When avid game enthusiast Rami Ismail tweeted an invitation to his 167,000 followers to join him in Animal Crossing for suhoor or iftar, the response was so overwhelming that he had to make a sign-up form
With Ramadan arriving as social-distancing measures remain in effect across the globe, Muslims are doing what they can to foster a sense of community in quarantine. Zoom dinners and remote prayer services have been commonplace since the early weeks of the pandemic, but Ramadan poses unique challenges. For many of the world’s 2 billion Muslims, the holy month is the most social time of the year, synonymous with large gatherings, group prayers, and community service efforts.
While Ismail is an avid game enthusiast — he’s a developer and cofounder of the Dutch independent game studio— he doesn’t typically observe Ramadan virtually. His hectic travel schedule normally sees him breaking fast with large groups in Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil, or India. “It’s always a fun, communal, celebratory experience for me,” he says. “It’s strange to be home in the Netherlands all month and not be able to do that.
The next evening, as the sun began to set in New Haven, Connecticut, Omer Bajwa, his wife, Lisa, and a few friends donned masks and gloves to operate a makeshift drive-thru in the parking lot of Masjid Al Islam, a mosque in the city’s Dwight neighborhood. They handed out prepacked iftar boxes of dates, naan, and chicken curry fromthrough rolled-down windows in car after car.
Since many people are reliant on mosques for the nightly iftar meal, Bajwa asked his friends to pool money to feed 130 people every Saturday. “The reality of New Haven is it can be quite poor,” he says. “And we have so many Muslim-owned businesses in the restaurant industry, which is taking a huge hit — we’re trying to buy meals from them, give them business.
Charity is one of the key components of Ramadan, and many of these same hard-hit restaurants are stepping up to serve their communities themselves. Since mid-March, Hamza Deib, owner of Brooklyn’s popular Middle Eastern restaurant
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