This year, I am observing Ramadan.
For the unfamiliar (few, I would presume), Ramadan is an Islamic holy month during which Muslims around the world fast during daylight hours so as to clear their minds and enable them to better reflect on God, themselves, and the world. It is observed during the ninth month of the Islamic Calendar, and it begins with the observation of a crescent moon. Accordingly, exactly when Ramadan occurs each year varies, both between years due to the offset of a lunar calendar relative to a solar one and within years due to variable moon visibility. Just this year, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States began Ramadan two days before the rest of the Islamic World because they allegedly observed a crescent moon, whereas others did not.
This archaic-sounding dispute naturally introduces one concept which is central to informing my understanding of Ramadan, that being it is extremely old. In Islamic theology, Ramadan originates with Muhammad’s fast in the second year after his migration from Mecca to Medina in the early 7th century. During this fast, he observed all of the rituals that we today associate with Ramadan: a pre-dawn meal shortly before the morning prayer, the continuation of his typical daily life during daytime hours, and the breaking of his fast at sunset.
However, historically speaking, the origins of the fasting practices that likely inspired Muhammad’s fast are ancient enough that we don’t even know where they come from. Jesus fasted for forty days and forty nights in the desert before he returned to civilization to begin his ministry. This fast would serve as the inspiration for Great Lent, a draconian forty-day-long fasting ritual which evolved into Lent. Moses fasted for forty days and forty nights as he awaited the Ten Commandments atop Mount Sinai. It’s unclear the extent to which Moses himself was a man or a myth, but it’s almost certainly inspired by some even older tradition.
All that being said, I am inclined to believe that traditions that last do so for a reason. Their practitioners get something that could not be gotten by any other means. If fasting were just starvation, then no one would do it. It would not have become mainstream, and it certainly wouldn’t have become a part of almost every major world religion. If it were generally bad, there would be some general taboo against it. I am particularly intrigued by the Islamic fast for two reasons:
It’s the most widespread: Muslims make up a little over a quarter of the world’s population, and a vast majority of those Muslims observe Ramadan by fasting.
Of the common fasting rituals in major religions, it’s the most extreme. No food, no water, and no sexual activity for an entire solar month during the daylight hours. For me, this has meant that I have begun fasting just before 6 AM and ended fasting a few minutes after 6 PM for the past week. Contrast this with Ta’anit in Judaism, where practitioners are only expected to fast a few days a year, or modern Catholic Lent, where practitioners are only expected to fast a couple of days and avoid certain meats on a few others.
As I have fasted, I have tried to figure out what exactly this fast has been doing to me and why some may find these effects desirable. So far, I have some praise for the wisdom of tradition, some critique for its perverse incentives, and some reflection on my own society.
To start, I do find some inner peace when fasting. I find it difficult to be excited, angry, anxious, or sad when I am most disposed to being hungry. Put simply, I do not have the energy to feel anything. Last week, I had to go to court to defend myself pro se against a citation. Normally, when I have gone to court, I have become quite nervous, and in the morning, when I had some energy to spare, I was nervous. But as the day dragged on and my appointment crept closer, I did not become more nervous, but less. Entering the courthouse, taking my seat in the crowded waiting room, and speaking to the prosecutor, I was supremely calm in a way that’s quite unusual for me, and I successfully argued for a continuance on the case. Do I think that the reason I ultimately prevailed was that I was fasting? Maybe, maybe not. There were certainly other factors at play here. But my sense of calm certainly helped me navigate this complex and unfamiliar social terrain.
Contrary to what conventional wisdom may suggest, I have not found myself getting hangry or grouchy, and I suspect that this is because, even if I am hungry, I do not mentally desire to eat. I know that, if I eat, I would be disappointed in myself and feel like a traitor to those friends who are fasting with me. Ramadan has made me more sympathetic to some notion of a mind-body distinction, whereas before, I would have been more inclined towards monism. When the gaps between what my body demands and my mind wants are so often magnified, the distinction becomes clearer, at least for a time.
One thing that fasting has certainly done is strengthen my relationships with certain people, namely my fellow fasters. You see, I am not fasting alone: both of my roommates and three of my closest friends also agreed to observe Ramadan so that we might feel less alone as we did so. While two of my treacherous friends dropped out quite quickly (one because he remembered he is merely a person of the book and the other because his desire for marijuana was too intense to wait for iftar), one of my friends and both of my roommates have stuck to it to the best of their abilities. If this were not a shared experience, I’m not sure that I would have been able to bear it, so I am extraordinarily grateful to those three who have stayed true to the holy word. While my detachment from Muslim social circles has prevented me from fully reaping the various social benefits that I imagine Ramadan provides communities, the mere fact of this peculiar shared experience has certainly drawn me closer to a few around me.
Moving on from mushy nonsense, fasting has also made me far more appreciative and aware of food. Now obviously, I didn’t need to fast to understand that food matters in the abstract. I have been hungry before, albeit never for any prolonged period of time and by my own will, and of course, we have reasons for appreciating food that are rooted in our biology and socialization. What I am referring to here is something more particular.
Last Friday, I ate a lighter suhoor than usual. I had chosen to swap out a turkey sandwich for an apple and to cut my water intake from three bottles to two. Now, the reason I did this was that I felt quite full already and scarcely felt I could bear eating more food since I had eaten a large iftar the previous night. Well, perhaps I should have eaten anyway since I felt terrible for the rest of the day. By mid-morning, I was practically keeling over with hunger and by noon, I was beginning to feel feverish. It got so bad that my manager at the Home Depot recognized that I seemed ill and recommended I clock out a few hours early. Thankfully, when I returned to my apartment, I could take the necessary measures to assuage my pain as I waited for iftar and did not suffer anything worse than what I have already described. Nonetheless, it is incredible to me that such a mild dietary change could wreak such havoc on my body. To that point, I had not fully appreciated that different foods have physical effects on the body. I had not appreciated that, when you eat turkey, your body digests turkey, which is substantively, materially different from your body digesting an apple. Despite the pain I had to endure to understand this, I am glad that I now do.
One part of Ramadan that I’ve found questionable so far is its…incentive structures. Let me explain.
So during Ramadan, one is permitted to eat at night, which usually means one meal early in the morning and one in the evening. This being so, the natural thing to do is to eat two large meals to compensate for not eating throughout the rest of the day. After all, during Ramadan, one is expected to continue with their daily life, just as the Prophet did. While I will happily concede that the food after fasting is delicious in a way no food can typically be by its own right, it does feel gluttonous to see that the clock has struck 6:20 and immediately prepare an elaborate multi-course meal each evening. Now, perhaps habitually eating a big dinner each night is not in itself gluttony. Perhaps it is actually a mirror that reveals my own gluttony. I can see before my very eyes all the food that I would have otherwise consumed throughout the day, laid across my small counter from the fridge to the stove top. Perhaps this incredible feat of consumption only makes me feel bad because it reveals how much I depend on physical sustenance to sustain myself. I’m not sure. Regardless, it feels a bit ridiculous, and it certainly doesn’t feel pious.
But I digress, because if there’s one thing Ramadan absolutely incentivizes, it’s sloth. According to Islamic tradition, it is better to laze around than it is to break fast. Given the constraints on daily caloric intake, this can actually be quite necessary, and if not necessary, then certainly pleasant. So far, the two days of Ramadan which I have most enjoyed were two weekend days where I intentionally stayed in my room playing video games to avoid needless energy expenditure and thus hunger. Now I am sure that, as my body adjusts to the demands of Ramadan, this sort of behavior will become less necessary, but it will nonetheless remain obvious that, to hedge against the worst side effects of fasting, avoiding physical labor is desirable.
Now this certainly flies counter to many notions that we have in the United States, where the Protestant work ethic is as entrenched as Ramadan is in Dar al-Islam. We have holidays where we take time off work, to be sure, but we have no holidays around which we are expected to work at a lesser rate. This was not always true: prior to the Industrial Revolution, manor lords would habitually cut the hours worked and sometimes even the wages offered outside of the harvest season because the demand for labor simply wasn’t there.
Today, such a notion is highly unusual, and abiding by the fast while being expected to adhere to the same social norms as everyone else in a non-fasting society can lead to some discord. It appears quite bizarre, for instance, to my coworkers at the Home Depot that I would choose not to eat or drink water even if I felt discomfort or put my own health at some risk. I imagine that my fellow Muslim fasters in Western societies will find this sympathetic, and it’s certainly something that makes me think about how the social norms of my society inform the ways in which I am practicing Ramadan. I cannot help but ponder how much different this experience would be if I had grown up Muslim or if I lived in a Muslim country, where organizations establish specific accommodations to make Ramadan more bearable, whether through earlier work start times, breaks during high noon, or public iftar events.
However, to get back on track, my concerns about gluttony and slothfulness during Ramadan are not purely hypothetical. The periodic gluttony of Ramadan is widely recognized as contributing to potential health risks especially for diabetics whose bodies struggle to accommodate the massive variations on blood sugar levels. For this reason, many medical professionals advise diabetics against fasting, though many participate regardless.
Slothfulness meanwhile contributes to slower economic growth in Muslim countries during the fasting period. While GDP growth is hard to appreciate in the abstract, it bears mentioning that GDP is literally the sum of all goods and services produced in a jurisdiction. If GDP is growing slower, it indicates that people are not getting their wants and needs met as quickly as they otherwise might have. Differences in GDP growth, over a long enough period of time, are the difference between rich countries with rich populations, and poor countries with poor populations.
But perhaps, these are sacrifices worth making. Even if productivity declined by a truly massive amount during the month of Ramadan, it’s only one month, and while it’s certainly wonderful that consumerist Western holidays contribute to GDP growth rather than stifling it, the profane consumerism of holidays like Halloween and Christmas has become a central element of these ancient celebrations, so often criticized that criticism is a cliché. Maybe there’s something to this low productivity. Maybe it’s the price of keeping holy-days holy. In the West, we have no days where discipline and restraint are placed above desire and indulgence. We have Valentine’s Day for sex, St. Patrick’s Day for beer, the Fourth of July for blowing stuff up, Halloween for candy, Thanksgiving for eating, Christmas for materialism, New Years Eve for staying up late, and the rest are just a day off work. We have no holidays in this country that ask that we do anything but lower ourselves to our basest desires. Ramadan asks that Muslims raise themselves above them.
Needless to say, I have found Ramadan so far to be an interesting and insightful experience. Given I am a kafir, I must concede that I am ending my Ramadan early: I have a flight to Finland on 16 February that I don’t wish to starve through, and it seems silly to make-up just two days of fasting at some later date. However, until then, unless there is some extenuating circumstance that demands I conclude my fasting early, I will continue to abide by the peculiar rules of this strange and ancient tradition in hopes that I may learn something about myself, grow closer with my friends, and better appreciate this marvelous diverse world in which I live. Inshallah, anyway.
If you enjoyed this essay, then I would highly recommend checking out my supplement to this essay, Ramadan and the Marginalized. I’ll be publishing it in The Journal, so it will be behind a paywall. But hey, the best things in life aren’t free.