Ramadan Travelogue - Sh. Abdal-Hakim Murad

[Mujib]

Ramadan Travelogue by Sh. Abdal-Hakim Murad

Ramadan Travelogue No. 1 by Sh. Abdal-Hakim Murad

Metabolically and internally, Ramadan knocks the stuffing out of us. Like all the basic practices of our religion, it is an idea as simple as it is shattering. The body and spirit respond at their deepest level. The ego squeals with pain. To the extent that we are still babies, we cry and cry.

There are some elemental human experiences where the body, detecting its limits, transforms the spirit. Making love, famously, is one example. But there are others. Once, walking in the Alps, I passed a lake as blue as cobalt, formed from the meltwater of a glacier which towered over it. No-one was in sight, so I stripped off and ran straight in. The shock of that freezing water around me was staggering, and I could feel my heart straining. Coming out, shivering uncontrollably, I felt like a king. All of life seemed to be shivering around me, and the world seemed to have become strangely sharp and bright.

The experience of being born must be similar. From a comfort zone we experience the pain of delivery, and the outrage of new existence in an external world of bright lights and strange sounds. The baby screams, but its pain is its first experience of true life. Spiritually, it has begun its career.

The fast blasts us, and exhausts us. We feel the laughable flab melting away, and start to remember the important fact that we are alive. Life is a symbiosis between our bodies and the world. We are alive when we feel that interaction and dependency at work.

[Mujib]

Ramadan Travelogue No. 2 by Sh. Abdal-Hakim Murad

First one enters the world, then one understands it, then one transcends it. And herein lies the problem of modern man. Although he is a materialist, he hasn’t yet entered the world – his technology ensures that. Instead, he drifts through life in a comfortable centrally-heated dream. As Max Frisch wrote: ‘Technology is the art of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.’
In such a culture of diminished consciousness, pain and loss are always experienced as negatives. The moderns can never find a divine name in a groan. For them, privation, of which fasting is a primordial example, contains nothing.

Khosh dar dam is an ancient axiom of our spirituality. Attentiveness in every breath. That is why the Afterlife is Quranically described as ‘al-hayawan’ – the abode of real life. ‘Today We have removed your covering, so that your vision today is sharp’ (50:22). In dunya, however, we love to tune out, to drop out, to space out. For us naughty children, paying attention is such an effort.

The fast enables a tunnel vision. Distractions and temptations on either side are blanked out, and we gain a focussed sense that we are moving to a destination. The body, with its blind craving, intuits that this is the time when the fast is to be broken. The spirit within is helped to remember that death and the land beyond are even more certain.

When we fast from the trivia of dunya, death becomes our iftar.

[Mujib]

Ramadan Travelogue No. 3 by Sh. Abdal-Hakim Murad

There's a silly piece in the Economist this week. Apparently fasting is bad for business. Brushing aside the interesting findings of Ahmad Etebari, who has shown that the stock market in Muslim lands usually booms during the fasting month, the anonymous journalist insists that 'a summer Ramadan is bad for the economy.' Of course, a subtle exploration of our need to renounce material desires is not to be expected of the Economist. But what a dismal list of complaints! Apparently more electricity is used: 'the lights stay on longer, as people have to eat after nightfall.' (The author seems not to know that Ramadan requires one to eat after nightfall in winter as well.) More locals will stay at home (is that bad for the economy?), increasing the demand for power. But the article admits that there are fewer tourists as well. Shouldn't the two factors cancel each other out?

Is this curmudgeonly drivel all that people want to read? It seems unlikely. Perhaps the penny will drop, the ranks will break, and some brave soul will write about one, just one, positive aspect of fasting, or of Islam as a whole. Not everyone in the world believes in the message of maximal gluttony, driven by an Adam Smith economy that assumes greed and selfishness to be the most powerful of human impulses. Economists like to ride the tiger of human desire, and even try to direct it. But can they say anything at all to the faster, who instead of using his greed, seeks to break and humble it?

[Mujib]

Ramadan Travelogue No. 4 by Sh. Abdal-Hakim Murad

Academics hate fasting. That’s because they are motivated not by money (they get little) or even the hope of influencing society (they never do), but by the exquisite pleasure of feeling superior to others: to silly students, slow administrators, and academic rivals. What could carry a reader through a page of scholarly pedantry, other than the recurrent joy of spotting errors, and knowing that one could have done a better job? But how can one be proud, if one is hungry?

Superbia, pride, is the greatest of the seven deadly sins. This is because it cannot coexist with the fear of God. The worst sinners in the Qur’an are the arrogant: Pharoah, Nimrod, the self-satisfied snobs of Ad and Thamud. With pride in our hearts, we cannot know God. ‘I shall divert from My signs those who were proud in the earth without right’, says the Qur’an. (7:146) ‘Even if they see every sign, they do not believe.’

So humility enables a truer perception. And hunger really helps. Thus does Ramadan sharpen our knowledge of ourselves and of the world.