Pangs of self in Ramadan

At sundown today, for Muslims around the world the month of Ramadan begins. It is a month where, for many, the pangs of hunger will sometimes twitch together with pangs of conscience and even, perhaps, the pangs of the mystery of self.

My own encounter with Islam's month of fasting has been full of turns and surprises, moments of minor triumphs of understanding ("a-ha!") and slowly dawning realisations that I had waded into a pool of meaning and was gradually finding myself out of my depth.

One should be wary of Christian assumptions about fasting when seeking to understand Ramadan.

True, some features are shared. Neither in Christianity nor in Islam is fasting exclusively tied to one liturgical month. Both have special, non-obligatory ascetical practices in which abstinence from food, drink and sexual activity is deemed to inculcate a self-discipline (or perhaps a discipline of selflessness) necessary for the sharpening of the inward spiritual senses.

Both Lent and Ramadan link the examination of personal conscience to social conscience. The period of fasting is also, in terms of prescription, a period of more devout prayer and performance of charitable works, particularly for the poor.

However, Lent and Ramadan are anchored in respectively different understandings of the human relationship to the deity.

Lent ends with the greatest feast of Christianity, Easter - in doctrinal terms, Christ's renewal of Abraham's sacrifice, his victory over death and the beginning of a new creation. Lent is understood as an apprenticeship with death - permanent abstinence for the duration of Lent is a fitting sign for this understanding.

Ramadan ends with a feast that is distinct from the greatest feast of Islam, which also commemorates Abraham's sacrifice.

Ramadan stands the rhythms of night and day on their head by enjoining fasting between sunrise and sunset, and the breaking of the fast during the hours of darkness. It is a fitting sign for the understanding it promotes: that God is Lord of all, the earth and the heavens; while moral laws enable humanity to live in harmony with its nature, all purely human arrangements are arbitrary and can be upended if the deity requests it.

Therefore, there is nothing intrinsically hypocritical that, in many Muslim societies, Ramadan (in social practice, although not by religious encouragement) is also a month of feasting at night, when commercial centres are lit up and high streets bring out their best wares.

However, non-Muslim querying of such practices finds strong echoes in Muslim self-criticism. The commercialisation of Ramadan, the departure from the ideals of spending the night gathered in prayer and Quranic reading... these are staple themes of stern sermons by religious leaders. Ramadan is the month in which tradition holds that the Prophet, fasting and withdrawn from the bustle of society and his own caravan trade, first began to receive the Revelation.

In this respect, the internal debates and arguments, about mere conformity and true understanding, about high ideals respected only in the breach... these will be familiar to someone raised in a society like Malta.

When living in Tripoli and the Libyan interior, in conversing with Muslim friends of different degrees of religiosity, I sometimes have imagined their Maltese counterparts participate in the conversation: the stern preachers and shrugging ordinary believers who consider them killjoys, the man who in midlife rediscovers the beauty of religion through fasting, and the other who shows you a newspaper cartoon poking fun at social excesses during Ramadan (enjoying the irony because he himself is guilty of such excess)...

By their very nature, religions like Christianity and Islam are argumentative religions - often breeding debates about the letter and spirit of the law that can create as much bonds between Muslim and Christian reformers as each group has among the conservatives and radicals in its own religion.

So, it would be a mistake to see in Ramadan only a marker of Muslim difference. It is also a flashpoint of religious and cultural argumentation in Muslim society that indicates some fundamental similarities with societies like ours.

It would also be a mistake, however, to think that any single Muslim one speaks to has a complete and settled view about the meaning of Ramadan.

Ramadan was sometimes an unsettling, even disturbing period for some Muslim men I came to know well - at least during certain episodes in their life. Keeping the fast properly means also being watchful about what one "imbibes" through the senses - pollution can come through obscene sight, sound, touch and thought... as well as taste. This self-consciousness can paradoxically undermine one's ordinary sense of self: confront (say) one's manhood with an alternative model, just as the emphasis of charity interrogates the ordinary practice of solidarity.

Men who had lived abroad as students, Libyan men who wanted to tell me something about themselves, repeatedly emphasised the existential importance of Ramadan. Away from home, they had flouted every moral rule they had been taught - except the fast, which they kept, despite everything. It was clear, from their confessions, that it was a time when they confronted what they were with what they had become and what they could be. It is as though they were feeling a pang of self.

A notorious Algerian R & B song, popular in its time, has the wayward singer declare to his lover that she makes him want to eat during Ramadan. This declaration is at once full of swaggering bravado and an admission of the craziness of his love. Despite its deliberate provocation, it upholds Ramadan as a sign of a saner love.

ranierfsadni@europe.com