in the attacks against Muslim people, not only as an attack on Muslimness, but as an attack on belonging. The want from the state and from right-wing movements to remove Muslims from both India and Palestine, to erase them, to say—you are not allowed to stay here anymore, even though you have stayed and been here for generations. You do not belong. And if you chose to stay, we will continue to try and break you, to show you that you don’t belong, that you will not be safe, that this land could never be yours.
I am so mad. Even writing this is so hard right now, I can feel myself shaking. How easily these things are swept under the rug, how easily a nationalistic narrative wins out at the expense of marginalized Muslim people globally. And to see this happening during Ramadan; to step into this month knowing that it would probably happen; and then to see most people going about their lives like everything is completely normal.
Forgive me for not being able to write something more articulate or hopeful, but I am so angry. Witnessing this violence over and over, year after year, moment after moment, really robs me of my words. It robs my body of so many things I don’t yet have words for. All I have right now is my grief. Just my knowledge that so many people don’t even know what’s going on, or else maybe saw a brief clip of it on Instagram or Twitter and then moved on about their days. But Muslim people are being murdered and attacked constantly across the globe, and then being denied their right to land, agency, and the ability to commune with Allah.
As most marginalized people know, seeing the repeated violence against your people globally, over and over again, year after year, is horrific. It brings on a deep guttural grief, and anger that is so multi-faceted and hard to hold in the body. But it also comes from love: from love of people, from the knowledge of how unjust this is, and from the inability to contain that silence.