Dear Leqaa,
Ramadan Kareem. I say it with a heavy heart, knowing these words reach you in a place that has tried to strip them of meaning.
It has now been one full year. One year since that dreadful night that marked the beginning of a brutal wave of arrests targeting protesters for nothing more than speaking the truth. Though we have never met in person, I have carried you with me every single day since Noor called me while I was detained in Jena, Louisiana, to tell me that you had been taken. I remember thinking: not again, not another one of us. From that moment, a piece of my heart has been tied to your struggle.
Leqaa, this is your second Ramadan in detention. I need to say that plainly, not as a detail but as a measure of what has been stolen from you. Ramadan is the sound of your mother’s voice calling you to iftar. It is the particular smell of food being prepared with love after a long day of fasting. It is the feeling of breaking bread with family, of praying together, of being held by community in the holiest time of the year.
But they denied you halal food in that facility. They denied you the basic dignity of practicing your faith. Last Ramadan you endured this, and now another has come and found you still caged, still waiting, still being told that your faith, like your grief, is something to be managed rather than honored.