As Muslims in Kansas City emerge from holy month, focus remains on global suffering

Eid al-Fitr, the festival of the breaking of the fast, has always been a time of celebration for Muslims around the world.

This year, the beginning of Ramadan — April 12 to May 12 — was filled with hope. Many Muslims in the Kansas City area were returning to mosques for nightly prayers after a year of the pandemic shutting down community gatherings, including during last year’s Ramadan.

“Everyone was joyous — seeing one another, praying by one another, staying up the night with one another,” Ammer Ahmad, 24, said.

But as Ahmad prepared for Eid — a celebration that began Wednesday night, marking the end of fasting — his heart was heavy, struggling with the joy of the holiday on one hand and the sorrow of knowing that many Muslims around the world are suffering immensely on the other.

“It’s hard to do so, thinking that there are other people that are waking up to the realization that they have no parents anymore or they lost everything they had,” Ahmad said Thursday morning as he drove to meet his family for breakfast.

He recited a core principle of Islam: if one brother or sister is in pain, the whole community feels it.

“You can’t just ignore it,” he said. “You have to address it.”

Over the last week he’s watched footage out of a neighborhood in East Jerusalem where the Israeli government is threatening to forcibly expel several Palestinian families from their homes. He sees images from Gaza, where in recent days, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has re-erupted in violence. Nearly 200 people, including almost 60 children, have been killed in Gaza by Israeli forces. Ten Israeli civilians, as well as two soldiers, were killed by missiles launched by Hamas.

On Saturday, a few hundred people gathered in Kansas City to show support for Palestine. The march coincided with the 73rd anniversary of the Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” when almost 800,000 Palestinians were evicted from their homes as part of the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. As a result, the majority of the Palestinian people became permanently displaced.

Ahmad, who is Palestinian American, grew up in Jordan and has distant relatives in the area of Ramallah, in the West Bank.

It’s not just Palestinians suffering, he said. There are the Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic minority, victims of an ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing by the Chinese government. And Muslims in India, where COVID-19 has taken deadly hold.

It’s humbling, Ahmad said, feeling more appreciative of his loved ones, a home and basic necessities.

He’s doing what he can to help from his Kansas City home. He’s trying to raise awareness and money to help those in need overseas.

“It’s a very passive type of assistance and that leaves many of us feeling bad,” he said. “Why can’t we do more?”

COVID-19 worries back home

“There was a period a few weeks ago, during Ramadan, where it seemed that we were getting calls every day hearing about someone else who had COVID, someone else who had been hospitalized,” said Sameena Hameed, who has extended family in India, where 4,120 died of the infection on Wednesday alone.

Hameed, a 21-year-old medical student studying at UMKC, said it was unsettling to see the fear on her mother’s face, thinking of her family and childhood friends back home in India.

“It was very stressful, especially in a time like Ramadan, to be so worried,” Hameed said, noting that while mosques were closed last Ramadan in the U.S., the worst surge hadn’t yet hit the U.S. or India. “This time around it’s a lot worse, especially with those new variants.”

COVID-19 aside, she said many members of the Muslim community have been concerned for family in other parts of the world — the Palestinian community in the Middle East; the fighting and famine in Yemen.

In Kansas City, she worries about keeping everyone safe. Islamophobia remains. And there’s the threat of new virus variants spreading.

“Now our fears are that we might be able to harm our community by being with our community, and so that adds a different layer of fear,” Hameed said.

The Muslim Student Association at UMKC, of which Hameed is a member, recently had a group iftar — or meal breaking the fast — at Loose Park.

As she helped pass out food, Hameed looked down the line of student faces and felt a little emotional, she said.

She thought of the community and safe space taken from the new Muslim students, who were being introduced to the student associations months late, thanks to COVID. She thought of what an important role the student Muslim community has played in her life.

Her world felt so small during the pandemic, Hameed said. Now it’s opening up again, even if all of the world has not.

Finding community in a pandemic

Last fall, a group of people mostly in their 20s and 30s created a group called KC Muslim Young Professionals.

The organization was spurred by “an acute sense of lack of community,” said Zoya Khan, 24, of Overland Park. “The isolation was really starting to kick in for a lot of us.”

While the majority of their meetings have been over Zoom during the pandemic, Khan said they’ve focused on the concept of “ummah,” which means “community” in Arabic.

Many of them grew up in America as part of a minority religious group that has been under “some intense stress in these past few years,” Khan said, so they prioritize checking in with each other — especially now.

“For me, community is primary in my relationship with faith,” she said. “And so I started to feel that very quickly in my faith relationships when I didn’t have that community support.”

They organized socially-distanced volunteer opportunities, helping at local food pantries and gathering care packages during Ramadan, noticing an uptick in Muslim families requesting help during the holy month.

“Every day, someone who’s mindful of the world around them can’t move through space without being consciously aware of what’s happening around them as well, from racial disparities to social-economic disparities to health disparities,” Khan said.

Despite wanting badly for mosques to return to pre-pandemic norms, she stays grounded by an “unwavering” desire to look out for others.

Mosques re-open

Though the Islamic Center of Johnson County is now open again, things are not yet quite back to normal.

Before the pandemic, there were times Syed Hammad Hussain could hear the heartbeat of the person standing beside him in prayer.

Now they’re separated by six feet of air.

“That feeling of touch, that feeling of unity within the prayer space is really missing right now,” said Hussain, 21, a University of Kansas student from Overland Park.

People are eager to get back to normal, but Hussain acknowledges that will take more community members being vaccinated.

Hussain, who helped launch the mosque’s livestream services when the pandemic hit, stood outside the center last Saturday night ahead of Eid, greeting people showing up in person for evening prayers known as taraweeh.

It’s thrilling to have so many in attendance again, Hussain said. He anticipated they would fill up Saturday night, and they did.

Muslims pray on the evening of Saturday, May 8, at the Islamic Center of Johnson County during Ramadan in Overland Park. Safety procedures including social distancing and temperature checks were in place. The event was not held last year due to the pandemic.
Muslims pray on the evening of Saturday, May 8, at the Islamic Center of Johnson County during Ramadan in Overland Park. Safety procedures including social distancing and temperature checks were in place. The event was not held last year due to the pandemic.

People streamed in with colorful prayer rugs tucked under their arms, first stopping at a touch-free thermometer that beeped with each newcomer.

At 9:55 p.m., there was a knock at the side door; half a dozen people stood on the other side of the window.

“I’m sorry, we are full,” one volunteer said.

Prayers began just before 10 p.m. The main floor, which normally holds 600 men, was filled with only 200 Saturday night. About 150 women prayed upstairs, and downstairs, about 250 men and women prayed in a split room. They all faced Mecca.

A spot behind the building served as an overflow area, and a place for those not yet comfortable praying indoors. Men lined up between the walls of the mosque and the playground fence as a speaker transmitted the Imam’s words. The women were fanned out behind them. Kids played nearby.

Others prayed next to their cars, unfurling their rugs in the parking lot. Off duty police officers walked around the perimeter, a reminder of the 2019 massacres at two mosques in New Zealand that led the Johnson County center to hire extra security.

But many people still stay home to pray, Hussain said, adding that coronavirus guidelines have pushed more families to lead prayer together in small groups at home. In recent days, national and local governments have begun rolling back pandemic restrictions, no longer requiring vaccinated people to wear face masks in most settings.

Family iftar

It was just after 8 p.m. on the 24th day of Ramadan. Samosas sizzled in a pan of popping oil as Samiha Noman, 41, handed her son a plate of fried food to take to the owners of a Quick Trip near the Noman’s Overland Park home.

Across the kitchen her daughter, who is almost 11, mixed milk with Rooh Afze, a traditional rose water syrup from Pakistan.

After filling up on potato pakora and meat-filled patties, the family made their way to the basement. A bowl of watermelon, a reminder of Noman’s childhood iftars in Kuwait, sat untouched on the table. The kids were too full.

Had they gone to the mosque to pray that evening, Noman would have prayed from the car with her daughter, who is still too young to enter the mosque under current coronavirus restrictions. Her husband and their sons could have gone inside, but they’d still be six feet apart.

At home, they can be close. Their sons, ages 19, 17 and 15, stood shoulder-to-shoulder behind their father. Noman and their daughter prayed right behind them.

When a community-focused holy month comes and you’re hit by a pandemic, “you appreciate all of those things, because now you don’t have it,” said Noman, a pediatric respiratory therapist in Kansas City — the prayers with others; the community meals.

She has seen the suffering. Lost jobs. Sick loved ones. The increase in young people coming to her hospital after failed suicide attempts.

A friend of her father’s was put on a ventilator for 10 days. A parent on her son’s soccer team was hospitalized.

The Nomans hear stories from Pakistan, where both of their ancestors are from. Fears of oxygen shortages, and having to choose who gets treatment.

While Noman laments that the Islamic center isn’t fully open again yet, she thinks of the Muslims in India and knows it could be much worse.

“Yes, my normal is different, but at least we still have some normalcy,” she said.

In the coming days, they would go back to the mosque for Eid prayers for the first time as a family since the pandemic began. After, they planned to have an outdoor picnic with friends to celebrate.

But until then, they remained in the basement — praying.

“Salaam alaikum,” her husband, Mohammah Noman, said. Peace be upon you.

After they finished praying, he asked his daughter what she prayed for.

“I prayed for everybody to be OK,” she said. “I always do.”