Growing up Catholic, and usually not eating meat except fish on a few Fridays a year during Lent, I was always in awe of Muslims who committed to fasting for Ramadan, going without any food or drink during daylight hours for a whole month.<\/p>\n
And that self-control is even more impressive during a summer heatwave, like the muggy one that rolled into New York in July 2013, when I was reporting for WFUV public radio. I thought it would make for great audio to talk to Muslims in the Bronx about not drinking water when it\u2019s 95 degrees outside. So I looked up my nearest Halal market and walked in \u2013 incredibly hot and sweaty from the trip. The guys there made a suggestion: don\u2019t talk now. Come to our mosque, just before sundown.<\/p>\n
That night was my first iftar, at Musa Mosque just down the road from Fordham University. They welcomed a college kid with a big microphone. I talked to the men as we ate dates and I put together a great story.<\/p>\n
Since then, my reporting has brought me to mosques several more times, not to mention temples and churches of every denomination. And instead of covering Muslims fasting in the heat, I was covering one specific Muslim who was fasting while campaigning long hours during an unlikely mayoral run.<\/p>\n
Political journalist Yashica Dutt was there too<\/a>, and I loved reading her dispatches<\/a> from the campaign trail<\/a>, which examined details<\/a> that other reporters didn\u2019t have. She\u2019s an award-winning writer on South Asian identity, and I\u2019m so glad she could revisit the story of Zohran Mamdani and add much-needed nuance to our understanding of this Muslim, Hindu, African, South Asian New Yorker.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Growing up Catholic, and usually not eating meat except fish on a few Fridays a year during Lent,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":776889,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,56383,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,1269,365,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-776888","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-editors-note","10":"tag-new-york","11":"tag-new-york-city","12":"tag-newyork","13":"tag-newyorkcity","14":"tag-ny","15":"tag-nyc","16":"tag-opinion","17":"tag-religion","18":"tag-united-states","19":"tag-united-states-of-america","20":"tag-unitedstates","21":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","22":"tag-us","23":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116526766514607432","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=776888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776888\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/776889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=776888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=776888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=776888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}