Making an #AccessibleRamadan for Muslims who don’t drive or own a car

By Laura Poyneer
Alt Muslimah

I am a single woman who is not able to drive. A combination of sensory processing and anxiety issues means that I have never felt fully in control of a car and have learned from experience that it’s safer for both myself and others if I’m not on the road.

It can often be difficult to go from point A to point B without a car. While the area where I live has a good public transit system, bus routes don’t always run where I need to go, when I need to get there, or on a convenient schedule.

One of the places I’ve struggled to get to is my local mosque. In order to reach the mosque, I first walk approximately ten minutes to the bus stop and then hop on for a ten minute ride to the nearest mosque. This, however, is the best case scenario. When the bus schedule doesn’t line up with prayer times at the mosque, travel time can eat up an entire afternoon. For example, I have to allocate over two hours to attend the Friday prayers each week and this means making a special arrangement with my manager to take such a long break from work every Friday.

Editor’s note: Laura Poyneer is a European-American convert to Islam who lives near Seattle. She works in online tech support and volunteers for the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative. She is active on Twitter athttp://twitter.com/muhajabah. Her views are her own. This article originally appeared in Alt Muslimah.

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