‘Fast’ is an intriguing word in English. Apart from its meaning of abstaining from food and drink for a specific period of time, it has also the sense of speed, as well as to make something secure or to tie or fix it: to make it fast. The morning meal is called ‘breakfast’ i.e. the breaking of the fast. “In Old English, a regular morning meal was called morgenmete, and the word dinner, which originated from Gallo-Romance desjunare (“to break one’s fast”), referred to a meal after fasting.” The French word déjeuner is from dé– +? jeûner (“un-fast (to break fast)”). The story of how Christian fasting moved from a daytime activity to a nighttime one concluded by ‘breakfast’ is an interesting one indeed but not our purpose here.
First let me give some deep background. Somewhere around 12000 years ago something changed in the fortunes of the human being when the first grains were domesticated, largely because of a fortuitous evolution in grain itself, meaning in the first instance wheat. The wheat grain had previously fallen easily to the ground and thus was difficult to harvest. The change had been that the ripe grain still adhered to the ear in which it was and could thus be easily harvested. The use of wheat and other grains is intimately connected with the rise of the first states/cities in the Middle East, although that occurred another 6000 years later.
The so-called Neolithic agricultural revolution is in itself fascinating and telling, the following story really coming to the fore only in recent years because of the discovery of Göbekli Tepe. Having been founded by hunter-gatherers before the advent of the neolithic agricultural revolution, it turned upside down the dominant theory that religion resulted from a full belly and spare time. Göbekli Tepe showed that the impulse to worship predates so-called ‘civilisation’, a Latin based word which, in one of two etymologies, simply indicates city dwellers, thus betraying the basic dichotomy of the Romans that whoever is not in the city is a barbarian. For the Greeks and Romans, the barbarians were simply those who could not speak Greek and Latin because they spoke other languages.
The neolithic agricultural revolution would lead to the foundation of the city-states and empires of Mesopotamia with their temples, which functioned also as granaries and banks. Those city-states invented cuneiform writing, first of all to record debts and interest payments, and then almost incidentally to write down history, myth and legend, such as Gilgamesh. They also invented taxation, military conscription, slavery and other matters which have been the affair of states to this day. At the core, they were founded on grain. And grain has been the foundation of the state ever since, or we could say carbohydrates, which have metamorphosed into sugar, the great addiction of our age. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb quipped, there are three addictions: heroin, carbohydrates and a regular salary. That middle term, carbohydrates, has its own devastating result in our time: diabetes, with its consequent heart disease and a host of other conditions. Indeed, arguably most American deaths from covid were from the underlying health conditions the virus fell upon, chief among them obesity and its twin, diabetes.
Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi, may Allah have mercy on him, once asked me to try and find a particular book on a Gaelic festival called Lughnasa (pronounced loonasa). Although I failed to find him a copy of the book at that time, much later one came my way, and it provided a clue to the fast of Ramadan. In it there was the following story, in my own paraphrase.
The cyclical reliance of traditional peoples on annual crops, originally grains such as wheat and barley, meant that before harvest there were thin times, a month of hunger, customarily July, although there are some indications that Gaelic months were variable because timed by moon-sighting. The month of hunger was brought to a close by the celebration of Lughnasa, but someone who harvested their crops before that celebration, even if the crops were ripe and ready for harvest, would be disdained.
The celebration itself held many elements, but principally the gathering and eating of the wild berries and fruits that are available at that season. Sometimes people made circuits around standing stones. Sometimes they swam horses across lakes in races – competitive sports and games were a part of the celebrations. Sometimes, they were occasions for the unmarried to find spouses. Then after the completion of the celebrations, people were free to harvest. I might not be wrong in regarding the month of hunger as a kind of Ramadan of the natural pattern (fitra) with Lughnasa its Eid. Is this the origin of Ramadan itself? I certainly don’t know and can’t make that claim, but it equally certainly seems to throw some light on it, even if tangentially.
But having digressed to Ireland, let’s continue, but this time to almost our own time, the early twentieth century. This is from James Stephens, a writer whom James Joyce wished to complete Finnegans Wake should he himself prove unable to do so. Here in his small novel The Charwoman’s Daughter, he describes the experience of a young man who lodges with a family comprising a mother and young daughter Mary. His voracious appetite is the object of much humorous comment by Stephens. But at a certain point, the young man becomes out of sorts, a little downhearted and generally “fed-up”, until something changed in him:
“The word “food” seemed suddenly a topic worthy of the most spirited conversation. His spirits arose. He was no longer solid, space belonged to him also, it was in him and of him, and so there was a song in his heart. He was hungry and the friend of man again. Now everything was possible. …
His ally and stay was hunger, and there is no better ally for any man: that satisfied and the game is up; for hunger is life, ambition, good-will and understanding, while fullness is all those negatives which culminate in greediness, stupidity and decay.” (James Stephens, The Charwoman’s Daughter)
This is the life-enhancing hunger that Muslims experience while fasting, not a punitive and suffering asceticism, but as Nietzsche affirmed about Islam itself, that “It says yes to life.” (Lest we get too carried away, Stephens also has a short story called “Hunger” which is a genuinely terrible picture of an involuntary hunger that led to starvation and death for an entire family.)
But here, Stephens touches on something vitally important from which we can say: as a culture we are “fed-up”, we are suffering from a surfeit, and most of our medical conditions are arguably from malnourishment, but not that of poverty, but of super-abundance.
But let us now go back to Islam and the Prophet Muhammad, may Allah bless him and grant him peace. Apart from his own fasting, which predated his receiving revelation because of his following in the footsteps of the pre-Islamic unitarians called the hunafa – those who by nature incline to the truth, there is his own dailyness. That contains an intriguing element, which is all too easy to misunderstand. His beloved wife ‘Aisha, may Allah be pleased with her, recounted that he never had his fill of barley bread, until he met his Lord, barley bread being considered an inferior type of bread.
Now this and the many traditions like it can be read ascetically, as an almost superhuman disdain for the world, which one can admire but not possibly imitate. It seems only destined for the very saintly. But what if that were a fundamental understanding, and we were to reverse it and say that this is normality and what we have is something else? What if we were to say that the human dependence on grains and thus food in general is a pathological condition, an addiction that can actually be surmounted? That is not to deny that grains such as wheat, barley, oats, rye and rice are blessings. They are mentioned generically in the Qur’an as blessings, and they are a part of wealth that is fundamental to the act of worship that is zakat – the annual charitable tax, and they are what must be paid on completion of the fast of Ramadan as what is known zakat al-fitr – the zakat of the natural primordial state.
But if we were to say that as human beings we have the relationship to grains upside down, and thus to our nourishment in general, it is a statement that few knowledgeable in dietetics would dispute. Grains are the basis of our diets rather than ingredients in them. Is it possible, that the fast of Ramadan in some way addresses this, in addition to its other goals?
In fact, here I have perhaps fallen prey to a mistake that is all too common: regarding what are benefits of acts of worship as the very reason for their existence. With the prayer, that would be to consider its undoubted benefits in terms of physical exercise in such a way as to transform it into an advanced type of yoga rather than a meeting with one’s Lord in the midst of the dailyness of life.
In particular, the act of fasting is distinguished by one quality, the words of Allah, exalted is He, in the hadith qudsi, “The fast is Mine, and I will reward it.” And again, this is its nature, it is a meeting with the Divine, a clearing (Lichtung) in the forest of our lives where suddenly the light of Being shines.
Whereas the salat–prayer is limited to the time in which it is performed, extending from the first takbir – “Allah akbar – Allah is greater” until the final “as-salamu alaikum – peace be upon you”, the time frame of the fast is the month itself from the first sighting of the moon of Ramadan to the sighting of the moon of the Eid. For many valid reasons including old age, ill health and travel, some Muslims do not fast, which occasions a discussion: is it the fasting that makes the month important, or is it actually a period of time that is special? This latter, which many regard as the correct position, sits uncomfortably with an Aristotelian and Newtonian idea of time as being neutral and without quality, something which, along with space, we are located within and can measure. But we can say that it is underscored by the astonishing hadith, which occurs in a number of slightly different narrations and wordings the most famous of which is the hadith qudsi – sacred hadith recording the words of Allah as transmitted by the Messenger, peace be upon him, in which the Divine says: “I am time.” This is a statement that both the mutakallimun – the scholars of kalam studies on what may or may not be said about the Divine and about the Prophets, and the people of inner illumination have tried to tease out its meaning, something that lies beyond the remit of this article. Nevertheless we can say it takes us out of the sphere of a remote rabbinical ‘god’ far from his creation even though we must also rightly beware of falling into pantheism and identifying Him with the creation.
Suffice it to say, that all the Muslims relate to this reality of time every Ramadan, with many who have little practice of Islam in other months returning to their prayers and the fast. The time itself is its own proof, as is the case with Allah. Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-Habib, may Allah be merciful to him, exclaims in the Greater Qasida in his Diwan: “O Living! O Eternal! Your own most eloquent proof!”
(Published in German in Islamische Zeitung)