On Friday, hundreds of millions of Muslims will start fasting for a month. They will abstain from eating or drinking from dawn to dusk. They will stand for hours in prayers each night to remember their Lord and express their gratitude to Him, seek His forgiveness and aspire to come closer to Him.
Imagine a vast crowd of hundreds of millions of Muslims (sorry didn't mean to frighten anybody) rushing headlong for a month in the same direction, seeking the pleasure of their Lord and you will begin to get some idea of the world's longest and biggest spiritual festival.
The Quran, the Muslim holy book, instructs that fasting, one of the five pillars of Islam, is to teach Muslims self-restraint. The ritual involves systematic abstinence of things normal to body, mind and spirit.
The limits are clear; no eating, no drinking, no sex, no fighting, no backbiting, no lying, no anger, no arrogance, no pride, no despair. This is the ultimate boot camp.
The point of the exercise for adult Muslims who are healthy and able, is to develop a regimen of self-restraint and to inculcate a capacity to, borrowing a term from Plato, control one's appetites. The hope is that this mandatory regimen will become a habit and Muslims will spend the rest of the year in a state of high spiritual alert.
The easy part of the month of Ramadan is the physical part. After a week the body and the mind adjust. One barely feels hungry or thirsty for most of the day.
The more difficult parts are the one's that demand spiritual discipline. Controlling one's id, mastering one's anger and pride, learning humility and recognizing the insignificance of the self in comparison to the awesome majesty of God are all struggles. It is not easy to become one with God in one month.
Ramadan is also the month in which most of The Quran was revealed. To celebrate the revelation, Muslims devote special prayers and try to find time to reread and recommit to its teaching and commandments. After fasting all day, many spend two to three hours every night in prayer.
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Muslims believe that Ramadan is a blessed month in which the rewards for any good action are multiplied many times over. Therefore much of the annual obligatory and optional charity happens during Ramadan. This is a good time to do fundraising if Muslim donors are your target. Islam mandates giving of 2.5 percent of wealth, called Zakat, and many Muslims give it during Ramadan.
At the end of Ramadan, Muslims celebrate the festival Eid. We break our fast early in the morning, wear our best clothes, give as much charity as we can and go to the mosque to offer special prayers.
As one enters the mosque one experiences a complex emotion of happiness and apprehension. Happiness for being blessed with one more Ramadan and apprehension because one is always wondering if what one offered God was enough, was it accepted, was it worthy of one who is the Most Merciful and Most Compassionate.
Sometimes, there is a feeling of lightness, as if the weight of impurities one had been carrying and accumulating all year has been lifted. Sometimes there is heaviness in the heart and one prays for one more chance to maybe get it right the next time.
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