
FirstLook: Iftar Nights
Photograph and video by Johnny Hanson
Iftar nights
Sunday, June 26, 8:42 p.m.,
Howard County, Maryland
We dug in, as we always do, just moments after sunset, as soon as it was time to break this day’s 16-hour Ramadan fast. As cell phone apps played calls to prayer in near synchrony, a small, hungry crowd descended upon the buffet table.
On this night it was a potluck iftar with a heri-tage theme, and the food mirrored some of the incredible diversity of suburban Baltimore itself: There was Malaysian tapioca cake (bingo ubi kayu), Ecuadorian empanadas, Bosnian stew (Bosanski lonac), Uighur steamed squash and lamb dumplings (petir manta), Italian escarole and beans (scarola e fagipoli), African- American bean pie, Senegalese peanut stew (mafe ginaar) and beignets (puff puff), Palestinian lentil soup (shorabit adas) and St. Thomas jerk chicken—all shared along with stories of their origins among friends old and new.
Iftar means “fast breaking” in Arabic, and the socializing that goes along with it is a worldwide hallmark of the month of Ramadan, which this year began on June 6 and ended with ‘id al-fitr (“feast of the fast breaking”) on July 5. (Following US Independence Day, this gave us a delightful double holiday.) In an upcom-ing feature article, I’ll be sharing some of the recipes you see on this table.
—Laila el-Haddad, author of
“Gaza’s Food Heritage” (N/D 11)
Sunday, June 26, 8:42 p.m.,
Howard County, Maryland
We dug in, as we always do, just moments after sunset, as soon as it was time to break this day’s 16-hour Ramadan fast. As cell phone apps played calls to prayer in near synchrony, a small, hungry crowd descended upon the buffet table.
On this night it was a potluck iftar with a heri-tage theme, and the food mirrored some of the incredible diversity of suburban Baltimore itself: There was Malaysian tapioca cake (bingo ubi kayu), Ecuadorian empanadas, Bosnian stew (Bosanski lonac), Uighur steamed squash and lamb dumplings (petir manta), Italian escarole and beans (scarola e fagipoli), African- American bean pie, Senegalese peanut stew (mafe ginaar) and beignets (puff puff), Palestinian lentil soup (shorabit adas) and St. Thomas jerk chicken—all shared along with stories of their origins among friends old and new.
Iftar means “fast breaking” in Arabic, and the socializing that goes along with it is a worldwide hallmark of the month of Ramadan, which this year began on June 6 and ended with ‘id al-fitr (“feast of the fast breaking”) on July 5. (Following US Independence Day, this gave us a delightful double holiday.) In an upcom-ing feature article, I’ll be sharing some of the recipes you see on this table.
—Laila el-Haddad, author of
“Gaza’s Food Heritage” (N/D 11)
You may also be interested in...
All the Lands Were Sea
In late 1967, photographer Tor Eigoland traveled for more than: a month, mostly by canoe, among the countless villages of southern Iraq's vast marshes. Now, 45 years later, writer Anthony Sattin calls his photographs a "rare and ethnographic record of a lost world. They bring us back to a time and place where people lived in harmony with their environment and respected the balance the natural world needs to thrive.'Hijrah: A Journey That Changed the World
Avoiding main roads due to threats to his life, in 622 CE the Prophet Muhammad and his followers escaped north from Makkah to Madinah by riding through the rugged western Arabian Peninsula along path whose precise contours have been traced only recently. Known as the Hijrah, or migration, their eight-day journey became the beginning of the Islamic calendar, and this spring, the exhibition "Hijrah: In the Footsteps of the Prophet," at Ithra in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, explored the journey itself and its memories-as-story to expand understandings of what the Hijrah has meant both for Muslims and the rest of a the world. "This is a story that addresses universal human themes," says co-curator Idries Trevathan.FirstLook: Soaring off Ambon Island
This photo was taken off Ambon Island, East Indonesia in 2010. It is one of my favorites, illustrating the free-spirited nature of the children in the rural archipelago. While some children in the big cities may stay inside and play computer games, the children in Ambon with easy access to the water see the ocean surrounding their village as their playground.