Commentary: Fasting Sounds Easy: A Peevish, un-Ramadanish Rant
Last updated Friday, September 5, 2008 3:19 PM CDT in Religion
By Mohja Kahf
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"Fasting is easy," an American businessman booms at me, at a club meeting where I'd talked about Ramadan. "You can eat after sunset, right? What I'd do is," he says, as if we Muslims wouldn't have figured out all the tricks to fasting already, "I'd eat all I want in the evening. Easy!"
"All right, you try it," I wanted to retort.
Maybe Lent is easy, post-Vatican II. On the other hand, "May it be an easy fast" is the Jewish greeting for a fast day. This, I'll take, from the Jewish friend who offers it for Ramadan. She knows fasting ain't easy: a Jewish fast is even harder, from sunset to sunset.
A Muslim fast goes like this: no food dawn to sunset, and no drink, not even water. Also no medicines, no smoking and no sex.
Welcome to coffee headaches, nicotine withdrawal, horniness, hunger and thirst. Wait: you're supposed to fast from peevishness and cussing, too. God help me.
I used to love fasting: the rigor! the workout! But the body gets creakier with age, and craves its comforts. There is some deeper lesson to be learned in this; I'll let you know when I figure it out.
The Ramadan fast is for Muslims past puberty except those with health conditions or on their periods. And yes, all privations are lifted after sunset. You are then free to eat, drink, smoke and make freaky, if you have energy left. Nighttime is when you're also cramming in workouts, grading, writing and socializing, because who wants to do any of those things without food or drink or, more importantly, coffee? For the pious, there's also those marathon Ramadan prayers, which can last until midnight.
So you catch a few winks and then you wake up, not before sunrise but before dawn which, in case you've never been up then, is a whole lot earlier. That's when you grope groggily for something to sustain you through the fasting day. Some annoyingly chipper Muslims buzz about bright-eyed, making an actual four-square meal in the ghastly dark.
The fasting cycle lasts a lunar month, twenty-nine days, give or take a day. Ramadan itself rotates ten or twelve days earlier each solar year. When I started fasting, exuberantly, around age 11, Ramadan was in balmy August. It has since inched backward through the summer, spring, winter, and autumn, to September. A February Ramadan is easy, granted. A May one is hard. A July Ramadan is murder.
Your body is getting all sorts of things flushed out of it, depending on what you've been putting into it. OK, OK, I really am grateful for this. I wouldn't do it on my own, if it wasn't a religious thing.
You don't know, until you put your particular body through a particular year's Ramadan, what it will do to you, or for you. Even a brisk, short-day November Ramadan knocked me flat, because I'd become a heavy coffee drinker over the preceding year. Fasting kicked that addiction for me that year, cold turkey, but if some of you in your goyish oblivion tapped me on the shoulder during those first mornings, I wanted to punch your lights out. Which really isn't in the spirit of the month.
The spirit of the month: Generosity. Forgiveness. Charity. Joy. Gratitude. A softening of the lower ego, and a measuring of the higher will.
But -- if you schedule my kid's soccer game across town during those last agonizing hours when my husband and I are trying to figure out, on half a brain between us, what the whole ravenous family is going to eat at fastbreaking, or worse, if sunset occurs right in the middle of a horribly timed band concert, well.
Utterly forgetting the less fortunate and the truly hungry, I have been known to break down and cry in the car over a plastic baggie of dates I grabbed to tide us over. Or I've whined, "I forswear all events scheduled so #%&*ing insensitively by goyim during Ramadan!" And then, "Damn, I cussed! There goes my fast!"
Things happen when your blood sugar drops. Ramadan is sort of like being socked in the gut (I mean, until your charity, forgiveness, generosity, joy, and gratitude kick in). I'm just telling you this in a friendly, precautionary way, in case you run into me around town this Ramadan.
And if you're kind enough to think of inviting your Muslim friends over during Ramadan, a word to the wise: Fastbreaking at 7:38 p.m. means fastbreaking at 7:38 p.m. Not 7:39 p.m. And not, as you love your life, a quarter to eight. How many well-meaning goy friends I've wanted to strangle for not getting the urgency of 7:38 p.m.
And don't phone us at sunset! The closer it is to sunset, the harder it is for me to remember to practice charity, joy, forgiveness and all that other Ramadan stuff. When the phone rings at 7:37 p.m. at our house in Ramadan, we all look at each other. Doggone goyim. Leave a message. And it better not be "Fasting is easy."
Mohja Kahf is the author of the novel, "The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf," and an associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Arkansas.
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