Eid will mark end of Ramadan
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Across the lake, Kholysoh Salaymane, a 20-year-old University of Washington student, spent an evening with several Cham Muslim friends, stuffing some 200 bags of toys.
All this bustle was in preparation for the "Festival of Fast-Breaking" known as Eid al-Fitr, which ends the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims refrain from eating, drinking and sensual activities from dawn till sunset to focus instead on God.
Tomorrow, more than 8,000 Muslims from a variety of backgrounds and cultures are expected to attend Eid al-Fitr at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in Seattle, where they will chant and pray in unison, as Muslims worldwide do.
Though Eid lasts three days, the main activities occur on the first day, when adherents go to early-morning prayers at their mosques, then go home to eat, bathe and put on their best clothes for Eid al-Fitr.
In the Seattle area, Muslims have held their Eid prayer at the Convention Center for a half-dozen years, with about 5,000 participating last year. Tomorrow after they pray and listen to a sermon on unity, they will break to visit with family and friends. It's at this time, and in the week leading up to the Eid al-Fitr prayer, that different Muslim cultures celebrate their special traditions.
"The whole month of Ramadan, we shouldn't do anything," said Salaymane, a Cham Muslim who came to the U.S. in 1987 with her family from Vietnam. "So this is our first day of basically breaking loose."
Washington state has about 40,000 Muslims from various backgrounds and cultures, including Arab, South Asian, Cham, Somali, Indonesian, Egyptian, Morrocan and Bosnian, said Aziz Junejo, who helped organize the convention-center gathering.
Salaymane is one of about 700 local Cham, the people of the Kingdom of Champa, which occupied what is currently the area from central to south Vietnam. Some Cham also lived in Cambodia.
Most Cham came to the U.S. and other countries as refugees after fleeing the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Vietnam War. Most live in the Beacon Hill, Rainier Valley, Northgate and Lake City areas.
About 70 percent of Cham in the United States are Muslim, said Basari Mohamath, secretary of the Cham Refugee Community of Seattle. After praying at the convention center, Cham Muslims will gather for a potluck at their local community center in Rainier Valley, where Salaymane and others from the UW Cham Student Association will give bags filled with toys and sweets to children.
Korshed, an Egyptian Muslim from Sammamish, has been baking about 200 kahk — Egyptian cookies filled with nuts and covered with powdered sugar — traditionally made for Eid al-Fitr.
"It's common in Egypt for the women to bake cookies together" for the event, said Korshed, who came from Egypt in the mid-1970s. "My mother, her sister and my grandmother would come in one house, and we'd sit there and we'd make trays and trays."
About 500 Egyptian Muslims live in the Seattle area, estimated Ahmed Zayan, Korshed's husband who is a software engineer at Boeing. Most live on the Eastside, working in technology, Zayan said.
Mohamad Joban, who came from Indonesia in 1990 and is an imam at a mosque in Olympia, will be leading an Eid prayer and sermon at St. Martin's College in Olympia. Local Indonesian Muslims, who number about 200, have been preparing Asian food such as egg rolls, Joban said.
Koshin Mohamed, executive director of Somali Community Coalition in Seattle, will spend the first day of Eid eating three feasts. In addition to lunch and dinner with family and friends, he will eat a special breakfast at home of spongy injera bread with cow or goat liver. Mohamed said most of the area's Somali Muslims live in South Seattle, SeaTac, Kent and Renton.
Adam Abdul Hahdi, a 30-year-old African American from Seattle, thinks there are from 2,000 to 5,000 African-American Muslims in the Puget Sound area.
"We have Cham mosques, Pakistani mosques, Somali mosques," said Junejo, the convention-center gathering organizer. "But on this particular day, they all make it a point to come to this particular prayer and to be a part of this one big community."