Twenty-Second Day
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Kazim Ali. From Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice. Tupelo Press, 2011.
In describing Ali's book Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice, Tupelo Press writes “Estranged in certain ways from his family’s cultural traditions when he was young, Ali has in recent years re-embraced the Ramadan ritual, and brings to this rediscovery an extraordinary delicacy of reflection, a powerfully inquiring mind, and the linguistic precision and ardor of a superb poet.” Asked about the intersection of his gay and Muslim identities in an interview with Connotation Press, Ali says “Of course being gay and Muslim put my body and my spirituality at bloody war with one another for decades. That’s a war I am glad to have brokered an armistice to. That ‘and’ (as in ‘gay and Muslim’) was a dearly won peace treaty. We’ve put down our arms. I wrote that treaty into the very skin and tissue of my body.”