Since the beginning of Ramadan on Sept. 1, millions of Muslims around the world have been fasting daily from food, water and other worldly pleasures.

This week, their fasting will end with the celebration of Eid al-Fitr, and in honor of the Muslim holy day Tuesday, Syracuse University will not hold classes.

Muslims will then begin the month of Shawwal, the 10th month of the Islamic lunar calendar, and end their fasting on either Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on the sighting of the moon.

‘It’s like a little Christmas for us,’ said Ali Benchakroun, a first year law student at SU. ‘This is our big holy day.’

Eid al-Fitr is more or less celebrated the same way by Muslims around the world, Benchakroun said. Families and friends gather to spend the day together and in the morning, around 7 or 8 a.m., go to the mosque to pray the Eid prayer and thank Allah for his blessings, Benchakroun said.

‘The great thing about it, is that the fact that we have a day off, a lot people are going to ask, why do we have a day off on Tuesday?’ Benchakroun said. ‘It’s a way for people to know about Islam.’

But getting Eid al-Fitr on the SU calendar has been a process years in the making.

Making it official

Eid al-Fitr has been an official campus holiday since 1995, said Ahmed Kobeisy, Hendricks Chapel Muslim chaplain and imam. He was instrumental in its addition to the school calendar.

‘Since there is a great deal of commonalities between Islam and the Judeo-Christian traditions, and since Muslims are integral part of the American mosaic, I had hoped and continue to hope that this society is seen as inclusive of Islam rather than being seen only as Judeo-Christian,’ Kobeisy said in an e-mail Friday.

In 1990, when he first volunteered to his current appointed position, Kobeisy said he had sensed Muslim students’ basic religious needs were not met by SU, and he vowed to challenge the status quo by addressing the university calendar committee. He proposed SU add the two main Muslim holy days, Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, the ‘Feast of Sacrifice’ at the end of Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.

‘I decided (to request a Muslim holy day) because I know how hard it is for Muslim students to practice and reconcile both religious demands with the demands of everything in life,’ Kobeisy said. ‘Furthermore, I wanted the university to be inclusive and thirdly, I had hoped for the addition to be educational and help provide more information on Islam.’

Maureen Breed, university registrar chair and calendar committee director, wrote in an e-mail that the school calendar, at that time, already accommodated Jewish students and faculty with Yom Kippur, added to the academic calendar in 1974, and Christians with Good Friday, added to the academic calendar in 1989, and vacations around Christmas and Easter.

The request was legitimate for young Muslims who were pressed for acceptance and religious equality, Kobeisy said.

‘An important reason is that many Muslim students would not profess their religious preference or affiliation out of fear of discrimination,’ Kobeisy said. ‘I knew of Muslim students who would not miss classes to attend a Muslim holiday or a prayer for fear of bias, although it is a university policy to allow students to be absent for religious holy days.’

After discussions with the Muslim Student Association, Kobeisy urged the calendar committee, which sets the calendar for SU every five years, to have the two holy days included as university-recognized holidays and made an aggressive push toward that goal. Kobeisy’s early efforts met resistance from the committee, he said.

At that time many universities across the country only had Christian holidays on their calendars, and schools with prominent Jewish student body took off on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. So for many at SU, Kobeisy’s proposal ultimately meant a startling departure from the university’s scripted religious holiday calendar.

According to MSA National, of the seven members of SU Calendar Committee in 1995, four were apprehensive of Kobeisy’s request and wanted to eliminate all holidays rather than adding one more, while only three members supported Eid al-Fitr. The setback was apparently not enough to dampen eager Muslim students, said Yusuf Abdul-Qadir, a senior political science and Middle Eastern studies major.

After members of the calendar committee questioned Kobeisy about the motives behind his request, they informed him of the possibility of adding only one holiday and not both, because the university did not have more than one day available to offer without affecting the instruction time, Kobeisy wrote in an e-mail.

‘I had to choose Eid al-Fitr over the other one because Muslim students would be coming out of (a month of daily fasting), and they would need a break,’ Kobeisy said.

Abdul-Qadir said progress was frustratingly slow at times. He said the effort of Kobeisy and MSA was deterred by competing administrations.

‘Even today, we get people in the administration who are very supportive, but it’s always off the record,’ Abdul-Qadir said. ‘There’s power politics on their part, and as a student, it’s frustrating.’

Elaborating on the difficulties with the back-and-forth bargaining between the Muslim community and the university, Abdul-Qadir said the effort was ‘kind of a revolution.’

‘It didn’t happen like that,’ Abdul-Qadir said. ‘It was a joined, unified effort. We had allies.’

Abdul-Qadir said fortunately some people, Christians and Jews alike within the university were willing to listen. Muslim students needed all the help they could get, Abdu-Qadir said.

Saving the date

Kobeisy and Muslims students gradually built allies in the university, and soon, members of the SU administration became involved, as eliminating all religious holidays from the official school calendar would have created more controversy.

The senior administrators decided to delve deeper into the issue, and eventually agreed to support Eid al-Fitr and fast-tracked its addition to the university’s calendar.

It was a remarkable turn of events for Muslims in Syracuse, said El-java Abdul-Qadir, Yusuf’s older brother and an SU alumnus. He was also a member of the MSA staff that helped established Eid al-Fitr as a holiday.

‘It was a long time coming,’ he said. It was something that needed to happen. I am more grateful that it was approved than I am salty that it took so long to happen.’

Today, some SU Muslims see the addition of Eid al-Fitr as a foundation for a peaceful institutionalization of Islam in America.

‘I think (the addition of Eid al-Fitr to the school academic calendar) is revolutionary,’ Yusuf Abdul-Qadir said. ‘It’s a step toward recognizing that Muslims are an integral part of this country.’

While administrators wrestle with the school calendar, SU’s registrar, Breed, who headed the academic calendar committee that convened last year, said in an e-mail SU has a commitment to accommodate students’ cultural and religious needs.

With sizable Muslim populations and significant demographic changes taking place in communities throughout the country, the addition of Muslim holy days to U.S. colleges’ and universities’ calendars ‘is the only right thing to do,’ Benchakroun said.

‘Syracuse started it, and it’s going to be a trend,’ he said. ‘A lot of universities might follow.’

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Published on September 28, 2008 at 12:00 pm