One of my favorite poems by Rupi Kaur.

Salaam Cinema (1995)

A paramedic woke him up and wanted to take him to the hospital but the man refused to get on the stretcher. He shouted “No, it’s Ramadan! I’m not leaving because I don’t want to miss Taraweeh (Ramadan late night prayers)!”

Then something Divine happened. Seeing all the cop cars and ambulances, a man standing next to me tried recording what happened. A board member of the mosque walked up and told the man to stop recording.

“You’re not filming that, are you?” the board member said. “That’s our brother right there. May Allah make it easy on his struggles.”

This man who passed out last night is outside the mosque all the time. A few nights ago he had urinated on himself and kept wanting to come inside the mosque for the nightly Ramadan iftar dinner. Security wouldn’t let him inside the mosque because it was a safety and security concern obviously, but they made sure he was given a plate of food outside.

This is the love and compassion people in the mosque have for a person dealing with struggles. Instead of tearing him down, de-humanizing him or kicking him out of the community, they do everything they could to help him during his cries for help.

“We all pray for our brother,” a woman standing next to me last night said. “He’s battling through addiction. But look, even in his most difficult struggles, he is still drawn to the call of Allah. That’s not an accident. We don’t kick him off the property because we’d rather have him here among the Muslims than all alone doing who knows what somewhere else.”

There are so many obvious parallels here to similar stories during the time of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). And I’m not mentioning where this happened nor who this man is, out of respect for his privacy. I urge you to do the same if you know the situation I’m talking about.

“Each and every one of us is tested in this world,” the woman standing next to me continued. “This is the test that Allah chose for him. What good comes from us attacking him? On the Day of Judgment, wouldn’t we want someone like him testifying to Allah that we helped him rather than adding to his hurt?”

This goes deeper than drunk people at the mosque. Each and every one of us is probably guilty of making someone not feel welcome in our spaces. It could have been explicit or some kind of implicit action that discouraged them from wanting to keep coming. In these blessed nights of Ramadan, it’s important to keep our hearts soft and conscious of every interaction we have with one another. Every one of our interactions should encourage another person to come closer to God, instead of encouraging them to head in the opposite direction.

These are the types of Muslim spaces I am blessed to be apart of. The ones that stand up for others especially when those others are unable to stand themselves.