IFTAR TABLES
Iftar Tables is a revival of a project first run by 14hundred, a creative Muslim start-up, in 2017.
Two years prior, someone had DM’d the company’s Instagram page to enquire when Ramadan in South Africa began. The person had just moved to the country to start a new job and didn’t know any Muslims, but happened to stumble across our company during a Google search.
A few calls later, some of our incredible friends got in touch with this individual and hosted her for Eid that year. She formed new friendships, found a community (and ultimately ended up marrying one of them), and through her reaching out – this project was born.
14Hundred was put on pause not long after as we too ended up moving continents and switching jobs and in the mix of it all, since leaving familiar spaces and communities, we’ve often found ourselves alone, Googling: ‘Ramadan start date’, ‘Iftar time’ and ‘Mosques near me’.
New communities can often be hard to find and nurture and while we’ve found ‘alone’ or with ‘less people’ to often be our preference for 11 months of the year, Ramadan without some form of community ranks highly among our least favourite experiences.
WHY IFTAR TABLES
After spending several years trying to find the ‘spirit of Ramadan’ in new and unfamiliar places, we’ve realised that it’s seldom found in prayer spaces – no matter how grand – or restaurant iftar menus – no matter how expansive.
Rather, before dawn, the warmth of the month finds you through the lady in the apartment across the road who waves at you during suhoor. Some days it finds you through the family who notices an out-of-city number plate on your car in the mosque parking lot and drives up to check if you would like to join them for iftar. Other days it creeps up on you through 3 Turkish grandmas at the mosque who spread their mat out a little further to include you in their iftar feast. When you least expect it, the warmth of Ramadan finds you through a cleaner at a hotel in West Africa who notices your prayer mat and calls back later with fruit and a scribbled address to the closest restaurant, a cab driver who turns around to share a handful of dates, and an extrovert from a group of friends at an iftar picnic that screams: ‘Are you alone? Join us!’
In unfamiliar spaces, it’s in these seemingly insignificant gestures from perfect strangers that we’ve found some of the greatest mercies of the month.
And so, off the back of a really tough few months for many across the globe, we thought it would be the perfect time to rekindle this project in the hopes that we can help others like us find a sense of deep community and warmth that the sacred month brings with it.
Breaking your fast alone is bleak, don’t do it.
WHO WE ARE
Iftar Tables is a revival of a project first run by 14hundred, a creative Muslim start-up. The project is run by a group of working professionals living in several cities across the world, far away from familiar communities.
Iftar Tables 