Fasting: The Systemic Context

This is the first Friday of Ramadan 1435, the holy month of fasting. It is a matter of gratification that in spite of our woeful decadence, this blessed month infuses a current of life, however tentative, into our spiritually lifeless bodies. This is a sign of grace (barakah) that this month brings in its lap for us. This barakah will certainly increase and deepen if we could arouse our consciousness to the place Ramadan has in the over-all system of Islam. Islam aims at awakening the spirit of man and enabling him to realize the prodigious potential latent in him in a way which is comprehensively beneficial to him, to his society and to mankind at large. For this purpose, the beginning is to be made with the conquest of man’s carnal self. This conquest implies that man’s spirit, the Divine spark in him, assumes the command of the animal energy in him, existing in the form of desires and proclivities. Three of these – eating, drinking and the sexual desire – have always defied control and need to be adequately bridled. Fasting has been prescribed to achieve this end. There are some life-denying systems which believe in totally exterminating carnal desires and for this purpose they prescribe various ways of penance and self-mortification. The history of religion is full of examples of such systems of belief. This extreme position culminates in escape from life and its responsibilities. Another extreme is to give in to carnal desires and live a life of gay abandon which, if practised at a large scale, will reduce human society to a congregation of animals. Islam accepts life in its totality but prescribes a moral and spiritual regimen to keep desire in check and divert this prodigious energy to paths of spiritual evolution. Fasting is an essential part of this regimen. It enables us to gain control over the most unruly desires in us. But to achieve this objective two essential conditions are to be fulfilled. First, since fasting is an integral part of a regimen, the whole regimen is to be adopted in order to make it really effective. You cannot isolate a particular component of a recipe for treatment from other components and have the results which it can produce in combination with other components of the recipe. Secondly the regimen has to be adopted for the sake of Allah’s pleasure. Any other motivation, such as considerations of health, may yield some marginal biological benefits but the real benefit will be lost. :- Prof. G R Malik