It's the Brian Larry Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone.

The Islamic holy month of Ramadan began at sundown on Sunday at a time when the killing of so many civilians in Gaza, as we discussed

earlier in the program, is causing worldwide grief and horror, not just among Muslims, but for

any people, when it's your people dying at that kind of rate, you tend to feel it that much

more personally and viscerally, I think it's fair to say. And when it's her own relatives,

here is a Palestinian American from San Francisco named Marwan Sabata on NPR's

weekend edition on Sunday on beginning the daily fasting ritual for Ramadan, but thinking about

his relatives back in central Gaza. They will not have a meal.

So it shatter me.

When I eat, when it's time to break my fast,

I'll be taken bites with a great deal of pain,

sorrow, suffering, agony,

and consumed with guilt.

Marwan Sabata on Weekend edition. Another group for whom Ramadan

is especially intense this year is Muslim asylum seekers here in New York, largely from West

Africa, who literally flew to Central or South America and made their way up. We talked on the show

recently about those two

furniture stores in Queens and the Bronx where scores of African asylum seekers were sleeping.

Our local news website, Gothamist, has a story called New York Mosques, are struggling to serve

migrants as Ramadan begins. And with us now, we welcome Amar Abdul Rahman, deputy imam at the mosque called

Majid al-Haram USA on East 205th Street in the Bronx. That's a Bedford Park section at the end of the

D-Train near Lehman College, Harris Park, around there. He also serves as outreach coordinator for the

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