Ramadan Mubarak, Comrades
For over a millennium, Muslims have used hunger as a biological reminder of the need for human solidarity during the holiday of Ramadan. That solidarity is key to building the kind of movement that can win a better world for Muslims and everyone else.
Hundreds of Muslims break their fast and offer congregational tarawih prayers in Times Square, New York City, on March 25, 2023. (Selcuk Acar / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
For over a millennium, Muslims have used hunger as a biological reminder of the need for human solidarity during the holiday of Ramadan. Nearly a quarter of the world’s population is Muslim, and many Muslims, year after year, still take up this banner every Ramadan. In the United States, there are 3.5 million Muslims, and despite decades of marginalization, Islamophobia, and state repression like Trump’s Muslim ban and intrusive surveillance, we are still practicing our religion.
Fasting during Ramadan is a collective transformative practice that insists on embodying the idea of equality. The material body, individually and collectively, feels hunger and thirst for a month; the idea that every human being deserves food and shelter becomes physically embodied. People become hungry, thirsty, exhausted, sleep deprived together as a community, and are hopefully transformed because of it. It is a consciousness-raising requirement for every able-bodied person.
It would be wrong to separate these practices from a politics of equality. The injunction to fast this month comes from the same injunction to diligently avoid any type of interest-bearing financial gains. Islam considers usury to be metaphorically the same as going against the grain of life: it’s not halal to benefit from other people’s vulnerability. In the Quran, Allah and His Messenger declare war on the usurers, affirming that fighting against unjust economic systems is a central component of being Muslim. Other economic rules for sharia-compliant Muslims involve prohibitions against overcharging, extracting rent on land that’s cultivated by someone else, and to put it simply, living without thinking of others. Fasting should be understood as part of a broader call to action to fight for the marginalized and build a more just world.
This Ramadan and every Ramadan, we Muslims should help raise consciousness to fight against the injustices that have plagued this country for hundreds of years. It’s not enough for us to complain about the world over iftar (the post-sunset meal). In Surah Ra’d, Allah says: “Verily Allah will not save a nation until they save themselves.” Islam empowers us to act to change our circumstances. We will not be deserving of divine intervention to change our condition unless we are willing to struggle for it.
Building Solidarity, Building Movements
It’s crucial that we understand the causes of anti-Muslim oppression and who is on our side. Both the Democrats and the Republicans fund the military-industrial complex, destroying the lives of millions and uprooting generations of people from their homelands. Both parties continue to provide financial and military aid to the apartheid state of Israel, and to Saudi Arabia, which is carrying out ethnic cleansing in Yemen.
Black Muslims in this United States, who make up 20-25 percent of all American Muslims, have historically been marginalized. They face racist brutality at the hands of the police as well as decades of economic disenfranchisement that have resulted in black Muslims being the poorest demographic within the Muslim community. And Muslims in the United States overall are the most socioeconomically disadvantaged faith group, with one-third of all Muslims living at or below the poverty line, and black Muslims making $30,000 less than that poverty line. More than two-thirds of Muslims in America say that they have experienced Islamophobia, according to a 2019 poll.
But most of these forms of oppression do not affect Muslims alone. We can and should seek to galvanize our communities into action and build solidarity along the way.
Malcolm X, one of the most famous American Muslims, sought to unite people into struggle after his pilgrimage to Mecca and his moving away from some elements of black nationalism. The pilgrimage was transformational to him, as he described in his account of eating from the same plate and drinking from the same cup as Muslims from all over the world. Over the course of his ideological evolution, Malcolm X realized that capitalism was a key enabler of racial oppression; this identification of capitalism as the basis for imperialist and racist oppression enabled the imagination of broad, powerful coalitions capable of resistance. Malcolm X’s life was cut brutally short, but he helped inspire radical anti-capitalist groups like the Black Panther Party and black liberation movements across the country. Following in his footsteps means organizing broad coalitions of working people to fight against capitalism and racism.
Many Muslims are doing exactly that. In New York, Muslims make up 40 percent of taxi cab drivers, a profession that has been brutalized by the gig industry’s profiteering. Driver suicides rose precipitously as a result of debt that had been accrued by taxi drivers in the city, with the average debt per driver at an astounding $550,000. Many of these drivers had taken out loans to finance purchases of taxi badges, which Uber and Lyft had made almost worthless.
In response, taxi drivers organized a massive hunger strike through the New York Taxi Workers Alliance to protest this injustice and call on the City of New York to write down their debt. They were joined in this hunger strike by Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and New York State Assembly member, who used his position in office to agitate for the movement’s demands. Along with picketing for forty-six days, taxi drivers fasted for fifteen days to win support for the agreement, which ended up providing hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to indebted taxi drivers, reducing the average debt faced by taxi drivers to $170,000 from $550,000 and applying a guarantee to repay loans that drivers default on. This was a profound victory of working-class people using their power to force concessions from haram financial institutions.
Bernie Sanders’s two presidential campaigns also sparked a massive wave of organizing in the Muslim community. In Michigan, Muslims overwhelmingly voted for Bernie in the 2016 Democratic primary, playing a crucial role in his upset victory in the state. In the 2020 primary, the Sanders campaign actively lobbied the Democratic Party to incorporate mosques as caucus sites in Iowa, which saw massively lopsided victories for Sanders, including a 115-3 blowout at the Muslim Community Organization in Des Moines.
Yet the Democratic establishment fought hard against Sanders, and it’s crucial for Muslims to recognize that the Democratic Party is not our party. Sanders captured so much momentum because he was willing to be antagonistic to the establishment and provide some level of resistance to imperialist interests. This included taking on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful pro-Israel lobby, attacking Republican and Democratic Party politicians who received backing from the group, as well as voting continuously against the National Defense Authorization Act, the yearly appropriations bill that funds the US military spending that inflicts suffering on Muslims around the world.
Sanders is in a clear minority within the Democratic Party, and it remains difficult to see a future in which working-class, anti-imperialist politics gain much strength among the Democrats. If we want a future in which candidates can run on bold anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist platforms, we have to build independent political organizations. We are starting to see organizations like this take root, such as the Socialists in Office (SIO) committee in New York and the Richmond Progressive Alliance in Richmond, California. These organizations have had some success, such as reallocating funds from police to social services in Richmond and helping to pass the most progressive New York state budget in years.
But the failures of Sanders and other DSA-endorsed politicians to consistently take principled stances on funding for the Israeli military show that it’s unlikely that any politician will be able to consistently confront imperialist interests on their own. We need to build mass movements of people who can not only vote and fundraise for left-wing politicians but also take the struggle to streets, workplaces, and schools to exert power. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, a mass antiwar movement arose in the United States that was able to mobilize massive coalitions of workers, students, black radicals, and even rebellious soldiers to protest the Vietnam War. To end support for the Israeli apartheid state and imperialist regimes all over the world, there is no substitute for building a disruptive mass movement.
Who Is on Our Side?
Understanding who is on our side can be difficult when organized forces sow division in our communities. Muslims are constantly being fed threatening material about the “LGBTQ agenda” that is supposedly destroying our families. But it is the same people who have called for invading Iraq, invading Afghanistan, funding the Israeli military, and applying a Muslim ban who are attacking LGBTQ rights.
It’s crucial that we understand why the organized right wing cares about attacking LGBTQ rights, and why these right-wingers should never be treated as allies by our community. By turning communities against each other, organized political opposition to the establishment becomes nearly impossible. This Ramadan, we should welcome members of all communities to our mosques to build ties of solidarity. If there are workers who are preparing to go on strike, invite them to an iftar. If there are formerly incarcerated people in the community, invite them to an iftar. If there are LGBTQ people in the community who have been ostracized from our communities in the past, invite them to an iftar. Solidarity is not built overnight, but has to grow over time, with intentional care and planning.
The Prophet (peace be upon him) is reported to have said: “Seek out the vulnerable for me, for you are only given provision and divine support due to your care for the vulnerable.” Our struggle on earth is simple: this Ramadan, when the stomach is empty and the mind becomes hyperaware, we can develop a new consciousness of the body that is humanity. Only through raising this consciousness can we build a mass movement that can defeat all forms of oppression.