Eid al-Fitr marks the end of the period of fasting known as Ramadan and serves as a day of celebration for Muslims worldwide. This year, Eid took place on Friday, March 20, and was celebrated in an unprecedented fashion at EMU. Younis Alhallaq, a graduate student in conflict transformation, attended the Eid celebration at EMU and described it as a “very cheerful experience to witness.” Before coming to EMU, Alhallaq attended a university in Lewisburg, Pa., where there wasn’t as large of a Muslim community. He mentioned how special it was to see EMU support the Muslim community and have the Eid prayer be performed on campus.
Rockingham County is home to two mosques. Every year, they celebrate Eid al-Fitr separately, but for the first time ever, the two mosques came together, at EMU, to celebrate with one another. Trina Nussbaum, Director of the Center for Interfaith Engagement, said, “[the mosques] decided to do that this year for community cohesion, for joint celebration, and then they started to realize, oh dear, there’s a lot of people.” There were an estimated 1,500 people who attended the joint Eid celebration.
Several months ago, when planning for the event began, the estimate given to Levi Clymer, an event operations coordinator at EMU, was that there would be a few hundred people coming. Clymer and other organizers were only notified of the increased expected turnout about a week before the event. Clymer was not the only one surprised, though; he said, “I also don’t think that [the mosques] knew that that many people were going to be attending until really the week before.” In order to make adjustments and successfully host an event of such a large scale, Clymer said it required “a lot of cooperation with a lot of different departments.”
Clymer described some of the planning and execution that went into the event, saying, “because the gym was being used the night before, we came in at 6 a.m. the morning of to get the tarp down. And all the credit for that goes to the facilities, guys who come in and do it. I mean, like, yeah, I was there with them, but it takes a whole team to do that. They had all the tables and chairs already in the hallway outside the athletic suite. All we had to do was bring them in.”
Clymer stressed the importance of getting this event right, given the current cultural climate, saying, “it’s a religious group that, especially at a time like now, is getting a lot of hate and there’s a lot of rhetoric going around that’s anti-Muslim, so we need to be especially careful.”
Nussbaum explained that EMU’s Mennonite history doesn’t need to get in the way of hosting events for other faith traditions. She said, “EMU, when it was founded, was for Mennonites only, and thank goodness, it is not that way anymore. I don’t mind that we still have this history, this heritage. We are deeply Anabaptist, and we continue to be that way, and I love that, but we are also a multi-faith campus.”
