Passing through the cares of the world to reach Ramadan

After 11 months spent amid the thousand and one anxieties of a world that alienates a person from his Lord, separates him from other people and estranges him from himself, God’s grace and bounty manifest themselves anew, and we have reached Ramadan, the month of the Qur’an, with all its mercy and blessing.

With Ramadan we are experiencing a reunion. First, we are reunited with our origin, our Lord, ourselves, from which we have been distant for some time. When we are reunited with ourselves, we are in any case reunited with our Lord. And the more truly we are reunited with our Lord, the more we find ourselves, learn ourselves, know ourselves.

Periodically, we reach once again a time we lived a year ago. Ramadan comes every year with the same splendor, the same rhythms, the same rites (menasik), and settles into the life of humanity. It comes without being under the control of any individual, any community or any state, and establishes its own order.

Over the past two years, an important part of these rites was suspended because of the Corona measures, but even suspended, that Ramadan was still lived as Ramadan. Today it will be welcomed and lived with the excitement of ending a longing that those measures have made a little longer.

The relativity produced by those who want to put their stamp even on Ramadan by agonizing over whether it should begin by the sighting of the crescent or by calculation, and who venture to put forward the moment when the fast begins, the istikbal or the imsak, as a matter of dispute, has the effect of a single leaf trembling in a forest. One Ramadan is joined to the next, and the truth that time is not within man’s ownership is lived again in all its clarity.

Then, by repeating all the forms of action, we are reunited with the traditions, sunnahs and customs that never grow old and never break off, but that we are heedless of on the days outside Ramadan amid the bustle of daily life. We re-establish the consciousness that this tradition established. With our infaq, our zakat, our fitr, our sahur, our imsak, our fasting, our recitation, our iftar, our sahur…

Ramadan is a remembering, but not a remembering that goes back and stays behind. It is a remembering in order to build, to rebuild, our existence that is directed toward the present and the future. Otherwise it would be 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 that it loads upon us with what it recalls, and this rebuilds us toward the future.

What it recalls, and does not merely recall but thoroughly teaches, is our responsibility toward the other. The other is not our enemy; the other is the place where our responsibility begins and where that which is different from us exists, in all its difference, together with the right to this difference.

On one side, Ramadan is a time in which a person meets himself, in which, pausing other occupations, he has the chance to question himself, to know himself, to mend himself. But on the other side, it is also a process that continues only by feeling to the very marrow the existence and rights of others and by feeling one’s responsibility toward them. A person’s greatest enemy is himself, that is, his nafs. A human being does to himself what others do not do.

The moment of encountering others is a person’s moment of trial, and in this trial what makes a person’s foot slip is his own nafs. With the arrogance, the pride, the egotism, the racism it instills in him, with complexes sometimes of inferiority and sometimes of superiority, with 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 bringing the nafs under control, of suppressing it, of protecting oneself against its evils, and that supplies the means of struggle against it.

Throughout the year there are so many things that strain this nafs… That nafs suddenly forgets many things it knew, and even if it does not forget, it falls into weakness; it falls into a heedlessness that is hard to believe, in the face of what Ramadan taught.

What we live through makes us say, “Did Ramadan not teach you this too?” As we stray from what Ramadan taught, 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, the further we move from Ramadan.

You look up one day and see that the children of a people who for hundreds of years were a refuge for the oppressed, who opened their Medina to the muhajirun, who were Ansar, have, at the instigation of some people around them, been seized by an ignorance that places the cause and the responsibility for many of the problems they live with today on the oppressed, on the muhajirun, on refugees whose hearts are already broken. Either they have begun to throw the help they gave in people’s faces, or they have drifted on to the thought that no help should be given at all. They ignorantly ask the questions: “Why should we help people whom Allah would have fed if He had willed? Why are we feeding others while our own people are hungry?” (Surah Ya-Sin: 47)

We forget, of course: which blessing is really ours, that we should envy it in another? Did we not say the guest comes with his own provision? Did we not say no one eats another’s provision? Where is our responsibility toward others that Ramadan taught us? Where is what our fasting made us feel, the pains, the hunger, the hardships of others? Was all that would remain to us of the fast we kept only the hunger we endured from morning till evening? Eleven months ago Ramadan reminded us, told us, taught us in all clarity; how quickly we forgot! When did we become so merciless, so indifferent, so fond of our own comfort, so enslaved to the comfort of our own nafs?

And when did we become so cut off from ourselves?

It is not in vain that we pray, “O Allah, let us reach Ramadan, the month of mercy.” Those who know, know the mercy and the blessings it contains, and therefore the deep wisdom contained in this prayer...

Here Ramadan has arrived; we have been soiled enough, we have forgotten enough, we have fallen into heedlessness enough, we have been bound enough. May Ramadan save us, may fasting hold us, may our being be set free, and may it unite us with ourselves and with our Lord.