Reaching Ramadan

Today, after 11 months have passed, God's grace and bounty have manifested once again and brought us, with all its mercy and blessing, to Ramadan, the month of the Qur'an. Yes, we are experiencing a reunion with Ramadan. First we are reunited with our origin, from which we have been distant for some time, with our Lord, with ourselves. When we reunite with ourselves, we are already reuniting with our Lord. The more we truly reunite with our Lord, the more we find, learn and know ourselves.

First we are reunited periodically with a time we lived a year ago. Ramadan comes every year with the same splendor, the same rhythms, the same rites, and settles into humanity's life. It comes without being under the control of any individual, any community or any state, and establishes its own order.

The effect of the relativism produced by those who, agonizing over whether to begin Ramadan by the crescent or by calculation, want to put their stamp even on it, so to speak, and who venture to put forward the moment of the beginning of the onset or of the imsak as a matter of dispute, is no more than the trembling of a leaf in a forest. One Ramadan joins onto the next and reveals with all clarity the truth that time is not in man's possession.

Then, by repeating all the forms of action, we are reunited with the traditions that never grow old and never break off but of which we are heedless on the days outside Ramadan in the bustle of daily life. We re-establish the consciousness that tradition has established. With our infaq, our zakat, our fitra, our suhoor, our imsak, our fasting, our recitation, our iftar, our suhoor...

Ramadan is a remembering, but not a remembering that goes backward and stays behind. It is a remembering to build our existence toward the present day and the future, to establish it anew. The alternative is nothing but taking the matter to nostalgia and drowning it there. Ramadan does not come every year to take us back and create in us a nostalgia for a golden age, to build a melancholic mood within that nostalgic state of mind. On the contrary, there is a responsibility it loads on us through what it reminds us of, and this reestablishes us toward the future.

What it reminds us of, and not only reminds but thoroughly teaches, is our responsibility toward the other. The other is not our enemy; it is the place where our responsibility begins and where what is different from us exists, with all its difference, together with the right of this difference.

On the one hand, Ramadan is a time when a person meets himself and, pausing other occupations, has the opportunity to question himself, know himself, repair himself. But on the other hand it is also a process that can continue only by feeling to the marrow the existence and rights of others and feeling one's responsibility toward them. A person's greatest enemy is himself, that is, his self (nafs). A person does to himself what others do not do.

The moment of meeting others is the moment of a person's test, and in this test what makes a person's foot slip is his own self. With the arrogance, the pride, the egotism, the racism it instills in him, sometimes inferiority and sometimes superiority complexes, the desire to establish power, or the wretchedness of becoming a servant to a servant...

Fasting is a tremendous exercise that opens the ways of keeping the self under control, suppressing it, protecting oneself against its evils, and provides the means of struggling with it.

Throughout the year there are many things that strain this self... That self forgets many things it knew, and even if it does not forget, it falls into weakness, it falls into a heedlessness hard to believe toward what Ramadan has taught.

What we experience makes one say "Did Ramadan not teach you this too(?)". As we stray from what Ramadan teaches, as its lessons are forgotten, we grow distant from one another, we batter one another more, we hurt one another more. Life becomes unbearable, intolerable as we move away from Ramadan.

You look and see that the children of a people who for hundreds of years had been a refuge for the oppressed, had opened their Medina to the muhajirun, had become Ansar, have, at the instigation of some around them, been seized by an ignorance that lays the blame and responsibility for many of the problems they live with today on the oppressed, the emigrants, refugees whose hearts are already broken. Either they have begun to throw the help they gave back in people's faces, or they have drifted to the thought that no help should be given at all. They ask ignorantly the questions: "Why should we help people whom God would feed if He wished? Why would we feed others while our own people go hungry?"

We forget, of course, which blessing actually belongs to us that we should envy it from another? Was it not that the guest came with his own provision? Was it not that no one ate another's provision? Where is our responsibility toward others that Ramadan taught us? Where is the pain, hunger, hardship of others that our fast made us feel? Was all that would remain to us of the fast we kept only the hunger we endured from morning to evening? Ramadan had reminded us, explained to us, taught us with all clarity 11 months ago; how quickly we forgot! When did we become so merciless, so indifferent, so fond of our comfort, and such captives of the comfort of our own self?

And when did we become so cut off from ourselves?

It is not for nothing that we pray "O God, bring us to Ramadan, the month of mercy." Whoever knows, knows the mercy and blessings it contains, and therefore the deep wisdom contained in this prayer...

Here Ramadan has arrived; we have been sufficiently soiled, sufficiently forgotten, sufficiently fallen into heedlessness, sufficiently attached. May Ramadan save us, may the fast hold us, may our being be freed, and may it reunite us with ourselves and with our Lord.