by Elly Fishman
“My grandma always told me I have to learn to stand up on my own,” says Shahina. “She said I shouldn’t ever be dependent on a man.”
“We’re going to work and make our own money,” says Aishah. “We’re going to travel.”
“To Burma, Paris, Singapore, and the pyramids in Greece.”
“You mean Egypt,” laughs Aishah. “We are going to make our own future.”
Ramadan
Dear colleagues, as most of you are aware, the holiday of Ramadan starts this week … I’m writing to explain how this tradition affects the school day and offer my services in helping with difficult conversations that may arise. These students fast from sun-up to sundown, which means they wake up around 4 a.m. and do not eat dinner until about 9 p.m. Many students will be tired or crabby. The library is open during all lunch periods as an alternative to the cafeteria. For example, gym class … Given that these students cannot drink water, it might be thoughtful to send them to the library as an alternative to a two-mile run assignment. If you find an obstinate student, or you feel a student is using Ramadan as an excuse for inappropriate behavior, please do not hesitate to contact me. And I will speak to them.—Sarah M. Quintenz
“I can’t go on this field trip because I’m going to be too hungry,” Abdul Karim, a Syrian senior, complains, referring to a school visit to a food pantry. He’s trailed by a pack of boys, most of whom appear puffy eyed and sleep deprived. They’re certainly tired, but they’re also playing it up. One by one they slam their bodies into the chairs around the center table in the ELL “womb.” Abdul Karim, wearing a gray hoodie over a Sullivan T-shirt, sits in the corner beneath the window. Another tilts his chair toward the door. He wears a backward baseball cap, white shorts, and an empty bag of Bold Party flavor Chex Mix over his left hand like a mitten. “Tomorrow is the first day of Ramadan, I’m going to be so hungry.”
“That’s bullshit,” Danny Rizk replies, strategically placing himself in front of a large standing fan. “A field trip like this is the actual point of Ramadan.”
In Chicago, Ramadan comes with the arrival of late-spring humidity. The city’s cool spring can pass quickly into summer. The streets are again lush and green. Sparrows and pigeons can be heard through the Sullivan windows, which remain open throughout the school day to let air into the stuffy hallways. In the library, students have traded their heavy winter coats for lighter fair. Girls who sported thick hijabs are now covered in pastel cottons. While March temperatures imbued the Sullivan hallways with a spring giddiness, the mugginess of May has dampened it.
“But I’m going to be so tired, man,” Abdul Karim persists. “Why they making us do this during Ramadan?”
Sarah enters the room. She’s heard enough to jump in without hesitation. “Nobody helped you in your home country? Nobody helped you in America? No one ever helped you?”
Abdul Karim laughs. “No …” he says sheepishly.
“Boy, I’m going to …” Sarah cuts herself off. “We can’t go feed starving people tomorrow because we’re going to be starving because it’s the first day of Ramadan? Come on.”
“A student told me that we practice Ramadan because God wants you to know how to live as people without much food and water,” adds Danny.
“Yeah, that’s true,” Abdul Karim nods.
“So, shouldn’t helping people in that state during Ramadan make even more sense?”
“I understand, but tonight I have work at 7 p.m.,” retorts Abdul Karim, who works at Cairo Nights, a neighborhood hookah bar. “I’m going to finish at 5 a.m. tomorrow. I’m going to sleep two hours and then come to school. I can’t go out in the sun after fasting and working.”
“So then say that,” says Sarah. “Say, ‘I’m not going on the field trip … ’”
“Okay, yes,” Abdul Karim responds, cutting Sarah off.
“Stop interrupting,” she demands. “What you’re teaching people is that you can’t feed the homeless because of Ramadan. That sounds bad, man.”
“Yes, okay, I understand.”
“How am I supposed to quit smoking with shit like this?” Sarah says as she rises from her chair. She pats her jacket pocket for cigarettes. The box is there. “Don’t follow me,” she snipes over her shoulder as she heads toward the school parking lot.
On Wednesday, the day after the field trip to feed Chicago’s homeless, Abdul Karim is back in the ELL office, trailed by his friends. They break into laughter as soon as they enter the room. Two of the boys explained they’ve broken their fast because they gawked at a classmate’s breasts.
“The first look is halal,” one explains to Sarah, referring to an action considered permissible in Islamic practice, “but the second look? Haram.”
The idea makes Sarah burst into laughter. “I’m going to put that on a T-shirt. It doesn’t matter what language you speak or culture. Boys are boys.”
Sarah has spent two years trying to help the Syrian seniors, one of a recent wave of Muslim students to Sullivan, negotiate boundaries between typical public school experiences in Chicago and the religious and cultural expectations they’re accustomed to. For many refugee students, attending Sullivan is their first exposure to secular education. In the United States, sticking to a secular curriculum is mandated by law. Yet, for the traumatized groups who land at Sullivan’s doors, religion can provide a powerful sense of comfort and security. And conflict with their religious practice can be deeply unsettling. At Sullivan, the times for two of the five daily Muslim prayers are hard to miss. A chorus from students’ mobile phones sounds throughout the school announcing the call to salat. That’s why, after fielding numerous requests from Muslim students asking to leave class for prayer, Sarah created two spaces for just that. The girls were offered a second-floor classroom and the boys a small room just off the school’s main auditorium. They could pray, but only if given a hall pass. Sarah often reminds students not to take advantage of the compromise.
But for Abdul Karim, who comes from a conservative Muslim family, no change inside Sullivan can recreate what he’s lost since forced out of Homs in 2012. On Thursday, the boy returns to the ELL office. He looks tired, the circles under his eyes a soft shade of maroon. There’s no levity in his voice today.
“I don’t really feel Ramadan anymore,” he says to no one in particular. “I just don’t really feel it like I did before.”
In Homs, the thirty days of Ramadan were Abdul Karim’s favorite part of the year. It was when he felt closest to God. He began and ended his day at the mosque, rarely looking at the clock. The adhan, sung out over microphones across the neighborhood, marked the passing hours. There were four prayers between sunrise and sunset, between Abdul Karim’s first and last meal of each day.
During Ramadan, all of Homs seemed to slow and relax. The days were filled with naps and prayer, and the aromas of his mother’s cooking. She ensured that the family had a feast for the breaking of each day’s fast. Just the typical accouterment—baba ganoush, hummus, grilled flatbreads, fattoush salad—took a couple of hours to prepare. The main dishes, including mahshi, or cored eggplants, zucchini, or squash stuffed with spiced rice and minced meats; kibbeh, made from bulgur, onions, and finely ground beef; freekeh and chickpea salad; and lentil soup, consumed the rest of his mother’s day.
The iftar, or breaking of the fast, came on the heels of the fourth prayer. When it did, the entire city seemed to shut down. Businesses closed. Restaurants shuttered their blinds. Everyone stopped their days to first eat something sweet—to revive from low blood sugar—and then came the evening feast. Most nights, at least eight people gathered around Abdul Karim’s family table. Together, they began their feast with dates, a fruit eaten by the prophet Muhammad, and tamarind juice, yogurt, or erk sous, a sweet and bitter tea made from licorice root. As a boy, Abdul Karim fantasized about eating every dish spread across the table. His eyes were inevitably bigger than his stomach. He rarely finished his plate of food.
After iftar, the neighborho
od poured onto the sidewalks and streets. Fanous, Ramadan lanterns symbolizing hope, cast a yellow glow onto the dark streets. Under their light, groups—mostly men and boys—gathered to smoke hookah, play chess and cards, or challenge one another in games of pickup soccer. Abdul Karim was never without his cousins or siblings. Everyone seemed to move in unison. He felt safe. Moreover, he never felt alone.
When Abdul Karim recalls those long nights spent on the streets of Homs, they feel like another life. His first Ramadan in Chicago hit him hard. In the city, there was no call to prayer. He tried praying at the neighborhood mosque, but he found it filled with strangers, so he resigned himself to praying at home. At school, he was often tired and frustrated by the eight-hour-long school days. In Syria, he had only six classes, each of them forty-five minutes long. American school always felt long, but while he fasted school days felt more than tiring, and sometimes debilitatingly lonely. From school, he’d go directly to his job working at the hookah bar. He’d break his fast at an empty table, shoveling spoonfuls of leftovers that his mother had prepared the night before. In Homs, the entire fasting month felt like an extended meditation. But now, in Chicago, the grief of his exile runs deep.
Friday arrives. On Fridays during Ramadan, observers are expected to pray together with their community. Abdul Karim has heard that a new math teacher, himself a practicing Muslim, will lead prayer in his classroom. It’s unclear how the arrangements began. Public schools are prohibited by law from organizing religious worship for students, but students themselves have a right to organize gatherings and to pray on their own. At Sullivan, with the refugee children, no one presses the issue.
Rather than go home to pray, Abdul Karim heads to the makeshift prayer room. To clear the floor for kneeling worship, desks, still piled with calculators and backpacks, have been pushed to the front of the room, the chairs stacked around them. Below the desks, the students’ shoes, most of them sneakers, make their own haphazard piles. On the wall, a poster reads “I am me—I am okay.”
Abdul Karim removes his shoes and jacket. He takes a small yellow rug from the corner, one from a colorful stack donated to the school. He lays the rug between two of his classmates. Their rugs face toward the qibla, the direction all Muslims face during prayer in order to face the Holy Mosque of Mecca. Abdul Karim uses “Qibla Compass,” a phone application, to determine the correct orientation. To Abdul Karim’s left, stands a Rohingya sophomore and to his right, a Somali junior. They stand in a line just a few feet behind the math teacher who leads the group.
The prayer begins. The boys raise their hands and say, in unison, “Allahu Akbar” or “God is great.” They place their left hands over their right and bow forward as the teacher leads. He then turns around to face the boys and offers his preaching or “khutbah.”
“We’re now a few days into Ramadan,” he begins. “If you’re not feeling anything yet, it’s not really a concern. It takes time. Eventually, we should feel a different type of spiritual sense within ourselves. And if you don’t, that is okay.”
Just then, the three descending notes of the school announcements blast from the classroom speakers.
Coach Williams, if you’re in the building, please meet Livingston in the main entrance.
The teacher continues calmly, unfazed by the interruption. “Like I said, it takes time. Get some rest this weekend. Just keep doing your best. Keep showing up. And also, do your homework.”
The math teacher then turns back around to face the same direction as the group. He begins the recitations again.
When the prayer finishes, Abdul Karim returns his mat to the corner. Before he exits the room, he nods to a few of his classmates and encourages them to visit him at work. He grabs his backpack. It’s heavier than usual, weighed down by the provisions from his mother. He’s not sure what’s in the sealed Tupperware, but it doesn’t matter. It’s a taste of home, and Homs. When Abdul Karim arrives at Cairo Nights, he will have just under an hour remaining before he can eat. Inside the dim bar, where the walls are decorated crimson red, and the now empty tables and chairs sit waiting for hookah smokers, only the app on his phone will signal when day turns to night and he can eat. When he learns the sun has finally dipped below the horizon, Abdul Karim will recite the fourth prayer, open his sealed plastic box, and eat every last bite of the dinner his mother prepared.
Shahina and Aishah
By mid-May, Shahina has stopped showing up at Sullivan altogether. She’s determined to have her own apartment and to find a job that will pay her enough to begin saving for it. Living under her mother’s roof, Shahina believes, is no longer tenable. Earlier in the month, Shahina was hired by a small shop stuffed with cheaply made traditional Indian and Pakistani dresses and jewelry. She worked during the week for $4 an hour cleaning the storage room and restocking displays. The hours proved grueling and customers asked her one too many times what size bra she wore. Shahina quit after just one week, but she never returned to school.
Since quitting the job, Shahina spends almost every day bouncing from one neighborhood fast-food chain to another—anywhere employees won’t scold her for using their free WiFi. She’s almost always accompanied by Aishah, who now has missed nearly as many school days as Shahina.
On a foggy May morning, Shahina arrives at a strip mall Dunkin Donuts just after 10 a.m. wearing jeans and a black top. She’s taken the time to fill in her eyebrows and brush her lips with an orangey-red lip stain. She knows that the chain’s Coolattas, sweet blended coffees, will erode her perfectly lined lips, but Shahina has arrived prepared. Her lipstick is stashed in her purse.
If Shahina were at Sullivan, she’d be well into third period. Several of the tables are occupied by regulars, one of whom has collected the free papers from outside the store and spread them into a patchwork of paper across his table. Another emerges from the bathroom looking more wasted than when he entered it. Shahina stands at the counter, craning her neck up toward the illuminated menu on the wall behind the counter. She has no interest in observing Ramadan. She plans to order an Oreo-flavored Coolatta to share with Aishah when she arrives.
Aishah lives a mile from Shahina. Her family’s apartment is a larger version of a typical Chicago railroad-style unit where several small rooms jut off a long, narrow hallway. There are three bedrooms—one of which her parents often rent for additional income—and a proper kitchen. The apartment has a dining room big enough to hold a dining table that can easily sit eight, but which is almost always stacked with toilet paper, groceries, and cleaning supplies. Though Aishah has more corners to disappear to, there’s nowhere at home she feels safe. Her father, who works night shifts cleaning airplanes at O’Hare International Airport with Shahina’s stepfather, is rarely home, but when he is, the house erupts in violence. In the early hours of the morning, Aishah hears her father blame her mother for Aishah’s misbehavior followed by the sounds of slammed chairs and loud slaps.
“This is your fault,” she’d hear her father scream. “You don’t discipline your daughter.”
The fights have become more frequent in the last few months. The stress has irritated Aishah’s acid reflux, a pain so sharp she barely sleeps. When she sits awake at night, she texts Shahina. She’s the only one Aishah texts. The girls often text each other until sunrise.
The situation for Aishah has gotten so bad that she started reserving some of her salary and giving it to her mother in secret. When her mother asked her why she was giving her money, Aishah told her, “So you can leave.”
Aishah knows her mother will likely never leave her husband. Aishah, however, is dead set on getting out.
When Aishah walks through the door, she carries a backpack that holds her Jewel-Osco uniform, a makeup bag, and a cell phone charger. She doesn’t intend to return home until well after dark.
Shahina is already sitting at a high-top against the window. The table is covered in daily tabloids, almost all of which speculate about the “Royal Wedding,” or the upcoming nuptia
ls between American actress Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. Shahina pushes the papers aside and slides the Coolatta over to her friend who takes a sip. The routine is a familiar one.
The two spend the next few hours side by side, but on their phones. The only times they look up are to dissect a mutual friend’s post or snap photos of each other. One frequent topic the girls discuss is their hope for the future, almost as though articulating their dreams out loud keeps them alive.
“I heard most people in America move out when they turn eighteen,” says Shahina, turning to Aishah. “They get their own money and have their own house. That’s what I want.”
“It would be really cool if we could live together,” Aishah adds. “If we do that, we won’t feel like we’re being controlled. Last night my mom told me again that I need to marry. I felt like my head was really burning. I was so angry, I just said, ‘Don’t force me to marry. I’m giving you money. I’m giving you five hundred dollars a month to help you. Don’t tell me what to do.’”
Shahina and Aishah like to imagine the apartment they’ll rent together. In their own apartment, they would stay up late watching horror films. They might even have parties. And even if their apartment has nothing in it, they agree, it will be better than living with their parents.
By mid-morning the girls are ready to switch locations. They consider where they could go next. Shahina suggests McDonald’s, where they can each order a one-dollar soft-serve ice cream. As they walk south down Clark Street, the sidewalks are crowded with people. The sun has come out from behind the clouds and the sky is a bright blue. Standing on the sidewalk curb, the girls hear a loud boom. Two cars have crashed in the middle of the street—one T-boning the other. Both drivers emerge from their cars, one of whom falls to his knees in despair. His car is likely totaled. Shahina and Aishah link arms as they observe the scene.