Faith Over Fatigue: Muslim Students Embrace Ramadan Amid Busy Schedules

For Muslims students, Ramadan can be a spiritual reset and a balancing act, as students juggle religious practices like fasting with day-to-day responsibilities like attending class and participating in sports.  

Ramadan is a roughly month-long holiday, held from the evening of Feb. 17 to March 19 in East Lansing this year. During Ramadan, Muslims refrain from eating and drinking from dawn to sunset, spend more time reading the Quran and praying, and increase charitable acts. Everyday responsibilities, however, don’t suddenly vanish during this time.

“I understand this is a time of us slowing down, but I think we also need to understand that we do have that constant school stress and having to work with that… during our holy month, it’s very challenging to balance those two,” said Areesha Shah, a junior at Okemos High School.

Fasting requires total abstinence from all food and drink, including water, from sunup to sundown. Shah started fasting during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, when she was 12. Her experience was different from what it is now, attending in-person school and playing tennis. 

While fasting during lockdown, Shah would stay up all night reading, eat a pre-dawn meal called suhoor, and then sleep during the day. 

This year, Shah wakes up around 5 a.m. for suhoor, goes to school, and when she returns, she reflects on her day of fasting and reads the Quran. She breaks her fast with the evening meal, known as iftar, then heads to the mosque, where she prays daily. Once she’s back home, she gets started on her homework, typically going to bed around 11 p.m. or later depending on the amount of work she has to complete.

Shah’s schedule ramps up when the tennis season begins in March. Last year, she played on the team while fasting during tryouts, practices and games. 

“It is difficult, I’m not going to lie. Every time I get really hungry or thirsty… I can never understand what they’re going through, but I think of my Palestinian brothers and sisters,” Shah said. “I start to think, ‘they have no food, they have no water, how are they going out and about?’ For me, that’s how I kinda reside with the fact of fasting, and I think about that a lot when I go on a run or play tennis.” 

Shah isn’t reluctant to experience hunger and thirst, and said that like other Muslims, she uses the month of Ramadan to become closer to God and understand how big a blessing food and water are. 

“I feel like Ramadan really does give you a whole different perspective of looking at how other people in the same world you’re living in are feeling,” Shah said. 

Similar to Shah, Jude Yahya, a senior studying kinesiology at Michigan State University, has been fasting since she was 12 years old. Only during the last two years has she felt the full spiritual connection to Ramadan. 

“I took time to really question what Ramadan is,” Yahya said. “I started reading [the] Quran… I started thinking of prayers like ‘this is for me, this is healing me, it’s not something to just check off’… once you flip the switch and [realize] Ramadan is for me… that’s when I started to feel it.”

During Ramadan, Yahya’s days are 18 hours long, starting at 4 a.m. and ending around 10 p.m. after praying. 

Yahya is taking on 18 credits and said she has at least one exam most weeks. She typically studies in the early morning after suhoor. While this schedule is exhausting to maintain, Yahya said it’s both temporary and worth it. 

Yahya schedules her hardest classes to occur during Ramadan as she finds she can focus better with fewer distractions. 

Yahya said she performs better academically during Ramadan, pointing to an experience she had in an anatomy class last year. She said she didn’t do well on her first exam, which was before Ramadan, but did much better on the other exams when she was fasting. 

“I don’t know if it’s a psychological thing or what, but when I’m taking an exam [while] fasting, I [have] never been more focused and I break down every word,” Yahya said. “I took anatomy last year during Ramadan, and I didn’t think I was going to pass. I don’t know if it was [my] dua or extra prayers, but… every night my dua went towards this class… I have a cheat code called Ramadan.” 

This Ramadan is unlike others Yahya has experienced, mainly because her parents and sister are currently overseas in Jordan. Typically, she would prepare iftar and attend prayer sessions called Taraweeh with her mother. Additionally, her mother would have mini lectures for Yahya, her sister and brother throughout the month. 

“I feel like needing my mom here during Ramadan has been really weird,” Yahya said. “When my mom’s here, I submerge myself in the community [and] we go to see our friends, it’s been a very lonely Ramadan.” 

Yahya also said that the culture around Ramadan isn’t the same in America as it is in the Middle East. Although she was born in Michigan, Yahya spent her upbringing living in the West Bank and the United Arab Emirates before she moved back to Michigan in 2019. 

In the UAE and West Bank, the spirit of Ramadan is everywhere, Yahya said. Streets are lit up and decorated, prayers can be heard echoing, school days are shortened and stores remain closed during the day but are open at night. 

“We’re all fasting and going through the same thing,” Yahya said. “You feel a sense of community… every day is extended for you to go with the schedule of Ramadan.”