As this year’s Eid al Fitr will come, I wonder what Eid really means to Muslims and Muslimahs, as a religious celebration. Eid is for optimism and a fulfilling gratitude towards Allah swt for the blessings that we all partake year around. The country’s Eid holiday allows for people to take a day off from work and simply rejoice in Eid prayers.
For children to be home on Eid day, get ready for the delightful Eid breakfast with savian and mithai, wear new clothes, and meet as well as greet aunts and uncles, cousins, grand parents as well as own siblings and parents – all must mean something really joyful. Adults mingle, invite and visit family and friends, take some delicious food to each others’ and enjoy a nice dinner together.
Not only does Eid feels like a very much needed revival for any broken ties with family and friends, but it enables us to believe ever so strongly that faith does hold people together. Eid inspires a sense of community. Iving off of ourselves to people who are not as well to do, as Allah swt made us, we must give them their share from what we are blessed with and do so with great sense of responsibility, almost feeling that if we did not, our Eid will not be as blessed as it would we, if we did care about the indigent.
When people go to mosques for Eid prayers and have grand breakfasts together at a Mosque based community center, it really makes oneself feel socially connected with other people, through our faith.
People should forego all negative feelings at Eid and truly try to make the effort to be friendly, kind, generous and humble. The effect of Ramdan, prayers, zakat, fasting itself for 30 days, must be worth some good teaching for us all, in our behaviors and interaction with other people.
Eid gives us the opportunity as Muslims and Muslimahs to set a great example for people whose religion is not Islam. & that example lies in the perfection and purity we seek and establish through our social finesse.
Virtues of honesty, equality, respect for everyone, affinity with the country we live in, care for the other people with whom we have an inseparable bond of sharing the land we live on and how each and everyone’s occupation proves to be of service at some point in time. Thus, Eid reminds of this particular feeling of extended interdependence with dignity and very closely knit two-way relationship among people.
From very personal spiritual to collective and social, patriotic to humanist regard for own selves by striving to gain consistent improvement in their areas and aspects of our lives, to keeping the system alive and going, Eid is that staple that super staple which ‘holds’ together the rim of our lives.
We ought to practice small, very small acts of kindness to all whom we can, & be thankful to Allah swt for the blessing of Eid, as a time which comes once a year, and if we wanted to, would make us refreshed for the whole next year to come.
Happy Eid al fitr.