Eid-al-Fitr this year was on Wednesday, April 10. Before the big day rolled up, an email was sent saying that Muslim-identifying students were allowed to ask for excused absences from faculty on religious grounds. This is, after all, a major month in the Islamic Calendar. In my own experience back home, the holidays catered to Eid stretched out for weeks, regardless of the day it fell on the Gregorian Calendar.
According to International Student Advisor Megan Putney, there were about twenty people who expressed an interest in participating in the festivity at the beginning of Ramadan. When Eid came by, we observed that there were six students who eventually showed up for prayer at the Masjid in Potsdam. The relatively few attendees show, for some of us, the difficulty of intentionally making space for something that our schedules once revolved around.
Islamic Culture Club organized major events throughout the period, including a communal Iftar on March 30, open to all members of the SLU and Canton community. This organization, run by Muslim students, had also offered to organize transportation for people at SLU to travel off-campus to similar community events in Clarkson and Potsdam. Fasting students also engaged in their own group activities and early morning meals. Overall, there was a conscious effort to recreate the festive environment we were so used to back home.
Likewise, Dining Services had also offered to accommodate the needs of fasting students by providing them with food for their early morning meal before they began fasting. They also took suggestions from students about cooking a special halal dinner for Eid. Despite the considerable amount of initiative taken by Dining Services, it seemed that there was still a degree of confusion among the students who ran to Dana. The lack of labels verifying that the meats used in the meals were indeed halal prevented some from tasting the foods supposedly catering to their needs.
Later in the evening, I returned to doing the coursework that I had put off for the occasion, feeling a sense of regret creeping up on me. I ended up moving the due dates of a couple of projects, disrupting my schedule. But perhaps that is the cost of trying to make space for things that were once a highlight of your year in an area where all the people with the same background as yours can be rounded up in a tiny room at the Student Center.
Upon further reflection, however, it does not quite sit right with me to not note the progress made in accommodating Muslim-identifying students this year. Dining Services did indeed provide fasting students with meal options for their early morning meal and did end up serving foods on Eid that the students had suggested. The excused absences from faculty are still a right step towards a sense of inclusion, although an official holiday for all students might make a better case for it.
Most of all, there are those who advocate for the Muslim-identifying members of the SLU community. A designated prayer space was established in the Winston Room this year upon the petition of a certain student. There is a certain beauty in being able to stand up for yourself and others and making visible spaces for those who might have different cultural backgrounds is not that difficult, at least in my view.
Outside the SLU bubble, things get much messier and more complicated. So, let’s go and build tools to understand what it means to truly represent and include the needs of students from different backgrounds. Progress is messy and rarely perfect, but it can only move us forward.