By Tommy Airey, re-posted from his Substack

This week, the stars will align.

The Christian season of Lent will kick-off on the exact same day as Islam’s holy month of Ramadan.

This is not just a coincidence. This is a divine conspiracy.

It all starts on Ash Wednesday, February 18.

I am wondering what it might look like for a network of Christians and Jesus-adjacent folks in North America to cross over and fast from food and drink during daylight hours for the entire month of Ramadan.

I see this as a small act of solidarity with Muslims all over the planet – and specifically with Palestinians who are enduring ethnic cleansing and genocide abroad, and constant demonization here in the US.

I also see this as a tangible way for Christians to repent from all the anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia built into the body of Christ.

Over the past twenty-eight months, conservative and liberal Christians have been far more sensitive to the feelings of Israelis and Jews than they have with the actual safety of Muslims and Palestinians, both here and abroad.

My strong sense is that most folks who were raised in Christian culture have Jewish friends and colleagues, but are not personally connected with Muslims and Palestinians in any meaningful way.

They have not heard “the other side” of Israel’s story.

They have not had access to first-hand accounts of the land theft, occupation, blockade, siege, apartheid, settlement expansion, broken ceasefires, forced starvation, abductions and torture that are part of this full-blown genocide.

They are unaware that 3,629 Palestinian prisoners hostages have been abducted off the streets and are currently being held in Israeli cells without charges.

It certainly does not help that corporate media outlets center Jewish pain and completely sideline the plight of Muslims and Palestinians. The Zionist mute button builds on all sorts of projecting propaganda about Islam being a religion of violence and a repressor of women, while American culture drowns in addiction, domination, sexual trauma, militarism and police brutality.

Here in America, Rep. Ilhan Omar is denied security duty and attacked at a town hall meeting, chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine on campuses are doxed and banned, and Leqaa Kordia is still sitting in a cell in Texas.

If these victims of racial and religious profiling were Christian or Jewish, their stories would go viral. Our two-party political establishment would raise hell to protect their rights and keep them safe.

In this Minneapolis moment, it is important to also remember that ICE was created in the aftermath of 9/11 to specifically target Muslims. Imams were profiled and mosques were infiltrated and Islam was libeled. All in the name of “national security” and “public safety.”

Muslims tried to tell us that, eventually, ICE would come for a lot of others too. Very few of us listened.

Two decades later, ICE – like the IDF – has a bloated budget and a license to abduct all the “enemies of the state,” which Trump defined this Fall in his National Security Presidential Memorandum on domestic terrorism: 

Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.

Donald Trump is clear. His posse is coming for those of us who have moved left, who are “woke,” who refuse to settle for an economy, a nation, a culture that denies the dignity and humanity of those who are not white, Christian, straight and American. 

Fair skin folks and middle-class people will only be protected by the state if we go along with its supremacist program.

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A few months ago, in one of her Substack posts, Dr. Farah Al-Sharif quoted the Koran:

Say not about those slain in the cause of God that they are dead—in fact, they are alive! But you do not perceive it.

Lamenting the lack of spiritual life on the left, she wrote:

We’ve come to a point where dead people have more spiritual life than the living.

The harm that organized religion has caused is real. But neither secularism nor the rule of law will save us. We need Something Else. We need a serious connection to spiritual realities, to a Power that is greater than empire, to an ancient tradition that has resistance receipts.

Dr. Al-Sharif wrote of the prophetic thread that weaves through the teachings of Moses, Jesus and Mohammed:

It is having the courage to have difficult conversations, shedding fear, sacrificing worldly attachments, speaking up when it is most expedient not to.

Western Christianity has become, by and large, a colonial counterfeit of the spiritual depth, moral clarity and political courage of Jesus, who fasted for forty days in the wilderness to confront and resist the temptations of empire. When he was finished, the bible says that he was famished – and wild beasts and angels tended to him.

Jesus was fueled by a feral spirituality. He was intimately connected to the land and her living beings – and to unseen, uncredentialed messengers of the divine. He was a prophet who cut against the grain, and he got crucified for it.

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For me, crossing over from Lent to Ramadan is one tangible spiritual practice of breaking rank with Christian supremacy and breathing with those who have been catching hell from Western imperialism for centuries.

Fasting for an entire month scares the hell out of me. But when Ramadan arrives, I know it will free me up to focus on Something Else. During daylight hours, I won’t spend a second preparing meals. Instead, I will get curious about what my soul is craving – in this famished imperial context.

Last year, Cyrus McGoldrick, a Muslim brother based in Turkey, told a small group of us that Ramadan is like training camp. It is a season to stretch our bodies and our souls to the limit. It is a time to get focused, to clear the calendar, to make space for prayer and physical training. So that we can resist our tyrannical enemies, whether its ICE and the IDF stalking neighborhoods, or the narcissism, anxiety, addiction, codependent patterns and ego games eating us up from the inside out.

When I was a freshman in college I was on the basketball team at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. During preseason training camp, our coach proclaimed that we were going to be the most fit team in America!

He told us that, before our season officially started, our entire squad had to run a mile in under five minutes. If we did not meet the goal, we’d have to wake up every morning at 6am and run it again – until we achieved it together.

I was 6’2” and weighed 180 pounds, but we had guys who were 6’11” and weighed 260 pounds. We all thought our coach was crazy. There was no way that our big bodies could run that fast for that long.

As it turned out, our entire team made it on our first try. I will never forget the burn I felt that entire last lap – and then finishing and looking over at Bill Mazurie throwing up his breakfast on the track.

I miss being part of a team that dares to do Something Else together. I’d love to conspire with other willing and able Christians and Jesus-adjacent comrades who are also discerning what they are going to do for this once-in-a-lifetime Rama-Lent event.

This synchronicity of sacred seasons – part fitness test, part freedom song – is offering us an opportunity to step back, breathe, give up and let go. It will lighten our load and build up our courage, so we have what it takes to resist all the fascist nonsense that’s about to come down the pike.