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About the Event: The ATL Ramadan Youth Nights is a collaborative effort conducted throughout the month of Ramadan aimed at building stronger connections for the youth, both amongst each other and spiritually with their Creator (swt). The initiative is in it's 4th year and started out of the need to ensure that during this busy month for every mosque, there remains a focus on our youth.

Goals: The ATL Ramadan Youth Nights mean something different to each person that attends or helps organize. It brings about collaboration between mosques, as many travel across town to visit the youth nights at each mosque. Moreover, the youth nights bring inspiring talks and reminders by youth speakers geared for junior high, high school, and college youth, icebreakers that allow new connections to be made, fun activities, night vigil prayers and also the pre-dawn (suhoor/sehri) meal together. For some it's about a stronger sense of community, others it's about the practical spiritual reminders, and for others it's about the culture and environment that's created at each mosque’s own unique flavor of the youth nights.

“It's so easy to preoccupy ourselves with worldly matters at home, especially as we get tired late in the night, but the youth Qiyams help provide encouragement to worship throughout the night while taking part in eye opening discussions, engaging games, and group prayers […] The Qiyams are successful in not only bringing us closer to God, but closer as a community as well,” said Dania Ibrahim.

"Youth nights allow brothers and sisters to take a break from typical individual spiritual activities and engage in more communal activities while building camaraderie and strengthening bonds of friendships,” said Muhammad Hajaj.

Whose Participating: This year, there are 10 mosques participating in the youth night, with a few more working on solidifying a date and program soon! Each mosque participates simply by sharing the date that they'd like to host their youth night and then it's up to the coordinators and youth team at each mosque to organize their youth night. Youth night activities typically involve icebreakers, group activities, reminders and talks by youth speakers, night prayer (qiyaam), some time for personal reflection or meditation or Quran reading, the pre-dawn meal, and Fajr in congregation before calling it a night.

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