In the hush of early dawn, while many of us scroll for suhoor inspo or adjust our prayer schedule apps, somewhere in Gaza, a mother tears a stale piece of bread in two—one half for her child, the other for her husband still buried under rubble. Across the ocean, in a Chinese detention centre in Xinjiang, a young Uyghur girl quietly mouths verses from memory. No Qur’an in sight. No dates. No mosque. Just breath and hope.
Ramadan is often painted as a time of spiritual abundance. But for millions of Muslims, it arrives in scarcity. Fasting under occupation, surveillance, displacement, and state violence turns the act of worship into a quiet form of resistance. This article is not a policy brief or press release—it’s a portrait of struggle, stitched from silence.
Gaza: Fasting Under the Bombs
In 2024, Gaza endured yet another Ramadan under siege. With over a million displaced and food aid throttled, fasting became indistinguishable from famine. The suhoor table—once filled with za’atar, olives, and laughter—is now a plastic bag of flour, shared between 12 people.
Still, Palestinians fast. They break bread on broken concrete. They pray in mosques with no roofs. “We don’t fast for this world,” said one woman I spoke to through a UN interpreter. “We fast for the next.” It was not pious bravado. It was defiance steeped in exhaustion.
Gaza reminds us that sometimes the fast is not a choice. Hunger is enforced. Faith becomes both a coping mechanism and a form of resistance. Children memorize surahs in tents. Families pray taraweeh under the open sky, unsure whether they will live to see Eid.
East Turkestan (Xinjiang): When Fasting is a Crime
For Uyghur Muslims in Chinese-occupied East Turkestan, Ramadan is a crime scene. Fasting is banned. Qur’ans are confiscated. Mosques are turned into museums or military stations. Entire families are surveilled, detained, or “re-educated.” Yet reports persist of Uyghurs fasting in secret—sipping water in public to avoid suspicion, then refusing food in private.
One exile in Turkey, now studying at a madrasa, told me: “My mother hasn’t fasted Ramadan in ten years, not because she doesn’t want to—but because the state watches everything. Even hunger.”
There is something unspeakably cruel about criminalising hunger. About punishing someone not for what they consume, but what they abstain from. Yet even under biometric surveillance and cultural erasure, the spirit of Ramadan endures—quietly, bravely.
Kashmir: A Fast Between Checkpoints
In occupied Kashmir, Ramadan often coincides with curfews, blackouts, and military lockdowns. Young men disappear. Women carry Qur’ans in torn tote bags through checkpoints. Masjids are closed under the guise of “security.”
Yet Ramadan brings with it pockets of resistance. Community iftars spring up in homes lit by candlelight. Quran circles are held in whispers. The fast becomes not just about abstaining from food, but about holding on to something when everything else is slipping.
One young Kashmiri journalist told me anonymously, “Our fasts feel heavier here. They are not just spiritual acts, but political ones. Every suhoor eaten in silence, every rakah prayed in fear, is a statement: we are still here.”
Sudan, Yemen & Somalia: Fasting in Famine
In Sudan’s Darfur region, and across parts of Yemen and Somalia, conflict has strangled aid supply routes, making food insecurity the norm. Yet Ramadan still finds a way in. In the middle of a displacement camp outside Khartoum, volunteers prepare iftar with UN-donated lentils and local dates. It’s sparse, but shared.
A Yemeni doctor fasting during a cholera outbreak once said: “We’re not starving because we’re fasting. We’re fasting in spite of starvation.”
The distinction is crucial. Fasting, even here, is voluntary. It is tied to dignity. It is the one thing that has not been taken. And so the iftar table, humble as it may be, becomes an altar of resilience.
France, India & Beyond: The Soft Violence of Surveillance
Not all oppression is loud. In France, Muslim charities face dissolution, women in hijab are harassed, and students who fast during exams are vilified. In India, Muslims observing Ramadan are painted as “outsiders” in a nation increasingly dominated by Hindutva politics.
In both places, the fast becomes a quiet refusal. A reminder that faith is not state-issued. “When I fast here, I feel like I’m reclaiming my identity,” said Mariam, a French-Algerian student. “Even if my school calls it a disruption.”
This is the soft violence of modern Islamophobia: policies that don’t ban Ramadan outright, but undermine its observance through bureaucracy, bullying, and public shaming. And yet—Muslims continue to fast. Students pass around prayer timetables in class. Office workers sneak away for Dhuhr in storage closets. Families host underground taraweeh in cramped apartments.
The Hidden Ummah: Fasting While Forgotten
There are Muslim communities whose pain rarely trends. The Rohingya in Cox’s Bazar. The Afghans under Taliban rule and US sanctions. Muslims in Central African Republic, in Chechnya, in Sri Lanka’s post-war silence. Even within the UK, asylum seekers housed in hotels eat cold suhoor from meal boxes delivered 12 hours earlier.
They all fast. Not for optics. Not for “mindfulness.” But because it connects them to a God who hasn’t abandoned them—even when the world has.
One Afghan refugee in Birmingham told me, “When I fast, I feel closer to my mother. We used to wake up together. She would touch my forehead and pray for me. Now I eat suhoor alone in a hotel, but I still feel her dua.”
Holding On to the Rope
So what do we do with this knowledge? When your iftar table is full, and your fast breaks with six different chutneys and a sponsored Qur’an recitation livestream, where does that leave the ummah in crisis?
This isn’t guilt-tripping. It’s ghaflah-breaking. It’s an invitation to dua—not the polished Instagram ones, but the ugly, choked-up ones. It’s a call to boycott silence, to fund organisations working at the margins, and to remember that the ummah is not an aesthetic—it’s a bloodline of belief.
In every battered corner of this world, Muslims are fasting. Not just to purify their souls, but to preserve their humanity. To stay Muslim. To stay alive.
This Ramadan, let your fast stretch beyond hunger. Let it stretch across oceans, checkpoints, and detention centres. Let it stand in solidarity.
Because when one believer is fasting in chains, we all fast with them.
