The Best of Times: A Former Prisoner Remembers Ramadan at Guantánamo

I first read the Dickens' classic, Bleak House, in solitary confinement, Camp Echo. The concentric part of this story is based on the fictitious -- though accurately representative -- and never-ending case of Jarndyce vs Jarndyce which ultimately consumes and destroys the lives of it’s central characters, rather like the Supreme Court decisions relating to the Guantánamo detainees. But it was the first sentence of another Dickens classic, A Tale of Two Cities, which reads, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," that captured my imagination back then. For that is precisely how I would have described the noble months of Ramadan spent in U.S. custody.

It was the night before the festival of Eid ul-Adha that I was sent from Pakistani custody into U.S. custody at Kandahar. After the brutal initiation of being processed like an animal and locked in a cage made of razor wire, I couldn't believe my ears when a visitor from the Red Cross was wandering around the cells, with an army escort, handing out small pieces of meat and cold bread to detainees, uttering the words, "Eid Mubarak."

That was the first Eid my family ever spent without me. Another five (both Eids of al-Adha and al-Fitr) were to pass before I saw them again. For most people in Guantánamo, it is approaching 16 of these blessed days over a period of eight years, dwelling in cages. And still they pray for deliverance.

However, the worst Ramadan I've ever had in my life was not in Guantánamo; that happened in Bagram -- the U.S. detention facility in Afghanistan. This was a place where already torture, humiliation and degradation of detainees regularly occurred. We were not allowed to talk, we were not allowed to walk or exercise without permission. We were not given access to natural light -- or dark. We had to guess prayer times and were not allowed to pray in jama'ah (congregation), call the athaan or recite the Quran out loud. I had to make tayyamum (dry ablution) for a year and had forgotten how to make wudhu (ablution) correctly by the time I arrived in Guantánamo, since water could only be used to drink, but not for wudhu. Anyone failing to comply with these rules was unceremoniously dragged to the front of the cell, their wrists shackled to the top of the cage and a black hood placed over the head. It happened to us all -- sometimes for hours, and even days, on end.

When Ramadan came I was already dreading it. I think we were all dreading it. There were no hot meals or drinks for us in Bagram. Fresh vegetables were a luxury we were not afforded. Fresh fruit was a rarity. There was none of the food we all so lovingly prepare and indulgently consume during this month of abstention in our homes. There were no snacks between meals or keeping food until later: everything had to be handed back within 15 minutes -- eaten or not. The meals were small pre-packed sachets, the types used for campers, and, sometimes, a moldy piece of Afghan bread thrown in for good measure.

There was no Taraweeh prayer, no Eid prayer. In fact, the Jumu'ah (Friday congregational prayer) has not been performed by any of the Guantánamo prisoners for the best part of a decade. The detainees in Bagram and Guantánamo shortened every prayer not only as a mercy from Allah, but as a refusal to accept any permanence of incarceration, even though that was -- and continues to be -- a looming reality in one way or another. It was a defiant rejection of imprisonment without charge or trial -- a fact unnoticed and quite irrelevant to our captors.

As if to punish us for the very arrival of Ramadan we were given only two meals: the suhoor (pre-dawn meal) and iftaar (sunset meal), the latter being given to us often several hours after sunset. On the day of Eid ul-Fitr we did not feast and make merry like most of the Muslim world. Instead we were made to fast from dawn to near midnight when we were finally given a food sachet. One of the guards, a young female to whom I used to speak often about Islam, history and literature was appalled by this and gave me some of her own food, at real risk to herself. It is a gesture I will never forget, but she was a rarity.