More than 250 colleges are expected to participate this year in a Fast-a-thon, a one-day event for non-Muslim and Muslim students to draw attention to world hunger and raise money for local food banks. The event began after 9/11 at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and has spread around the nation. Last year almost 1,800 students participated at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Some Ramadan fasts have a political message. Members of a local antiwar group in Ann Arbor, Mich., have organized a “solidarity fast”—three-day shifts or for the entire 30 days—to demonstrate opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus the recent fighting in Lebanon. But dozens of American service members in Al Anbar province in Iraq are fasting, too, according to Sgt. Jeremy Pitcher, a spokesman for Coalition forces in Iraq. He says the fast is “a gesture of good will, a gesture of respect for the nation of Iraq, for the culture of Iraq.”
Some non-Muslims fast out of friendship: Yusra Ahmad, a Muslim, and Shira Taylor, who is part Jewish and part Christian, have fasted together throughout their four years at the University of Toronto’s medical school—connecting them to “something bigger and greater” than the daily stresses of school, says Taylor. On Oct. 2, at the Church of St. Paul & St. Andrew in New York City, Muslims and Jews will break the Ramadan and Yom Kippur fasts together. The holidays coincide next year, too—and won’t again for another 30 years. Many Muslims welcome those who share their fast. Imam Tahir Anwar of the South Bay Islamic Association near San Francisco calls it “one of the most powerful gestures of friendship [non-Muslims] can make to us.”
