CINCINNATI — For a month, the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati will be at its busiest. Its mosque will be full, prayers will echo through the halls and its faithful will be together, celebrating Ramadan as a community for the first time in more than a year.
Like other religious communities, the pandemic interrupted one of the most important holidays in the Muslim calendar. Ramadan is a month of prayer, reflection and community, and as the Cincinnati areas faithful return to the mosque this spring, coronavirus concerns still loom large, informing those reflections and changing the way the community can come together.
Ramadan began on the evening of April 12 in the United States and is expected to last until sunset on May 12. Throughout the month, practicing Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset and focus on spiritual cleansing, celebrating on the last day with the festival, Eid al-Fitr.
In 2020, the month began in late April, at the height of the pandemic. At that point, Dr. Amir Izhar, the board chair at the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati, said the building had been closed to the public for a little more than a month.
“The Ramadan is a time when we all get together as a community as a society to pray together and have some social festivities so closing down the door was a very difficult decision for us to make,” he said.
The imam leads the usual Friday congregational prayers over livestream and every night of Ramadan, he leads prayers in the mostly empty mosque. Even Eid al-Fitr was a drive-through event.
“We were not able to enjoy this beautiful place for a long time but coming back it was a great feeling,” Izhar said.
Izhar said the board decided to reopen in late June, taking precautions to keep people safe.
The mosque’s carpet marked spots six feet apart for members to come in and pray. The center required masks and the roughly 1,000 people who could typically gather for weekly prayer were now more like 150.
During Ramadan, the demand to get into the mosque is even higher.
Izhar said 1,500 can come to evening prayer, so the ICGC had to make room to prepare, setting up two overflow tents.
From there, members can watch the nightly prayers on a screen set up at the front, while performing them together at a safe distance.
“I think we’re planning to keep this one for the whole summer and take that one down after Ramadan,” Izhar said, pointing to pair of white tents pitched across the parking lot from the mosque.
As the board chair of the ICGC, Izhar helped plan the center’s COVID-19 response and as a healthcare worker, he understands how important it is that the center gets it right.
He’s a kidney specialist, working with hospitals across the Cincinnati area and he’s seen first-hand the impact the pandemic has had on his colleagues.
Meanwhile, Izhar said the year has also taught him caution pays off and that’s the philosophy he’s taken with ICGC’s COVID-19 response. He said the center closed again in October when cases began to spike again and reopened in March as vaccinations became more widely available.
“Things are still not back to where they should be, but it’s going in the right direction slowly but surely,” he said.
Izhar said he’s still monitoring the case count closely, but the ICGC is doing what it can to keep people together in any way it can.
“I’m hoping and praying that this will continue this way and we can finish Ramadan the same way that we started,” he said.
Izhar said the past year has already given him a lot to reflect on over the next several weeks. He said he’s come to understand how important it is to be together and also how a community can work together from a distance.
He said he’s also learned just how much collective action can serve the greater good.
“Ramadan teaches also that we need to be all collectively working together,” he said. “To bring people, it does not have to be one faith or a certain faith but we just have to be together as one.”