Lawrence.com

Falestine Afani Ruzik grew up in the Middle East, playing in the sand and carving castles into the Saudi Arabian desert.

She loved it there, even though she was forced by law to cover her body with a dark wrap, she says.

She's proud of the friendliness of the Saudis, their deep-rooted culture and the pervasive practice of Islam.

But when Ruzik was 11, the Gulf War changed everything.

As stray U.S. missiles began to tear into homes nearby, Ruzik's family of five fled Saudi Arabia and moved to a tiny town in Kansas.

"The whole war made it tense and it wasn't fun anymore," she says.

Overnight, Ruzik became a religious minority. She still fasted Ramadan and stayed inside during Friday recess to pray. But she says living in the Bible Belt made her shy about her Islamic faith.

"My whole entire high school and junior high career people were trying to convert me. Somebody came up to me at my grandmother's funeral and started talking about Jesus, like trying to convert me," Ruzik says.

Despite those numerous (failed) religious interventions, Ruzik - whose dad is Palestinian and whose mom is a "honkie" from Kansas - kept her faith close.

She doesn't pray five times a day anymore, but there's one tradition she says she'll always keep: Ramadan.

Dawn to dusk

Ramadan is Islam's holiest month. This Sunday at sunrise, Muslims in Lawrence and all over the world will abstain from eating, drinking, violence, sex and swearing in an attempt to reach a higher spiritual level.

They also try to pray five times daily at sunrise, mid-morning, lunchtime, afternoon and sundown. In the evening, when the sun lowers beneath the horizon, Muslims break fast with a feast of food and drink. Often, family and friends get together during the meal to celebrate.

The fasting and praying goes on for an entire month. During that time, Muslims are encouraged to give to charity and consider what contributions they're making to the world and to God, or Allah.

During Ramadan, KU's Muslim Student Association melds spirituality with charity during their annual Fast-A-Thon. The MSA invites anyone, Muslim or not, to join in Oct. 11 to fast for just one day from sunup to sundown. Local businesses pledge money to back the fasters, and the MSA donates proceeds to local homeless shelters.

Fadlullah Firman, president of the KU MSA, says that the idea behind Fast-A-Thon is "to give awareness that there is hunger in the world."

"We live in a society where we take food for granted. We waste a lot. And this one day you'll be able to feel how much you've taken for granted ... Just the things in your house, like an apple on the table."

Going without food or water for an entire day may sound like torture. But Firman says the feeling you get from the dedication and concentration it takes to do so can be beautiful.

"Once you starve yourself, your mind works differently. You run based on what you have spiritually," he says.

Cultural bridge

Lawrence always has a high turnout for Fast-A-Thon. While most college towns are lucky to scare up 100 fasters, participation in the Lawrence Fast-A-Thon can reach up to 400. Most fasters, Firman says, are non-Muslim.

"It's so beautiful here," says Firman, who grew up mostly in Indonesia and Malaysia. "The brotherhood, the bond between the people in the community."

Fast-A-Thon, besides helping the homeless, also gives non-Muslims a glimpse into what practicing Muslims go through during Ramadan. The holiday also gives Muslims a chance to expose the community to their traditions.

"You get this intrinsic satisfaction right after you have this big event where you try to create dialogue or educate people on Islam," says Firman. "To know that you're creating a bridge between two different cultures, two different ways of thinking is really, really good."

Aversion to Islam...

Moussa Elbayoumy, the director of the Islamic Center of Lawrence, says that there has been an escalating amount of discrimination against Muslims since 9/11.

"And that number keeps going up," Elbayoumy says.

That discrimination is exactly what Firman feared would happen after 9/11.

Just one month before the attacks, Firman moved to Lawrence from Jakarta, Indonesia, a teeming metropolis in the world's largest Muslim nation.

He remembers sitting in government class watching the now-infamous footage of the attacks unfold on live TV.

"Please," Firman remembers thinking to himself, "don't let it be a Muslim."

Elbayoumy says that in the six months following 9/11, some people were slower to point fingers at Muslims in the U.S. Then, he says, talk show hosts and television evangelists started to vocalize discrimination against Islam.

With nightly newscasts on suicide bombers, al-Qaeda, Iraqi insurgents, Hezbollah and Iran's nuclear development, it's perhaps no surprise that some Americans see Islam as a strange, extremist religion that facilitates hatred and violence.

Another common misunderstanding about Islam, Ruzik points out, is that Muslim women have no rights. She says the Qur'an actually gave women the right to divorce and to own property hundreds of years ago so "they wouldn't need a man to survive."

"It's not Islam that would screw with a woman's rights. It's the culture, and it depends on where you're at," Ruzik says. "The Taliban really screws up the message ... They say, 'Oh, it's Islam.' It's really not. They're just being jackasses."

Groups like the Taliban may contribute to this stat: Elbayoumy says that 45 percent of Americans "profess to having negative views of Islam."

"We were lucky that in Lawrence," Elbayoumy says, "that that trend hasn't matched what we are seeing recently."

...Even in Lawrence

But some discrimination does exist, even here.

Before Firman moved to Malaysia, he lived with his parents in Lawrence. When he was seven or eight, he went walking down Emery Road with his three siblings and mother, who wears a traditional head covering called a hijab. They were on their way to the park when a Jeep passed them, turned around, and passenger screamed "take that thing from your head and go back where you came from."

"I remember it till today," Firman says. But, he adds, that was a long time ago, and he has no hard feelings.

The only recent discrimination Firman recalls is when, shortly after 9/11, a female Muslim student was walking on campus when she made eye contact with a passerby who informed her to go back to where she came from.

"She grew up in Overland Park all her life," Firman says with a slight laugh. "Where's she gonna go, you know?"

But incidents like those are fairly rare in Lawrence. Elabayoumy says that for Muslims, living in the Midwest isn't all that different from living in a big city.

Finding her religion

Niloofar Shahmohammadi is an Iranian-American who says she's never felt discriminated against in all of her 20 years. Shahmohammadi was born and raised in Overland Park by her non-religious parents. She didn't pray or celebrate Ramadan, but after a visit to Iran when she was 12, she became fascinated with Islam.

She asked her grandfather to teach her to pray, and she practiced Ramadan by herself each year. She even researched Islam on the internet in her spare time.

When she came to KU, Shahmohammadi went to the Lawrence Islamic Center during the first week of classes.

"I wanted to see what it was like to go to a mosque. I was kind of scared," she says. But as soon as she went, Shahmohammadi was hooked. "It was the first time in my life I was surrounded by Muslim people."

Her parents, she says, found her newfound religious fervor "cute." That is, until Shahmohammadi started covering her head with a scarf.

"That was bad," Shahmohammadi says. "My mom got really mad. She did not like it. She was like, 'I don't associate with the scarf at all, why would you do that ... you don't need a scarf on your head to be modest and decent.'"

But Shahmohammadi's parents are by no means liberal. They are strict, she says, in almost every other aspect.

Shahmohamaddi explains that in Islamic countries, religion and culture are inseparable, and that even the least religious people have deep-seated moral values.

For example, her parents never allowed her to wear makeup until she went to college. And, even now, they'd prefer she not date men until she's found someone she thinks she'll marry; and for the most part, she's conformed to their wishes.

They also never drink alcohol. And if they ever find out she writes a weekly sex column called "Bitch+Moan" for the KU student newspaper, they'd probably flip.

"How would I show that to my mom?" Shahmohammadi says, referencing her latest advice to a virgin who was worried she'd orgasm too quickly during sex. "I'm not showing that to my mom. I want to be able to. In my mind, it's all in good fun. But I can totally see my mom starting to freak out."

Allahmerican

Since that first semester, Shahmohammadi has stopped going to the mosque, mainly because of what she sees as tension among the strict Muslims and those that are more open to change.

Like Ruzik, she has become more personal about her spirituality.

Still, she admits she's a little worried about what her Muslim friends must think of her sex advice. A while back, one of them sent her an e-mail that read, "I hope you haven't turned away from Allah" - and that was before she scored the gig as the new "bitch" on campus.

"I sort of wonder what they're thinking. I bet they aren't thinking very good things about me to be honest," Shahmohammadi says. "I have just as much faith as I ever did, and I think moreso. It has nothing to do with a sex column."

Recently Shahmohammadi glanced at her calendar and realized Ramadan was coming up. She won't be wearing a hijab this year, but, once again, she feels strangely drawn to the practice of Islam.

"I don't know why," she says. "But yeah, I'm gonna do it."