Ramadan begins today. Across the Muslim world, nearly two billion people will turn toward Mecca in the predawn darkness, whisper the niyyah of fasting, and enter the most sacred month of the Islamic calendar – the month in which the Quran descended, in which the gates of heaven open and the gates of hell close, in which a single night, Laylat al-Qadr, carries the weight of a thousand months.

And inside a country that the overwhelming consensus of global Muslim opinion has declared an apartheid state, approximately 1.8 million Muslim citizens will do exactly the same. They will fast from fajr (dawn) to maghrib (sunset).

They will pray tarawih in over four hundred mosques scattered from the Galilee to the Negev – in the Ottoman splendor of al-Jazzar in Acre, in the ancient simplicity of al-Bahr on the Mediterranean shore in Jaffa, in modest neighborhood masjids in Umm al-Fahm and Rahat and Qalansawe.

In fact, tens of thousands of Muslim worshipers gather every Friday of Ramadan at the Al-Aqsa compound in Jerusalem’s Old City, ascending to what is Islam’s third holiest site, a place many insist is systematically restricted or inaccessible. Yet each Ramadan, the esplanade fills with prayer, bodies aligned shoulder to shoulder beneath an open sky, complicating slogans with lived reality.

They will break their fast with dates and water, as the Prophet instructed, and they will do so as citizens of a state that funds over a hundred of their mosques, pays the salaries of their imams through the Ministry of Religious Services, and has seated a Muslim justice, Khaled Kabub — born in Jaffa, educated at Tel Aviv........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)