Day 20 - Muna Jondy: “After Faith, It’s Character”
Revealing Ramadan: 30 Days, 30 Voices [mp3, 4:14]
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
Muna Jondy is the 20th voice in this series. She’s an immigration attorney who runs her own private practice in Michigan. Muna, who was born in the U.S., is one of nine children of immigrant parents. She says the simplicity of her faith streamlines her life, but that the society around her can make it difficult to raise her children in an Islamic manner — instilling values of kindness, consideration, and community.
Check back on this blog each day or on our Facebook page to hear a new voice in our “Revealing Ramadan” series. If you’re the on demand type or simply need a more automated form of listening, we’ve produced a special podcast feed that’s available now. Oh, and a special show too!
Day 19 - Hussein Rashid: “The Night of Power, and Imperfection”
Revealing Ramadan: 30 Days, 30 Voices [mp3, 5:23]
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
The 19th voice in this series is Hussein Rashid, a Nizari Ismaili Muslim who was born and raised in New York City. He recounts one of his favorite vigils of Ramadan, Laylat al-Qadr or The Night of Power — a night in which many Muslims stay up all night in constant prayerm, reading Qur’an, reflecting. On this night, Muslims believe that the Qur’an was first revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. He also recites one of his favorite passages from the Quran prayed on this night, The Verse of Light.
Hussein currently teaches at Hofstra University in New York and writes for several blogs, including Religion Dispatches.
Check back on this blog each day or on our Facebook page to hear a new voice in our “Revealing Ramadan” series. If you’re the on demand type or simply need a more automated form of listening, we’ve produced a special podcast feed that’s available now. Oh, and a special show too!
Day 18 - Naazish Yarkhan: “Celebrating Eid in the U.S. and India”
Revealing Ramadan: 30 Days, 30 Voices [mp3, 5:31]
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
Our 18th voice is Naazish Yarkhan, a writer and editor who grew up in fairly secular family in Bombay, India and now lives in suburban Chicago. She tells the story of celebrating Eids in her native country then and how much more joyous it is for her now in the United States. Immigrant communities celebrate together, she says, and brings the richness of various traditions and festivities to their adopted home.
Check back on this blog each day or on our Facebook page to hear a new voice in our “Revealing Ramadan” series. If you’re the on demand type or simply need a more automated form of listening, we’ve produced a special podcast feed that’s available now. Oh, and a special show too!
Day 17 - Reuben Jackson: “Support in Those Beginning Years”
Revealing Ramadan: 30 Days, 30 Voices [mp3, 3:58]
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
On this 17th day of Ramadan, Reuben Jackson, an African-American man who was raised Southern Baptist and converted, or “reverted” as he says, to Islam in May 2001. He immersed himself in Islam’s sacred texts and memorized prayers by Yusef Islam (formerly Cat Stevens). His Ramadan reflection tells about the support he received early on from friends at his local mosque in Arlington, Virginia to trainers at his gym.
Check back on this blog each day or on our Facebook page to hear a new voice in our “Revealing Ramadan” series. If you’re the on demand type or simply need a more automated form of listening, we’ve produced a special podcast feed that’s available now. Oh, and a special show too!
Day 16 - Parisa Popalzai: “Ramadan in Indonesia”
Revealing Ramadan: 30 Days, 30 Voices [mp3, 3:04]
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
Parisa Popalzai, an Afghani-American woman who immigrated to California after the Soviets invaded her home country in 1979, is our 16th voice in this series. She is an American Muslim who didn’t grow up with Muslim friends and, in the process, began to lose her religious identity. Her year of studying abroad in the world’s most populous Muslim country gave her a new perspective on the month of Ramadan, and her religious identity.
Check back on this blog each day or on our Facebook page to hear a new voice in our “Revealing Ramadan” series. If you’re the on demand type or simply need a more automated form of listening, we’ve produced a special podcast feed that’s available now. Oh, and a special show too!
Day 15 - Ny’Kisha Pettiford: “Who’s in the Kitchen at Night”
Revealing Ramadan: 30 Days, 30 Voices [mp3, 2:52]
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
The 15th voice in our series is Ny’Kisha Pettiford, an African-American woman who works for a health care communications company. She grew up in a Christian household — her mother Catholic, her father non-denominational — and converted to Islam while in college. She talks about how her family celebrates holidays and the cultural warmth of her local mosque during the month of Ramadan.
Check back on this blog each day or on our Facebook page to hear a new voice in our “Revealing Ramadan” series. If you’re the on demand type or simply need a more automated form of listening, we’ve produced a special podcast feed that’s available now. Oh, and a special show too!
Day 14 - Steven Longden: “Suited and Booted”
Revealing Ramadan: 30 Days, 30 Voices [mp3, 5:08]
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
On this 14th day of Ramadan, a Mancunian who converted to Islam in 1993: Steven Longden. He tells the story of dressing up for prayers at a local mosque for one of his first Ramadans and his recollection of a beautiful recitation of the Qur’an. He also shares his own Arabic recitation.
Check back on this blog each day or on our Facebook page to hear a new voice in our “Revealing Ramadan” series. If you’re the on demand type or simply need a more automated form of listening, we’ve produced a special podcast feed that’s available now. Oh, and a special show too!
Day 13 - Nadia Sheikh Bandukda: “Breaking Fast in the Garment District”
Revealing Ramadan: 30 Days, 30 Voices [mp3, 2:31]
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
Our 13th voice is Nadia Sheikh Bandukda. She is a self-described “by-choice conservative Muslim female born in America, who studied in Saudi Arabia and Teaneck, New Jersey.” She recently graduated from college with a degree in political science and now works at a non-profit focused on immigration issues, and is at work on her first novel. Her Ramadan memory is set in New York’s garment district, in a furniture store owned by her father.
Check back on this blog each day or on our Facebook page to hear a new voice in our “Revealing Ramadan” series. If you’re the on demand type or simply need a more automated form of listening, we’ve produced a special podcast feed that’s available now. Oh, and a special show too!
Day 12 - Sabiha Shariff: “Awareness of Abuse and Domestic Violence”
Revealing Ramadan: 30 Days, 30 Voices [mp3, 2:30]
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
Our twelfth voice on this twelfth day of Ramadan is Sabiha Shariff, an Indian woman who grew up in Mumbai and has lived and worked in New Jersey for nearly 25 years. Now retired and living in Dallas, she is active in her Muslim community on issues of homelessness and domestic violence.
Check back on this blog each day or on our Facebook page to hear a new voice in our “Revealing Ramadan” series. If you’re the on demand type or simply need a more automated form of listening, we’ve produced a special podcast feed that’s available now. Oh, and a special show too!
The “Multiplicity in Singularity” That Is Islam
by Krista Tippett, host
“If one dream should fall and break into a thousand pieces, never be afraid to pick one of those pieces up and begin again.” —Flavia Weedn (photo: Mushda Ali/Flickr)
We’re thrilled to put our show with 14 distinctly different Muslim voices back on the air a year after we created it. It is really more an experience than a show — one that was as full of discovery to produce as to hear.
In fact, we were surprised to find ourselves creating it. At the beginning of the summer of 2009, we extended an invitation to Muslims to reflect on their lived experience of Islam, of what it means — in a daily, particular way — to be part of what is often referred to in the abstract as “the Muslim world.” Responses were slow at first but began to pick up in number and intensity as our query was circulated in networks far beyond the public radio universe.
Hundreds of people responded from an incredible range of backgrounds, ages, and sensibilities. They came from an Iraqi-American Muslim growing up in Monterey, California and also from Mexican-American and a Russian-American converts living in robust Muslim communities in places like Seattle and Dallas. They were artists, stay-at-home moms, lawyers, college students. They wrote from Indonesia and Turkey, England and Canada, Saudi Arabia and Oman. We began to call some of them up to hear their voices. And Trent Gilliss — our senior editor who conducted most of these interviews — created an interactive map that blends personal photos, audio, and essays.
And though we had asked people to reflect on Muslim identity in a broad sense, we were immediately struck that so many had a vivid, epiphanal Ramadan story to share. We created a 30-day daily podcast — a new voice for each day of Ramadan — which you can still download if you’d like. And we pulled together this show with 14 stories across a spectrum of life and spiritual sensibility.
A bit of background: Ramadan commemorates the month when the first verses of the Qur’an were revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. It is marked by recitation of the Qur’an, prayer, and fasting — sun up to sun down. The Ramadan fast is a spiritual discipline of commitment and reflection; but it is also meant to align Muslims with the larger experience of need and hunger in the world. And Ramadan is a period of intimacy and of parties — of getting up when the world is quiet before the sun rises for breakfast and prayers with one’s family, of ending or breaking the fast every day after nightfall in celebration and prayers with friends and strangers.
Of the many links on our site, none intrigues me more than our Flickr page, where you can see the faces behind the stories and voices. Taken together, the people who have become part of this project embody and illustrate the “multiplicity in singularity” that is Islam, as Feruze Faison put it. It was a delight, and an honor, getting such an intimate glimpse inside this holiest month of Islam.
