Egyptians offer Eid al-Adha prayers outside a mosque in Cairo, Egypt, Saturday, Oct. 4, 2014. Muslims around the world celebrated Eid al-Adha Saturday to commemorate the willingness of the prophet Ibrahim - or Abraham as he is known in the Bible - to sacrifice his son in accordance with God's will, though in the end God provides him a sheep to sacrifice instead. The major Muslim holiday coincides this year with the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, the first time this has happened since 1981. Photo: AP Photo/Hassan Ammar ROCKVILLE, Md. — The gonifs who stole Yom Kippur — not to mention Good Friday, Rosh Hashanah and Jesus’s birthday — were seated around a doughnut-shaped desk, hailing diversity. This was the Montgomery County Board of Education in public session last Tuesday afternoon, with dozens of Muslims and their inter-faith allies clamouring in the rafters, and an ungodly mess on the agenda.
At issue was the need to approve a school calendar for 2015-16 in one of the most affluent, well-educated, and politically liberal ridings in the United States. Stretching from the weathered-brick palaces of the Washington elite to the pasturelands of the Appalachian foothills, Montgomery is home to more than a million residents of every creed, faith, and fatherland — including the nine-year-old I walk to a Grade 4 classroom every morning when school is in.
The Muslims had come to ask the board a simple, loaded question: why should the Hebrews’ prayerful New Year and their sombre Day of Atonement be official school holidays for students and teachers here, but not the Koranic feast days of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha? (The Good Friday and Christmas holidays are mandated by the state of Maryland and thus are beyond the local board’s purview.)
Many of the petitioners wore badges or carried placards with the message “Equality 4 Eid.” (Eid al-Fitr marks the end of the fasting month of Ramadan. Eid al-Adha commemorates Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his first-born son to the Lord.) There even was a rabbi in the pro-Eid delegation, preaching that denying days off for Islamic observance while granting them to Jews and Christians would be “damaging to the spirit of one-ness.”
This opinion was not unanimous.
“I’m a Christian and I think it’s ridiculous,” huffed an ex-Marine who was marshalling a column of flag-bearing cadets into the chamber for the Pledge of Allegiance.
“Strike ‘ridiculous,’ ” he commanded me, a moment later. “I say, acknowledge all of them and don’t make ANY of them a day off. Make the kids go to school on all of them.”
“This is conceivably a no-win situation all around,” predicted a board member named Rebecca Smondrowski as the debate began.
“Rude retorts will not be tolerated,” warned the parliamentary Chair. But there was no discourtesy from the galleries, only the plea, as a man named Abdul Sheikh told me, that “as a humble parent, I want my child to have an innocent childhood.”
“In Islam, you don’t get to enjoy anything for free,” Mr. Sheikh went on. “We don’t get up one fine morning and decide ‘I’m going to celebrate.’ These children have not been eating or drinking from sunrise to sunset every day for a month. Do they not deserve a holiday?”
There aren’t any Muslims on the Montgomery County Board of Education, at least none who identified themselves as such. But each member, in his or her turn, professed confusion over how to deal with so much multiplicity.
“There are faiths that I never heard of,” noted Patricia O’Neill. “I am STUNNED by the number of holidays.”
“We are not in a society that is faith-blind,” admitted Christopher Barclay. “We have created this conundrum: as much as we celebrate our diversity, we have to figure out how to HANDLE that diversity.”
A county attorney who looked too much like NHL commissioner Gary Bettman was called to parse the Constitution. He told the crowd that the county’s two official Jewish holidays had survived a court challenge 40 years ago on the grounds that, when schools HAD been open on those days, student and teacher absences exceeded fifteen per cent, making pedagogy “operationally impossible.”
“The school system must advance a secular, not a religious purpose,” the lawyer said. What percentage of the county’s population adheres to the Muslim faith is unknown, the board was told, and it probably would be illegal to ask.
Eventually, the Montgomery County Board of Education voted seven to one to accept a proposal put forth by Member Smondrowski to keep the Jewish holidays as they are and make next year’s Eid al-Adha a holiday as well, but to remove their sacred names from the official calendar altogether. (In 2015, conveniently, Eid al-Adha and Yom Kippur both occur on the same day. It will just be called “Student Holiday.”)
Also: stop calling Christmas Christmas and Easter Easter.
This decision was equitable in one regard: EVERYBODY left unhappy.
“There are going to be headlines,” Member O’Neill despaired. “ ‘This is a war on Christmas.’ ”
“I’m REALLY concerned about a community feeling not respected,” moaned her peer, Barclay.
“As for that legal guy, he’s lying!” flared my friend, Abdul Sheikh. “There never was 15 per cent Jews!”
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