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A few hours before dawn, when most New Yorkers are fast asleep, a middle-aged man rolls out of bed in Brooklyn, dons a billowy red outfit and matching turban, climbs into his Lincoln Town Car, drives 15 minutes, pulls out a big drum and — there on the sidewalk of a residential neighborhood — starts to play.

The man, Mohammad Boota, is a Ramadan drummer. Every morning during the holy month, which ends on Sept. 21, drummers stroll the streets of Muslim communities around the world, waking worshipers so they can eat a meal before the day’s fasting begins.

But New York City, renowned for welcoming all manner of cultural traditions, has limits to its hospitality. And so Mr. Boota, a Pakistani immigrant, has spent the past several years learning uncomfortable lessons about noise-complaint hot lines, American profanity and the particular crankiness of non-Muslims rousted from sleep at 3:30 a.m.

“Everywhere they complain,” he said. “People go, like, ‘What the hell? What you doing, man?’ They never know it’s Ramadan.”

Mr. Boota, 53, who immigrated in 1992 and earns his living as a limousine driver, began waking Brooklynites in 2002. At first he moved freely around the borough, picking a neighborhood to work each Ramadan morning.

Not everyone was thrilled, he said. People would throw open their windows and yell at him, or call the police, who, he said, advised him kindly to move along.

As the years went by, he and his barrel drum were effectively banned from one neighborhood after another. He now restricts himself to a short stretch of Coney Island Avenue where many Pakistanis live.

Fearing that even that limited turf may be threatened real estate for him, he has modified his approach even further — playing at well below his customary volume, for only about 15 to 20 seconds in each location, and only once every three or four days.

The complaints have stopped, he said. But as he reflected on his early years of drumming in the streets of New York — before he knew better — wistfulness seeped into his voice. He rattled off the places he used to play, however briefly: “Avenue C, Newkirk Avenue, Ditmas, Foster, Avenue H, I, J and Neptune Avenue.”

“You know,” he reluctantly concluded, “in the United States you can’t do anything without a permit.”

Mr. Boota wants to be a good American, and a good Muslim. “I don’t want to bother other communities’ people,” he said. “Just the Pakistani people.”

Several prominent Muslim organizations in New York said they knew of no other drummers who played on Ramadan mornings. But while the custom’s usefulness has been largely eclipsed by the invention of the alarm clock, it has hung on in many places. Indeed, Mr. Boota said he continues the practice, in spite of the challenges and resistance, as much to keep a tradition alive as to feed a cultural yen of his countrymen.

“They’re waiting for me,” he said.

The daily Ramadan fast runs from the start of dawn to dusk. So shortly after 3 one recent morning, Mr. Boota left his wife, Mumtaz, as she prepared a predawn meal in their Coney Island apartment. About 15 minutes later he pulled his Lincoln to a stop in front of Bismillah Food, a small Pakistani grocery store on Coney Island Avenue, near Foster Avenue. Several men were inside; taxicabs parked outside suggested their occupation.

In one fluid motion, Mr. Boota popped the trunk, cut the motor, leapt out, hoisted the drum’s strap over his shoulder, greeted the owner — “Salaam aleikum” — and, standing in the sidewalk penumbra of the shop’s fluorescent light, began playing.

The men came to the door. “He’s a very popular man here,” one of them said, nodding at Mr. Boota, who wore his usual performance attire: a traditional shalwar kameez, a loose two-piece outfit, elaborately embroidered with gold thread.

Mr. Boota wielded his two drumsticks in a galloping clangor that echoed off the facades of the darkened buildings.

After about 20 seconds, he ended his performance with a punctuative smack of the taut drum heads. There was an exchange of mumbled pleasantries in Arabic, the men moved back inside the store, and as quickly as he had arrived, Mr. Boota was behind the wheel of his car again, driving a block south to another Pakistani-owned business.

“A few seconds,” he said, as he cut the engine again. “Ten, 15 seconds, and bye-bye.”

For the next 20 minutes, he repeated this drill outside three Pakistani restaurants, four convenience and grocery stores and a service station.

No one complained — audibly, at least. And a close watch on nearby windows along the street revealed no annoyed, or even curious, residents.

“You see, nobody yelling at you,” Mr. Boota said cheerily. “Everybody happy to see you.”

He added, “I don’t want people unhappy.”

Drumming, Mr. Boota said, is a family tradition. He is a seventh-generation ceremonial drummer and is now training his 20-year-old son, Sher, one of eight children. In addition to his Ramadan reveilles, Mr. Boota plays at Pakistani weddings, birthday parties, graduation celebrations and other events.

“A lot of happiness hours!” he exclaimed.

During his rounds the next night, he stopped at a Pakistani-run service station and wandered with his drum into the service bay. He wanted to demonstrate the full capacity of his instrument. One of the mechanics slid the heavy doors shut, and Mr. Boota started to play at full volume, unleashing deafening sheets of sound. For three solid minutes he pounded out relentless, churning polyrhythms that filled the space like smoke.

Mr. Boota was obviously reveling in the power of his drum after a week of frustrated Ramadan duty. As the ringing in the listeners’ ears faded, he headed back to his car.

“It’s a great noise,” he said.

Majeed Babar contributed reporting.

Giving Ramadan a Drumroll in Brooklyn at 4 A.M.,
NYT,
13.9.2009,
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/
nyregion/13drummer.html

Jerusalem Journal

Jews and Muslims

Share Holy Season

in Jerusalem

September 29, 2008

The New York Times

By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM — Jews are not quiet in prayer. Even when focused on the most personal of quests, as they are this season — asking God for forgiveness for dark thoughts and unkind deeds in the past year — they take comfort in community, chanting and swaying and dancing in circles, blowing the trumpet-like shofar, a ram’s horn.

These are the days of the Jewish month of Elul, leading up to Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, when tradition says that God determines who will live and die in the coming year, and the Western Wall plaza in Jerusalem’s Old City is a festival of piety that runs from midnight till dawn. Tens of thousands roll in and out during the night reciting the special penitential prayers called Slihot.

Coincidentally — the Muslim calendar shifts every year — it is also Ramadan, the month when the faithful believe that God gave the Koran to the Prophet Muhammad, a time of fasting, self-reflection and extra prayer, when being at Al Aksa Mosque here is even more important than usual. At night, when the fasting is over, the celebrating begins. The ancient stone alleyways of the Old City are lit up with strings of colored lights, special foods are prepared, and Palestinian Muslims come and go by the thousands.

The result has been a kind of monotheistic traffic jam in September along the paths of the tiny walled Old City, especially as dawn approaches each day. The Muslims and Jews walk past one another, often intersecting just at the Via Dolorosa of Christian sanctity, as they hurry to their separate prayer sessions: the Muslims above at the Dome of the Rock, the Jews just below at the Western Wall.

It would be wrong to call these tense encounters, because there are essentially no encounters at all. Words are not exchanged. Religious women in both groups — head, arms and legs covered in subtly distinct fashion — look past one another as if they took no notice. Like parallel universes with different names for every place and moment they both claim as their own, the groups pass in the night.

But there is palpable tension. Israeli soldiers walk in small packs to ward off trouble. Security cameras bristle from most walls and intersections. Commemorative stone plaques mark past acts of terrorism (“On this spot Elhanan Aharon was killed. From his blood we will live and build Jerusalem.”) while Palestinians complain that they are losing the competition for control of these ancient byways and that those in the occupied West Bank are barred from coming without special permission.

“I don’t believe the Jews and Muslims can ever have peace here,” Said Abed said on his way to dawn prayers at Al Aksa when asked his view of the unusual intersection of Slihot and Ramadan. “The Jews are trying to control Jerusalem by deciding who can stay here.”

Some Muslims defy archaeology and history by saying that Jews have no link to the site and that it is purely Muslim sacred territory. The same problem exists on the other side as well — some Jews believe that the holiness here is theirs alone.

Inside a closed-off area of the Western Wall plaza a few hours earlier, four young men were studying Talmud, reading to one another rabbinic commentary about a prayer for rain that is said as the new year starts. What did they think of the coincidence of Jewish and Muslim prayers only yards from each other during these days?

“The Muslims shouldn’t even be there,” offered Haim Ben Dalak, 18, of Petah Tikvah, who just started a year at a Jerusalem religious seminary before his army service. “There should be a Jewish temple there. That’s what we believe.”

Thirty years ago, the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, who knew this city as few others have, wrote:

The air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams like the air over industrial cities.

It’s hard to breathe.

The Hebrew name for the city, Yerushalayim, ends with “-ayim,” a grammatical construction used for pairs of things. The device, known as a dual, exists in Hebrew and Arabic but few other languages. Which duality is being invoked has been lost to history, but it would not be hard to imagine that it is the one of heaven and earth, of holy and profane, and the difficulty of their coexisting. But of course everyone tends to focus on the holy.

Called Al Quds (the Holy One) in Arabic, Jerusalem is the city that Mohammad visited on his night journey to heaven. Just as Jews pray facing Jerusalem from anywhere in the world, Muslims did so originally as well, until the site was moved to Mecca. Jerusalem remains for Muslims the third holiest city after Mecca and Medina.

Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, rabbi of the Western Wall for the past 12 years, goes every midnight during this period to Slihot at the wall.

“Night is a special time for spiritual reflection and this wall makes even those with hearts of stone shed a tear,” Rabbi Rabinowitz said after his half-hour Slihot prayer next to the wall, its crevices revealing the imploring notes to God stuffed there by visitors.

Above his voice can be heard scores of groups — some large, some small, all of slightly different tradition — praying in a mix of Hebrew and Aramaic, acknowledging sin, seeking redemption.

Most are devout, but some are secular Jews who come here for Slihot season, a growing trend.

“We love coming to Jerusalem at this time of year,” said Ada Lugati, a hairdresser from the northern city of Afula, who was dressed in distinctly nonobservant manner, in slacks with a uncovered head and bare midriff.

“It feels here as if the heavens are open to our prayer,” she said as she looked up at the clear night sky. Avi Kenig, 17, starting a year of religious study at an institute just across from the wall, put it this way: “We have been taught that here we are at the center of the world. These are the gates to heaven.”

Jews and Muslims Share Holy Season in Jerusalem,
NYT,
29.9.2008,
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/29/
world/middleeast/29ramadan.html

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