kdrizzleDLN

Extremely ignorant regarding Ramadan and fasting generally. Here are some notes based on my own extensive experience of fasting (I regularly do 5 days water only) and some knowledge of Islamic praxis. There will always be people who perform any act of obedience mindlessly and as a check-box exercise. For those people, gorging on food morning and evening may come easily. Even so, they still achieve the benefits of self restraint for a period. The point of fasting in the Quran is to cultivate God-consciousness via self restraint, not just from food, but sex, smoking, etc. It’s daft to say that a short fast is of insufficient duration to qualify as a fast because its purpose in the first place is twofold. (1) Continuation of something previously prescribed to nations (2) Attainment of God-consciousness Even denying yourself two meals at their normal times or coffee or smoking is sufficient to begin to learn how to subordinate your desires to God’s will. On the lunar calendar, there will be times when fasts will feel like skipping lunch, but even in that scenario the spiritual training persists. For a fixed period every day for a month, you train yourself in subordinating appetites, sexual and otherwise, to obedience. Additionally, what a lot of these posts miss is the heightened and intensified obligations of prayer and recitation. Performed properly, there is no time to sit around eating endlessly once you break your fast. And who, realistically, is waking up at 5am and stuffing their face when they have work the next day? After breaking fast, Muslims have to rush to pray and then there’s a 20 cycle prayer if you’re a man at the mosque every night that takes over an hour and can often go late into the night. Not to mention, most Muslims should finish reading the Quran at least once in the month, separate from the prayer. Taken holistically, it’s hardly “hedonistic asceticism” when the day is structured so tightly as to leave very little time for indulging appetites. When fasts are long you might not break until 10pm, then rush to the mosque to do 20 cycles of prayer that can go past midnight, then you rush home to sleep and be up again at 3am and drink water and eat something hope you get enough rest in time for work in the morning… Sounds pretty brutal. Because it is. And of course your stomach shrinks during fasting so you can’t stuff your face, even if you want to. It’s a blessing for Muslims that some years are shorter than others. The videos you see are when people are hosting friends and family as there is a reward for that. Perhaps they are apt to go overboard but you can’t assume bad intentions.