There are two holidays in Islam, Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha. Today is Eid al-Fitr, the first day of the new month after Ramadan. It's dawn now, and elsewhere, people are gathering for the Eid prayer. This is my first Eid in the West, and my first Eid alone. There are no other Muslims here and no masjids. No takbeer. No one will ring my doorbell to ask for eidiyya. No children in new clothes. No Eid swing. No cap guns. No ma3moul. I have a doctor’s appointment this morning. Jordanian people perform Eid al-Fitr prayer early morning in Amman, capital of Jordan, on Aug. 19, 2012.(Xinhua/Mohammad Abu Ghosh) A souq in the Palestinian refugee camp of Baqaa, north-west Amman. Vendors encourage customers to buy sweets ahead of the festival in downtown Amman, Jordan Making ma3moul, cookies filled with date paste flavoured with cardamom. You roll some date paste into a ball, wrap some dough around it, and then press it into the mould. People who can afford it often slaughter a sheep or a goat on Eid and share the meat, although it's not required. This is in Iraq. Eid is a very special day for children. They get a set of new clothes, and relatives give them small amounts of money, which they spend on cheap toys for sale on sidewalks, often cap guns. Sometimes firecrackers. Eid morning can be very scary for stray cats and people with PTSD. I've never seen kids this big on an Eid swing actually, that's funny. I haven't seen Eid swings outside of Jordan, but I haven't been everywhere. Eid is announced when/if the first sliver of the new moon is sighted on the 29th day of Ramadan. Eid mubarak everyone. كل عما و أنتم بألف خير
You're not alone, you're just not physically near the people you are sharing this with. And thank you for sharing it with us, too.
holy crap I love those biscuits omfg I'm not Muslim, but I lived in the UAE for a big chunk of my life (and the familia still does) and I still remember Eid being p fun.* so, eid mubarak too :))) (*minus the firecrackers. especially in my neighbourhood which is full of highly flammable dead trees. those are just mildly frightening.)
It's hard not to be sorry for all that I've lost sometimes. But I try not to dwell on it. Thanks folks <3 Eid was kind of a failure of a day. I went to the doctor, but my appointment was actually yesterday (whoops), so I spent four hours in the car for nothing, and I had such a migraine. Even my face hurt. But I got some sleep and I'll try again tomorrow.
Aaaaah you've been to the UAE! I liked it there. Behind my friend's building in Abu Dhabi there was a building that looked like a pink layer cake. There were a lot of fantastical skyscrapers, that was p neat. I could do without the firecrackers too! They were terrifying, and they were so cheap in Jordan, they were everywhere. But ma3moul are the best, we used to make hundreds of them and eat them for months. They keep really well.
No 3 is ayn ع. It doesn't exist in English, idk if you know what that is. 5 is خ, the kh sound, the number and the letter look similar. Not everyone uses the numbers to represent the same sounds though! It can be confusing if you don't know their dialect. Ma3moul is written معمول, idk if you read Arabic.
@Mattias I don't read arabic sadly :( i was wondering if the pronounciation i have for the word in my head is correct, it probably isn't. this isn't quite the same, since french and english mostly overlap sound wise and use the same letters barring a few additions/changes in terms of add ons to the letters, but I'm used to sounds not quite matching up. french and english rs, for example, drive me nuts when i hear anglophones trying to pronounce french ones because they keep getting it wrong.
Ah that's too bad, the pronunciation is much clearer in Arabic. I'm an Anglo and I used to speak French okay (some of my relatives speak French as their first language) and my pronunciation used to be decent, but WOW is it ever bad now! I am one of those Anglos who get it totally wrong, sorry about that, we butcher your language so bad. Some French vowels are really different from English vowels, and we look at words like "jus" and go "juice!" It's terrible. If you can pronounce French you can learn to pronounce Turkish pretty easily, Turkish has a lot of vowels and many of them are the same as French vowels. Only one of them doesn't exist in French or English.
I found a photo essay about Nubians in Egypt, if you guys liked this post you might like it. It looks similar to rural Jordan.
oh that's so cool. sorry i assumed you were arabic of origin language wise? i don't know where i got that impression, sorry heh. and yeah, french is miserable to learn, i've come to realize this. though what doesn't help anglos is that spelled french and spoken french has about as much to do with each other as i dunno, portuguese and spanish or something (i may be exagerating)
It's okay, Arabs make that mistake too! I do speak Arabic and I'm part of Arab culture so it's no wonder. It doesn't happen irl now that I don't wear hijab or abaya, but I still get read as Arab on the internet. Yes that's true! Quebec French is difficult, it's as hard to transcribe as colloquial Arabic so it doesn't sound anything like the written language. The rural French dialects of four hundred years ago kind of got preserved there.
Not to be overly curious/nosy, but why did you stop wearing the hijab? I have some muslim (I'm assuming you're muslim, correct me if I'm wrong, you're newish here so I don't know as much about you as do some of the others) friends who chose to wear the hijab even when not forced to by their families (i'm not passing any opinions on hijabs/other clothes that cover the hair and/or the whole body, i don't know enough about those cultures), is it because of gender something or moving or something else? and it's just sort of amazing. an example "ca" (pronouced sah) is technically not a word in written french, you have to write out cela.
Yes I'm Muslim. It wasn't that common to see women not wearing hijab in the Gulf, but it's more a matter of social convention than force. Some of the professors or doctors didn't wear hijab, but I was just a research assistant so I had to wear what my boss told me to wear. In Jordan, most of the people I knew wore hijab, but if you went to the University of Jordan or to West Amman, most women didn't wear it. Religion was seen as a lower-class, less modern and sophisticated thing, so the pressure on upper class girls was to NOT wear the hijab. (Thanks, colonialism.) It depends on where you are, and when, and who you're dealing with. I didn't actually want to take off the hijab, but I'm trans and I would never be recognised as not-female if I wore the hijab. But a bigger issue is that I'm in rural Canada, and I can't be visibly Muslim here, it's not acceptable and it's quite dangerous. People would tear my clothes off, it's happened to a friend of mine, and the police do nothing. There is always social pressure about what female-assigned people are allowed to wear or should wear. I am not allowed the agency here to choose to wear the hijab. My body doesn't really belong to me, no matter where I am.
Oh that's- that's actually pretty fascinating. Obviously as a christian-raised westerner, I have a lot more to learn about this. Wow. OH JESUS FUCK that's not okay. I'm really sorry that happened to your friend, and I'm really sorry you can't be visibly your own freaking religion. I want to live in a less religious society but for me that means religion would be another part of a person's presentation, or not, depending on how they so chose (am i saying this right?) I- I know how that feels like, though not to that extent (see christian westerner statement above). I admit that I unfortunately sometimes find people's reasons for wearing the hijab creepy (which is more my own internalized whatever, that i need to look at and examine more closely), but I still think you should have the choice whether or not to wear it in public spaces. I'm really sorry, jesus that sucks so hard.
Thank you *hugs* It's not always as bad as that example obviously, but if you look like a lady, it goes like that.
@wes scripserat I think you're saying that fine. Whether you're religious and how you express it should always be your own personal choice. But unfortunately there's always social pressure around that. I don't think most Westerners really notice the social pressures in their own society, as opposed to other societies, because they're not that different from the post-Christian norm, but ask somebody who is visibly Sikh or Muslim in the West, and they notice it, because they are different enough from the norm that people react negatively. The reactions aren't always as bad as having your clothes torn off obviously, although that's not uncommon, but there's a constant stream of people giving you nasty looks or telling you that's not allowed here, or concern trolling women about how they're being oppressed by their male relatives (dear white feminist ladies, that's not actually less racist). It gets tiring. A lot of my friends tend to just not go out, or only go out in groups. I'm going to a restaurant in my small town with some of my Muslim friends in a few days and they all wear niqab, I think we're all praying for less racism on Monday. It's alright, don't feel too bad. Dwelling on it doesn't really help. You learn to make jokes about it.
