The Month of the Qur'an

After an interval of 11 months, the month of Ramadan has completed its cycle in time and has once again taken its seat at the head of our world.

Let us not say that it came to us as a guest; in my view, let us not fall into the impertinence of regarding ourselves as the host. It is we who are the guests; it comes as the envoy of the true Host. It reminds us, perhaps, that we are in fact guests in the world we live in.

Without faltering for even a second, it comes with all its rules, its air, its climate, its abundance, with the prayers that accompany it, its acts of worship, its habits, and reminds us of our constants, and, if we have forgotten, teaches them to us again.

It is it that is constant and unchanging; it is we who are moving and registering continual change. True, it too has a capacity to travel through the whole year in 33 years, perhaps because it is an envoy. Even so, through the constants it represents, it teaches the Owner of Absolute Being.

Each time it comes, not much changes in it, but something has changed in us. We cannot always greet it with the same excitement, with the same climate of meaning and spirit, but it nonetheless comes and brings forth its own climate, its own excitement, its own meaning.

Ramadan teaches a human being living amid the cares of life not to be a plaything in the hands of the self, not to do everything his soul desires; that he is not condemned merely to his own desires, nor to the whims and passions of other servants, nor to the dungeon of history, society, geography and his own ego; that with love and will he can tear down the walls of these dungeons, and that only then can he reach the level of the noblest of creatures.

One who is able, for the sake of a love, to master his own ego is already freed from seeing history, geography and society as a fate; he realizes that God's earth, and the possibilities it offers him, are far too vast, and sets out on a migration of freedom. This migration, this hijra, begins first within the human being himself. Fasting is the first step of this migration; it is the first step of a human being's liberation from his self and, thereby, from his geography, his history and his society.

But even though this migration sets out from the self, society, history and geography, it returns to them again, with the lessons it has taken, with compassion, with altruism. He has compassion on himself, he sees the existence of people in society weaker than himself, he recognizes and understands the existence of people in other geographies, their being no different from himself, forms a bond with them and has compassion. He notices that people in times before him went through the same experience and forms a distinct bond with them as well. "Fasting has been prescribed for you as it was prescribed for those before you." He grasps the meaning of this, aimed at establishing this bond of compassion with all people, both historically and geographically.

Fasting begins with a human being's withdrawing, for a moment, from the world, but this withdrawal opens the way precisely to the human being's opening up more to people, to history, to the world and to his Lord. Ramadan comes to remind, again and thus, what is made forgotten by the openings a human being lives through each year in the cares of life without experiencing this withdrawal, by the struggles he undertakes, the fights he enters, his differentiations from other people.

Each year, when it checks on us, Ramadan finds us in a different condition. As is known, this year it found us in a very different one. For some time the world has been living, almost compulsorily, a state of fasting independent of Ramadan. It does this, from many things it can do in normal times, either voluntarily or, at times, compulsorily because of the curfews that are imposed. Those who have shut themselves in their homes, even if they continue life at home as if nothing had happened, have in this confinement something that recalls fasting and fulfills its task to a small degree.

Because of this social lockdown we are living through, we cannot greet Ramadan this year with a great excitement manifested in intense socializing. We are far from the atmosphere of the communal iftars, tarawihs, shopping and gatherings that have increasingly become the inevitable habits of Ramadan. We breathe the melancholy air created by having moved away from these habits. Yet perhaps it was the turn, in fasting, of those habits that are the accidents of Ramadan; perhaps we need to reflect on the dimensions of them that distance us from the meaning of fasting, and to keep their fast as well.

Undoubtedly, although the socialization that emerged historically and culturally with Ramadan has very functional features, beyond a certain point it can also have an effect that gradually corrupts the meaning of the matter. Essentially, Ramadan is not an occasion for socializing but for withdrawal, for a person's turning to himself, trying to know and understand himself and to change in a positive direction. In actual fact, the tarawih prayer is a prayer that our Prophet performed not in congregation but individually. Surely hoping for some benefits, Umar had it performed in congregation during his caliphate, but this did not make it obligatory.

I have no objection at all to the form the tarawih prayer has taken culturally today; culture develops and gives rise to different forms precisely in such ways, but on condition that the reference point for the essence of the matter is not destroyed.

Meanwhile, one of the most important, yet not very widespread, acts of worship of Ramadan is itikaf. Itikaf is a person's cutting himself off completely from all worldly ties for a period in order to focus on worship and contemplation. In the Ramadans we have experienced in our age, itikaf is one of the most neglected acts of worship. It is bound to be made easier still by this lockdown we have entered by necessity.

Of course, what is more important, and most important, is that Ramadan is in fact as much a month of the Qur'an as it is a month of fasting.

The Qur'an is of course a book of guidance that must give us direction in every phase of our lives. But what makes Ramadan worthy of congratulation is that the Qur'an was sent down in this month. And the best way to grasp it is to read the Qur'an reflecting on it well, with tadabbur and tazakkur.