We’re excited to be wrapping up our Ramadan hiatus. We hope you had an uplifting month and a joyous Eid al-Fitr!
Al-hamdu lillah wa shukr lillah, this year was exceptional for me and my family. We took some extra time off and spent the holiday connecting with our local community at an amusement park before heading out for some time in the Amish countryside. It was a nice balance between urban entertainment and rural refreshment. It was a much better experience than the Eid of my youth.
I remember celebrating Eid growing up, although I’m not sure celebration is the right word.
It was drudgery. In fact, Eid sucked.
First, I had to get up way too early. I remember my parents being stressed getting us into our clothes and out the door in time to fall in with hordes of strangers converging on some baseball field or airplane hangar. The parking was horrible. We had to take off our shoes and put them in bags to carry around. I was getting bumped and jostled trying to keep up with my relatives so that I didn’t end up hopelessly lost amidst a sea of overly-perfumed zealots. The audio set-up was abominable, either completely inaudible, shrieking with feedback, or echoing off every surface to become an unrecognizable cacophony of quavering vocalizations. It was near impossible to take anything positive away from the sermon, so urgent was the desire to get up and not be there.
And always at the end of it all, the consolation donut.
If we were lucky enough to have held onto our shoes, our next task was to find our car and make our way out of the chaotic parking lot with enough limbs intact to try and have some fun with the rest of our day.
Those were my childhood memories. Things got better by the time I was a parent. Our collective frustration had inspired us to set up community picnics and other alternatives to the stadium prayer. We had post-prayer events planned well in advance and often several weekends into the future that allowed for a number of options, carnivals and amusement parks being popular choices. That’s more or less where we are now, and it’s not a bad place to be, al-hamdu lillah.
But we think we can do better. We enjoy the thrill of a roller coaster as much as anyone, but we want to see Muslims take their holidays into the wilderness. Instead of the the mass urban convergence that typifies our merrymaking, why not an orchestrated diaspora into the wild?
It makes sense given our tradition of sighting the new moon to mark the holiday. In order to give ourselves the best chance of a lunar viewing, we head into the surrounding hillsides and spread out across the often hazy coastlines. Our chances might be just as good from our rooftops or a trip to the local high-rise, but something about that feels less than ideal.
For the last few years Dust and Tribe has invited our community outside for Eid al-Adha. We’ve offered our prayers beneath the redwoods of Northern California and the rainy canopy of the Blue Ridge Parkway. The commemoration is intimate, memorable, and entirely in line with the larger work of inaugurating an American Islamic holiday tradition.
This year we’re taking the initiative even further and inviting you to join us for a weekend of white-water rafting to honor the Festival of Sacrifice. Rafting is a beautiful platform to internalize the notion of “going with the flow” through lived experience. Families pull together through the teamwork required to safely navigate the rapids. More than anything, it’s an outrageously fun time in the embrace of wild nature and we say that is exactly what an Islamic holiday should be about.
Make sure you and your family sign up here before spots run out.
And if you’ve got Eid memories and ideas to share, please post them in the comments below!
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