Middle-Eastern food was served at the charity dinner benefitting the Greater Chicago Food Depository. Photo by Chloé Benoist / North by Northwestern“Zakat” and “Sawm” — charity and fasting — are two of the five pillars of Islam that were highlighted on Sunday as the Muslim Cultural Student Alliance organized its first Fast-a-Thon. It culminated with a charity dinner, benefiting the Greater Chicago Food Depository, at sundown.
“This year we decided to add the Fast-a-thon with [the Iftar, the meal celebrating the end of a fast], because with the lunar calendar, Ramadan moves up a couple of weeks every year, so this year only a couple of weeks were during the school year,” Anisa Rahman, a Weinberg junior and member of McSA, explained. “It’s an awareness event, but it’s also a fun event — we eat, we talk.”
For McSA co-president and Weinberg junior Mustafa Rahman, who is not related to Anisa, the act of fasting helps put many things into perspective.
“We all take for granted the things that are given to us by God, and food is a huge part,” he said. “I feel that [fasting] it’s cathartic to people.”
Rahman emphasized the fact that the event did not cater only to Muslims. According to him, about 100 of the fasters registered online, and out of them, “only 20 or 30 were Muslims.”
Weinberg senior Mark Crain was one of those who fasted. He addressed the crowd to talk about his perspective on fasting from his Protestant point of view. For Crain, the event was a sign of unity on campus.
“At Northwestern in particular, we constantly seek to realize the ideal that there is indeed more that unites us than separates us,” he said.
McSA co-founder Anas Osman (WSAC ‘98 and Kellogg ‘08) was the keynote speaker for the evening. He discussed the relationship between Islam and hunger, and the need for action against it.
“The idea in Islam, and I think it is true of all faiths, it that we have an ethical imperative to not sleep with the knowledge that your neighbor is hungry,” he said.
Osman also condemned the selfishness of some Western countries in regards to the food crisis because, according to him, their trade barriers and food waste are some of the root causes of hunger in the world.
“The haves have it, and the haves could easily give it, but they don’t,” he said.