DADAAB, Kenya — As the Islamic holy month of Ramadan began, Faduma Aden fasted all day although she didn’t have enough food to celebrate with a sundown feast. The Somali mother of three, who fled starvation in her country, said she fasts because she fears God.
Muslims around the world have extravagant dinners during Ramadan after not eating from sunrise to sundown. That kind of celebration is unthinkable this year for most Somalis, who are enduring the worst famine in a generation.
And even though Islam allows the ailing to eat, for many Somalis, it’s a matter of faith to participate in Ramadan’s fast.
“It hard for me to fast, but I did fast for fear of God,” said Aden, who is among tens of thousands who have made the arduous journey, often on foot, to a refugee camp in neighboring Kenya.
Others, like Mohamed Mohamud Abdulle, are ashamed they don’t have food “to console the soul” at sundown after fasting all day.
“How will I fast when I don’t have something to break it?” asked Abdulle. “All my family are hungry, and I have nothing to feed them. I feel the hunger that forced me from my home has doubled here.”
For much of the Muslim world, Ramadan falls this year at a time of political upheaval. Food prices typically spike during the religious month, and the elaborate dinners many in the Middle East put on to break the daily fast drive a deep hole in household budgets.
Fleeing Somalis say they have been forced by famine to fast for weeks or months, without the end-of-day meal to regain their strength.
“I cannot fast because I cannot get food to break it and eat before the morning,” said Nur Ahmed, a father of six at a camp for displaced people in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, whose wife died last year during childbirth.
Sheik Ali Sheik Hussein, a mosque leader in Mogadishu, called it “worrying” that many Somalis cannot fast because they are weak from hunger and don’t have food to regain their strength after sundown.
“We have asked all Muslims to donate to help those dying from hunger,” he said. “Muslims should not be silent on this situation, so we shall help if Allah wills.”
At a hospital run by the International Committee of the Red Cross in the Dadaab camp, clinician Muhammed Hussein breaks away from examining a patient to note that his Ramadan fast gives him greater understanding of the suffering of famine victims.
“It gives you a lot of sympathy when you yourself feel hungry, you will understand the pain of someone who has not eaten. . . . With this kind of severe malnutrition, people have no energy to walk, they have been walking from Kismayo in Somalia to this place. It gives you that heart to feel mercy for the people who are suffering.”
In a Ramadan statement Monday, President Barack Obama said fasting can be used to “increase spirituality, discipline, and consciousness of God’s mercy.” Obama said the world must come together to support famine relief efforts.
“The heartbreaking accounts of lost lives and the images of families and children in Somalia and the Horn of Africa struggling to survive remind us of our common humanity and compel us to act,” he said.
The U.N. says more than 11 million people in the Horn of Africa need food aid, but 2.2 million are in peril in a region of south-central Somalia held by the al-Qaeda-linked militant group al-Shabab that is largely inaccessible to aid groups.
