Celebrating Eid with a Heavy Heart: Joy, Remembrance, and Resilience in Islam

Eid Mubarak — but how do we celebrate when our brothers and sisters are bleeding?

Every year, as the crescent moon is sighted and the month of Ramadan draws to a close, Muslims around the world erupt in joy. The takbir fills the air — Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Laa ilaaha illallah — and families dress in their finest, exchange warm embraces, and sit together over festive meals. Eid ul-Fitr is, by divine design, a day of unbridled celebration, a reward from Allah ﷻ  for a month of sincere fasting, prayer, and spiritual striving.

But this year — as in recent years past — that joy is shadowed by a profound ache. Images from Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran have filled our screens and broken our hearts. Mosques reduced to rubble. Children pulled from beneath the debris. Families celebrating Eid with no food, no shelter, and no loved ones left to embrace.

For many Muslims around the world, the question arises with painful sincerity: Is it right for us to celebrate while our brothers and sisters are suffering so deeply?

The answer, grounded in Islamic tradition, is both honest and hopeful: Yes — but not without them in our hearts.

Eid Is a Command, Not a Choice

Eid is not a cultural tradition that Muslims may choose to observe or set aside. It is an institution ordained by Allah ﷻ and established by the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. When the Prophet ﷺ arrived in Madinah and found the Ansar celebrating two days of festivity, he declared that Allah ﷻ had replaced those days with two better ones: Eid ul-Fitr and Eid ul-Adha. (Sunan Abi Dawud)

To abandon Eid entirely — to replace communal gratitude and joy with silence and grief — would be to misunderstand the wisdom embedded in the Islamic practice. Islam does not demand that we suppress our humanity. It channels it. It asks us to hold joy and sorrow together, not to choose one over the other. In this, our faith is both demanding and extraordinarily mature.

Ramadan Prepared Us for This Moment

The month of Ramadan is, at its core, an annual training in empathy. When the believer withdraws his hand from food before dawn and does not reach for it again until sunset, he is not merely disciplining his body — he is remembering. He remembers the mother in a refugee camp who has no iftar to prepare. He remembers the child who knows hunger not as a spiritual exercise but as a daily reality. Fasting is solidarity made physical.

And so, when Eid arrives at the end of that month, it does not arrive as an escape from that awareness — it arrives as its culmination. The joy of Eid is deepened, not diminished, by the compassion that Ramadan carved into our souls. We celebrate knowing — and that knowledge is itself an act of worship.

“Dalam Kita Bergembira, Pasti Ada yang Berduka”

This truth has long been woven into the cultural and spiritual fabric of Muslim communities. The beloved Singaporean singer Rahimah Rahim, in her iconic Eid song Selamat Berhari Raya, captured it with a simplicity that strikes the heart. She reminds listeners that in the midst of celebration, there will always be those who grieve — that the joy of feasting should never make us forget those who have nothing. It is a reminder not to let the festive table become a wall that separates us from the suffering of others.

This is not pessimism dressed in Raya clothes. It is the Islamic spirit of tawazun — balance — embedded in song and culture, passed down through generations of Malay Muslim communities who understood that celebration and conscience must walk hand in hand.

She also offers us something else: resilience. Joy and sorrow take turns, she reminds us, and whatever trials we face, we must face them with steadfastness. Tabahlah menghadapi — endure with resolve. These are not the words of someone giving up on joy. They are the words of a people who have learned that faith carries you through both the feast and the famine.

One Ummah, Beyond Sect and Border

The suffering of Muslims today does not stop at any border. In Gaza and Lebanon, our brothers and sisters have endured relentless bombardment, displacement, and siege. And most recently Iran too. Civilians who had no part in the politics of war have paid the price with their lives and their livelihoods.

The Prophet ﷺ drew no borders around the Ummah’s compassion. When an innocent Muslim — in Gaza, in Beirut, or in Tehran — is killed, displaced, or terrorised, the entire body of the believers is wounded. This Eid, let our compassion be as wide as the Ummah itself.

What Islam Asks of Us This Eid

Rather than dimming the lights of Eid, Islam asks us to expand its meaning. Here is how:

Make du’a for them. Even as Eid celebrations continue, raise your hands and supplicate. Call their names in your heart — the names of Gaza, of Lebanon, of Iran. Ask Allahﷻ  to grant them relief, steadfastness, and victory. Du’a is seen as a means to change impossible situations, offering protection and strength during trials.

Give your sadaqah with urgency. Voluntary charity should not slow when Muslims are suffering — it must increase. The scholars are unanimous on this: when the Ummah is in pain, the flow of generosity from those who have to those who have not is not optional, it is obligatory upon our conscience. Give to reputable organisations with proven track records of delivering aid directly to those who need it most.

At SimplyIslam, we have been honoured to serve the people of Gaza since 2017 — long before the world turned its cameras toward that besieged land. Over the years, our teams have renovated schools so that children could learn with dignity, constructed water wells so that families could access clean water, and carried out numerous humanitarian projects that sought to restore, however partially, a sense of normalcy and hope to a people under siege. Since October 2023, as the scale of the catastrophe has grown beyond imagination, our humanitarian activities have intensified — with support flowing into Gaza on an almost daily basis, channelled through trusted partners on the ground. Every contribution from our community has been a lifeline. Every donation, an act of faith made real. https://rebuildgaza.life/

Speak the truth at your Eid gatherings. The family meal is a circle of trust. Use it. Educate your children. Remind your elders. Do not let Eid become a bubble of wilful forgetting. Awareness shared across a festive table is a form of collective conscience that can move communities to action.

Celebrate as an act of defiance. Our faith, our identity, our joy — these are not weaknesses. When we gather in our best clothes and raise our voices in takbir, we declare that Islam is alive, that Muslims endure, and that no force on earth can extinguish the light that Allah ﷻ placed in the hearts of believers. To celebrate Eid is, in this sense, an act of spiritual affirmation.

The Ummah Is One Body

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said: “The believers, in their mutual kindness, compassion and sympathy, are like one body: when one of the limbs suffers, the whole body responds to it with wakefulness and fever.” (Sahih al-Bukhari and Muslim)

This Eid, let us be that body. Let us celebrate — fully, gratefully, joyfully — but with our hearts stretched wide enough to hold the pain of those who cannot celebrate as we do. Let our du’a carry their names — all of them, without exception. Let our Eid tables carry their memory. Let our Eid joy carry the weight of a promise: that we will not look away, and we will not be silent.

To our brothers and sisters in Gaza, in Lebanon, and in Iran — and in every land where Muslims are suffering and oppressed — know that you are not forgotten. You are in our hearts, in our du’a, and in our actions.

May Allah, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful, grant relief, justice, and lasting peace to our brothers and sisters wherever they are suffering under oppression. O Allah, transform their distress into relief, their hardship into ease, and their fear into security. Strengthen their hearts, elevate their ranks, and grant them victory through patience and steadfastness. Ya Rabb al-‘Alamin.