We’re three weeks in, and the fasting month of Ramadan will continue to enchant our souls for just one more week. We miss it already.
But that’s how it’s always been with Ramadan. No sooner do we become one with it — one with its all-consuming teleological spirit and the allure of its daily rituals — than we realise that it’s time to part with it. And, yes, parting, in this case, is such sweet sorrow. It is so because Ramadan, as it has been described, is like a rare flower that blossoms once a year and just as you begin to smell its fragrance, it disappears for another year.
It is difficult to describe the cultural, let alone the transcendent, ethos of this special month to a non-Muslim, as it is, say, for an American to describe the engaging warmheartedness that sweeps across American society during Thanksgiving — a festive event anchored uniquely in American traditions — to a non-American.
During Ramadan, we fast from sunrise to sunset, a ritual at whose core is a call to believers to abjure sin and embrace virtue, to reflect on purpose and meaning in one’s world. Never mind that we still speak of ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’, and do so as if the Copernican model of the solar system had not long replaced the Ptolemaic, the theory that earth is the stationary centre of the universe around which the cosmic order rotates. And never mind that eroded figures of speech still haunt our vocabulary, our idiom, our metaphor.
We are, after all, only human, and human parlance, unlike God’s, is flawed. We can strive toward — but are destined never to achieve — perfection. Consider how long it took our species to learn the truth, revealed in the Quran (Verse 21:54) a millennium and a half ago, that “From water We created all living things” and that (Verse 25:54) “It is He who has created man from water”.
Where souls are defined
And how long will it take this same species to unlock the countless other mysteries in our Holy Book, dealing not just with the scientific canon that defines our objective world, but the moral code that governs our individual being? It is in laws and institutions, in the arts and music, in theatre and dance, in science and verse, that our civilisation is housed. But it is in sacred texts that our soul is defined.
At no other time in our lives are we struck, through fasting, prayer and reflection, by how our capacity to feel and communicate is all underwritten by the assumption of God’s presence in our lives, than during the month of Ramadan each year. In short, during this month, we live, as much as we state, Islam. We fast and reflect, for without reflection fasting is merely an act of being hungry as you wait for dinner to be served.
And, no, I will remind non-Muslims, Ramadan is not a sombre affair — far from it. Rather it is, in addition to everything else, a festive month. And being ourselves festive, as observe Ramadan’s cultural and religious rituals — respectively opulent cuisine and effusive piety — we overeat and over-celebrate, over-consume and over-state, yes, but all that display of abandon, in its own way, forces us, actually, to free ourselves from the tyranny of the ‘should’ in our daily lives for the rest of the year, and to equally free ourselves from the constraints we place on our communal sense of reference as believers, subsystems in a social system called the Umma, the commonwealth of Muslim peoples around the world.
Partakers of the same ethos
And, finally, so you think we, American Muslims — along perhaps with other Muslims who live in countries outside the Umma — are not privy to any of that, presumably because we are deprived of the cultural ethos of Ramadan, its souq smells and muezzin sounds, its traditional rituals and living myths? Well, think again, dear reader.
According to the Pew Research Centre (PRC), the renowned fact tank in Washington, which provides information on social issues, public opinion polling and demographic trends in the United States and the world, as many as 80 per cent of American Muslims (I’m one such) observe Ramadan, while, incidentally, only 39 per cent of those Muslims (I’m not, I confess shamefacedly, one such) observe that other pillar of Islam, praying daily. As to why more American Muslims fast than pray, here the scientific insights of PRC are few.
I would say though that no reply to that can match the force of the obvious: Prayer is a solitary affair, whereas Ramadan, because of its engaging gregariousness, reaffirms these Muslims’ cultural ethos and cements the remembrance — torn at the edges in the New World — of their sense of self as Muslims. And we all care about that, surely, as we soon leave this year’s blessed month of Ramadan behind us.
Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.