Witnessing Jerusalem’s Ramadan revival
By Kaamil Ahmed
On the first few nights of Ramadan, Palestinian youth congregated on the steps that lead into the Old City of Jerusalem’s Muslim Quarter — to make as much noise as possible.
They were reclaiming Damascus Gate; a place that had been the main socialising point for youth and filled with market stalls until it became barren and militarised during recent months of violence.
It became like the rest of East Jerusalem and the Old City, which shut down with the sunset. Without the shopkeepers and customers, the city’s stone streets are left dark and empty, completely devoid of the nighttime buzz usually associated with Middle Eastern capitals.
But Ramadan has revived the city. Instead of an almost curfew-like quiet, people are living from sunset to dawn, following Taraweeh prayers at Al-Aqsa with hours of drinking coffee, tea and juices, smoking nargile and, this year, watching European football games on projectors.
More seasoned journalists say the atmosphere this Ramadan is still subdued compared to previous years, there should be more noise, more stalls, more cafes. The saddest absence is of elderly West Bank residents (and a limited few from Gaza), who are usually able to visit Al-Aqsa only in Ramadan but have had their permits universally frozen this year after an attack in Tel Aviv killed four Israelis.
But still, the lights that have gone up in every neighbourhood, the Ramadan-only businesses that have sprouted and the shared iftars in the courtyard of Islam’s third holiest mosque have shown me a version of Jerusalem I haven’t seen at any other time of the year. My experiences of Ramadan have been in London and Ankara, cities that are not massively affected by the month, so to see Jerusalem not just change but transform puts a far more hopeful lens on the city’s situation.
It gives Ramadan a power that we don’t always feel in Britain. This is the month where Muslim Jerusalemites live more proudly than any other time of the year; the blast of a cannon marks the beginning and end of the fast; children parade through the Old City banging drums and singing to remind all that dawn is approaching; and I stumbled across a group of actors putting on street theatre show in the middle of the central market.
After the show, I spoke to some of the actors about why they were doing more shows in Ramadan and they said it was because of the sheer amount of people visiting the Old City. Later, one of them wondered: “I want to why it is that the city becomes so spiritual in this month.”
