On May 28 last year, during the month of Ramazan, writer Nazia Erum posed a question on her Facebook wall, asking how many of her friends had attended an iftar before. An overwhelming majority said no. This got her thinking and within a few days, she, along with a few like-minded friends, organised the first of many interfaith iftars. Beginning from her house in Noida, the initiative soon found chapters across India, including in Mumbai, Hyderabad and Lucknow.

This year, too, the initiative has continued under the hashtag #iftar4all and has taken a broader, more organised form. On May 26, outside the All India Institutes of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) hospital in New Delhi, a large iftar gathering was organised, where over four hundred people, mostly poor outstation patients and their relatives were distributed iftar packets.

“One important thing we realised while distributing iftar was, how privileged we were, and how many people are there who need help,” says Shakaib Azhar Chaudhry, a management professional and one of the people associated with iftar4all. “We thought of helping people, particularly those who don’t get proper food, who are away from their homes. We fixed on hospitals to start our work. Why hospitals? We know the condition of healthcare in India. At AIIMS Delhi, people from across North India come for their treatment. But they get minimal facilities for food and living. We thought of starting from here.” 

Ali Shervani, a marketing professional, was one of the people present at the AIIMS iftar. “Food is a personal thing,” he says. “When you share your food, that builds a real bond. You would have noticed it, when you share a meal with strangers, at highways or some tourist places, that stranger doesn’t remain a stranger any longer.”

Credit: @TheMuslimsofIN

“We need to create a dialogue. How else do you work for communal harmony?” Asks Dr Waris Farrukh, former principal of Burhani college, Mumbai. She was the host of the Mumbai chapter of the iftar4all last year.”Dialogue is a chance for each group to come halfway and meet the other. For example, at my college during Ganpati Visarjan, I used to ask my students to help the police with bandobast duty. So you would see students working to organise the Ganpati fest smoothly at our college. This iftar is a similar initiative, where we come and interact, do not judge each other, and respect each other. “

In the times we live in, with gated communities our residence and mainstream media are our primary source of understanding people from outside our own immediate communities, the task of breaking down our artificial barriers has never been higher. Nazia says there were two objectives in mind regarding the interfaith iftars. The first was ‘the wish to open up our homes and through it, possibly, hearts’ to ‘bridge the lack of knowledge about our customs, homes and our food’. At the iftar held this year, the guests were asked to write down one stereotype or bias that they grew up listening to about the ‘other’ community. These notes were then put in a bowl and later read out. This little bowl of notes turned out to be much more than ink and paper, ‘it was generations of mistrust, prejudices and differences being broken’.

Iftar parties are nothing new to the Indian public life. However, their usage has been identified with political parties, and often as part of their outreach programmes to Muslims. An approach like iftar4all takes the tradition of breaking one’s fast, sharing one’s food with others back to its intended form — a normal, recommended activity to be acted upon by common people.  “The annual political iftar pictures were almost a smokescreen for us while growing up,” Nazia says. “We couldn’t see how the tokenism deprived us of the actual inter-community outreach that is needed at ground level. Yes, breaking bread together brings people close. But were the masses actually doing that?”

If the recent hits on the iftar4all hashtag are anything to go by, the masses are certainly taking to it now. Across the country, iftars have been organised at gurudwaras, churches and temples. There have been community iftars at hospitals and refugee camps. In Tihar Jail this year, inmates from different faiths are observing the fast together. For the iftar4all group, the plan this year is to go beyond homes and extend it to hospitals, juvenile homes, night shelters and so on.

In Guwahati since last year, under the mentorship of journalist Teresa Rehman, a few like-minded professionals started organising iftar get-togethers and Eid mehfils at educational institutions that never ever had any direct exposure to the Muslim society. An Eid Mehfil was organised at the Parijat Academy at Pamohi in Greater Guwahati in July 2017, the entire target group being tribal children from nearby villages. “Deliberations about various facets of Islam, musical programme, quiz and serving of Eid cuisine to the students and faculty marked the event,” says Nurul Islam Laskar, former executive editor of Eastern Chronicle, and one of the organisers. “This year too, an Eid Mehfil has been planned at the Guwahati Blind School during July 2018. This one will have added items such as gifts for all students and an “Itr counter” so that the visually-impaired children can get the fragrance of Eid.”

Rana Safvi is a historian focussing on Delhi art and heritage, with a particular focus on the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, she has been an integral part of the interfaith iftar programmes since last year. On her blog, one finds a section named saanjha chulha dedicated to Indo-Islamic architecture. Saanjha Chulha is a quintessential Indian tradition, where people living in the same mohallas, spread across various faiths and practices, would cook and eat food from a single community kitchen. This tradition, Safvi says, would ensure that communal harmony and brotherhood is never breached. Iftar4all is a gentle throwback to an earlier tradition like this, where inter-faith harmony was the norm rather than the exception of the day.

A remarkable gesture of interfaith harmony was done by Yashpal Saxena on June 3, this year. Four months back, his son Ankit was allegedly murdered by the family of the Muslim girl he was in love with. On the third of this month, Yashpal organised an iftar party in memory of his son.  Anas Tanwir, a Supreme Court advocate and part of the iftar4all group in Delhi, was present to do ‘khidmat‘ at this iftar. “Hate can only be defeated by love,” he says. “His (Ankit’s) father has shown us a way. He has overcome grief to support love. We had to be by his side. The world is going through a churn. We would like to be on the side that heals.”