Fasting during Ramadan is a unique opportunity to attain both peace of mind and heart. During Ramadan one concentrates on rendering good and abstaining from the wrong. Such a pursuit creates peaceful serenity in the hearts of men and women. Ramadan fasting cannot be complete and in fact, the fast can be invalidated if one fails to control his or her temper. The fasting persons are advised to refrain from argument and to inform the other party that they cannot continue the troublesome dialogue because they are engaged in the sublime obligation of fasting.
Without doubt, a full month of such restraint is destined to leave its mark upon our bodies and souls. The fasting during Ramadan that requires certain restraints from dawn to dusk, when the human interaction is the greatest, is designed to mould the lives of its practitioners. Ramadan fasting offers an opportunity for Tazkiyah, the cleansing of the self, through its disciplinary regimen. On another level, Ramadan offers a unique opportunity for synthesizing with the less fortunate.
The fasting during Ramadan has been ordained for Muslims as fasting had been ordained for people that preceded them. Prophet Muhammad, addressing his companions on the last day of Shaban, the preceding month, said: “O people! A great month has come over you; a blessed month; a month in which is a night better than a thousand months; month in which Allah has made it compulsory upon you to fast by day, and voluntary to pray by night. Whoever draws nearer (to Allah) by performing any of the (optional) good deeds in (this month) shall receive the same reward as performing an obligatory deed at any other time, and whoever discharges an obligatory deed in (this month) shall receive the reward of performing seventy obligations at any other time. It is the month of patience, and the reward of patience is Heaven. It is the month of charity, and a month in which a believer’s sustenance is increased.” [Narrated by Ibn Khuzaymah]
In one month, we’re given the peculiar assignment to defrock the ephemeral world of its authority over us and to reinstate a spiritual bearing that, if unsuppressed, is competent in perceiving where permanence lies. In contemporary terms, fasting the month of Ramadan is a countercultural movement that confronts a materialistic ethos that tries to cancel the interior of religion and discounts the importance of rituals in human life. What the modern aspirant does in Ramadan is hardly subtle. In depriving ourselves of food and drink from dawn to dusk, we implicitly defy a despotic marketing imagination that has deputized nearly all of us to serve a culture of “buy and dispose and buy more.” This depletes resources, darkens the sky, and melts Arctic glaciers. But it also dulls our sense of the sacred.
Fasting the month of Ramadan is one of the 5 Pillars of Islam. It is unique among them, in fact, because as far as rites go its very form connects with the unseen, since the “act” of fasting is about refraining, which is invisible and altogether private. Unlike prayer, pilgrimage, charity, and even the testimony of faith, which involve body, money, or voice, fasting is hidden and is permitted close dwelling with other concealed aspects of the human creation that the consumer of popular culture is scolded to neglect.