On Saturday evening, Kenza Fourati and her two zealous children hovered around a decorative Ramadan calendar they put up about a month ago in their Brooklyn home.
“Yallah, let’s turn it around,” Ms. Fourati said. Together, they flipped it and revealed the other side: “Eid Mubarak. The Mohyeldin Fourati family.” The sun had just set, the crescent moon was spotted and it was confirmed: Eid al-Fitr, the holiday that marks the end of the holy month of fasting for Muslims, would be on Sunday.
Decorating the house during Ramadan and Eid is a relatively new tradition that Ms. Fourati, a model and the co-founder of a brand called Osay, has adopted. As her children have been getting older, they have been asking more questions about their faith.
In Tunis, where Ms. Fourati, 39, grew up with a large family, Ramadan celebrations were all around her. On the night before Eid, she recalled running around the streets surrounding her home with her friends as fireworks lit up the sky.
“This is how I grew up, and I want to give them a glimpse of how we grew up,” said Ms. Fourati, who has been creating fun ways for her children to explore being Muslim.
She then pulled apart her children, who were playfully wrestling each other, and led them to a bedroom upstairs to show them their new outfits for a morning Eid prayer they planned to attend at Washington Square Park. For Idris, 6, Ms. Fourati presented a white jebba, a traditional Tunisian robe, and a red chechia, a cylindrical brimless hat. She had some options for Dora, 8 — either an embellished purple jebba paired with a gold belt or a black Palestinian thobe. Dora jumped up and down and exclaimed that she liked the purple dress: “It’s shiny, and it has more jewels.”
After a spiritual and disciplined month of fasting, Eid al-Fitr is a joyous holiday for Muslims. They show off new outfits, attend festivals, eat special-occasion dishes and sweets and visit friends and relatives. But none of it would be possible without the mothers in the households, who, on the day before, make the magic happen.
In New York, where nearly 800,000 Muslims reside, many mothers have created new preparation rituals with their families while also carrying on old ones from their childhoods.
Growing up in the 1980s on an island in Bangladesh called Sandwip, Mahima Begum and her five siblings would rush to the local mela, or festival, on the morning of Eid, where they purchased colorful bangles and Bengali sweets. When they returned home, they were greeted with a feast prepared by their mother, who had stayed up the whole night preparing it.
“We were doing nothing,” Ms. Begum said. “My mom doing everything.”
Ms. Begum has since inherited the responsibility. Each year, she puts together an impressive Eid spread for the 40 or so relatives who visit her home in the Kensington section of Brooklyn. The preparation process is no joke.
“First, I think about what my kids like,” Ms. Begum, 49, said. “That type of food I make.”
Ms. Begum started cooking at 4 a.m. the day before Eid. She made dishes like beef biryani and goat korma, as well as her signature dish, chicken jhal fry, a masala fried chicken doused with a sweet and spicy sauce. She conceived the recipe when her daughter, Shompa Kabir, was 2. (She keeps track of time not by year but rather by her children’s ages.) She has cooked the dish every Eid since.
Ms. Kabir, 29, a food content creator who gained an interest in cooking after observing her mother in the kitchen, helps how she can, especially as she has gotten older. Her offering the past few years has been a dessert that she calls a ras malai cake. It’s a diasporic creation: an almond crusted sponge cake, similar to tres leches, with masala-infused milk topped with light whipped cream.
“I want her to feel like she’s being appreciated,” Ms. Kabir said. “She’s been doing this my entire life. So I want her to see and understand that what she’s doing is very commendable.”
Over in the High Bridge section of the Bronx, Ramatoulaye Diallo had plenty of help from her two daughters and her daughter-in-law while preparing the Eid spread. The star was thiebou yapp, a one-pot rice and beef Senegalese dish.
Just before 1 a.m., Ms. Diallo, a 52-year-old nurse, transferred marinated beef into a pot so big that it occupied two burners on the stove. Then, she focused her attention on the yassa, a vermicelli dish made with onion sauce, and gave one of her daughters instructions in the Fulani language to bring some water for the pot.
“We don’t measure, we just cook,” Ms. Diallo said.
Her daughters then stepped away from the kitchen to set up the dining table with a new tablecloth purchased on a trip to Morocco. They had also changed the bedsheets and cleaned the curtains, a practice that Ms. Diallo carried on from her own mother in Thiès, Senegal.
“There is a myth that said that Eid should find everything clean,” explained Ms. Diallo, who moved to New York with her family in 2006. “No dirty clothes, nothing. The day is so big and the day is so holy, so they believe that everything need to be clean for the celebration.”
“I try to make sure that they take the holiday seriously,” added Ms. Diallo about her daughters. “Being here is not easy. A lot of people get westernized, and they forget about their culture.”
Her efforts have been fruitful. Safiatou Diallo, 28, her eldest, said her favorite part about Eid is choosing the fabric and style for her traditional Fulani outfit and getting it handmade by a tailor. “I even sometimes fantasize about moving back to Africa and just wearing African clothes every day,” she said.
Yelda Ali has been thinking a lot about how to immerse her 15-month-old daughter, Iman, in her culture. Ms. Ali, 39, the daughter of Afghan refugees, grew up celebrating the holiday house-hopping in Edmonton, Alberta. But for the majority of her 16 years in New York, she didn’t have houses to hop to. (Her family remains in Canada.) Now that she is a mother, she has cultivated her own household with her husband, Anthony Mejia, filling it with recreated traditions.
“I feel like traditions just helps us feel rooted,” said Ms. Ali, a D.J. in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. “We still have the privilege of our language. We still have privilege of the recipes, the songs, the music. For me, cultural preservation is so important. This is our existence, and if we don’t continue keeping this stuff in community and being intentional about passing the stuff on, they’ll die. So many things die in diaspora — we’ve seen it happen.”
But there’s also so much birth and rebirth in diaspora.
Every Eid, Ms. Ali, 39, plans to pick up a new recipe that had been passed down on her maternal side — unwritten recipes that she wants to keep alive. This year, the recipe was an Afghan pasta cooked with ground beef and topped with yogurt and dried mint.
Mr. Mejia, who is Dominican, has developed a fondness for learning how to cook Afghan dishes. He was in the kitchen frying onions for the dish, while Ms. Ali was steaming Iman’s floral Eid dress in the room next door. Ms. Ali had started playing vibrant Afghan folk music, hyping up Iman, who was dancing, in Farsi.
Their plan for Eid was to set up a mela, or picnic, at Herbert Von King Park, with the Afghan pasta and some traditional sweets. Melas are very common in Afghan communities, and though they are typically quite big, here in New York, Ms. Ali would be having her own mini mela with her new family.
“It’s about quality,” Ms. Ali said, “not quantity, right?”
