March (Muslim) Madness

Revisiting THE BURDA during the last days of Ramadan

March is known as March Madness in the United States. The NCAA Division I men’s college basketball teams compete in seven rounds for the national championship, until you get to the Final Four.

I know vaguely that March is important for these nightly games. I’ve watched people watch the games, like a weird anthropologist, which I am not.

I am weird but I’m not an anthropologist.

For American Muslims, if you add tarawee, midnight dhikr, suhur with proper dood patthi chai at 4 AM, and tahajjud there’s a different kind of madness, too.

A lightness, a delirious kind of happiness that you are doing everything you possibly can do, doing what the Beloved probably did all the time, and that your actions are aligned with a tradition that precedes you and will continue after you are gone.

You are in total submission to the divine will.

(Not basketball but close enough)

Just as these college basketball games are consolidated into a month, for Muslims in the last third of the month, so much worship…