The Blessed Month Of Ramadan
I fasted last Ramadan largely because of everything going on in Gaza. This year I wasn't planning on it, because waking up at 5 AM is hard, but then on the first day my cat woke me up anyways, like a mewing messenger of God. Pippi doesn't usually do this, but he kept at it, and so I thought. Maybe Allah was trying to tell me something. Cats are generally Muslim after all (dogs bad, cleanliness, etc).
In literal hindsight, Pippi had been bit on the ass the day before and just wanted to go out for revenge. But we believe what we want to believe, and I do believe there are signs all around. As the Quran says, “There are signs in the heavens and the earth for those who believe: in your own creation and all the creatures He has spread about.”
And so I ate a bit, prayed badly, and started fasting. Paradoxically, it felt like a relief rather than a deprivation. I always wondered why Muslims wished each other Ramadan Kareem during an ordeal, but I get it now. Ramadan brings order to your life, it's not an ordeal at all. When I stepped out the air felt clearer and decisions also. I honestly missed Ramadan, it's one month which takes the mental burden off not sinning. Small disciplines lead to larger discipline, like bricks make a wall. I don't have to think should I drink that drink, should I smoke that joint, should I pray, should I meditate? Ramadan clears those decisions, like lifting a fog. I could literally see it when I stepped outside because the Indian pollution has blown over Sri Lanka. Another coincidence I'm sure.
It's as DMX said in his dialogue Damien (speaking as the character Damien),
Got some weed? Go 'head, smoke it! (What?)
Go 'head, drink it! (Word?)
Go 'head and fuck shorty!
You know I can keep a secret (Aight)
I'm about to have you drivin', probably a Benz
But we gotta stay friends, blood out, blood in
Damien has DMX killing his friend by the end, because Damien is of course Satan incarnate, and all the Benzes and bitches are temptation. But how do you see this when as the Quran said, “Satan has embellished their fantasies.” As (the late) DMX said, “The snake, the rat, the cat, the dog; How you gonna see him if you livin' in the fog?”
What he and They are talking about is Satan. You can consider this an imaginary figure, but you still need imaginary numbers to make higher math work, what matters is the results of symbol manipulation, not the symbols. So it is with higher understanding. I see no particular contradiction in this, the message must fit the medium, to roughly invert McLuhan. Human brains are largely allocated to processing humans and this is why God appears as a person and his nemesis like another person, a bad one.
Is God a person, is Satan real? are stupid questions. Is a map a territory? Is anything anything else? This is simply how to fit higher realities into lower dimensions, like the confines of an ape skull. Water has no particular shape, but you have to put it in a glass to drink it. In the same way, we have to put higher beings into effectively human forms to understand them. So let's talk about Satan, using ape grunts represented as squiggles presented as pixels. This stuff is all unreal, except the feelings they evoke.
Ramadan is the month when Satan is symbolically chained, he doesn't work, and if you follow a few simple instructions, he actually doesn't. Fasting focuses your attention away from bodily things, and if the attention wanders, it's just a month, c'mon. The injunction to pray five times a day, which seems insurmountable on a daily basis, becomes just a hill during Ramadan. A month is long enough to be habit-forming, so the injunction is really quite ingenious. During Ramadan, I am clean as a cat (wudu) and very clear of mind (besides the hangriness). Islam is, in my experience, the simplest religion to follow. It tells you exactly what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. If you just go through the lower motions, the higher emotions come naturally.
Last Ramadan, however, I found this quite difficult, the first time around. Going without food is fine but going without water all day in Sri Lanka is excruciating. But it really makes you think about how tenuous this hold on life is, how much we need the external for our internal existence. Ramadan—by tying food and water directly to Allah—makes you appreciate things on a deeper level than ‘I have money and bought stuff to put in my mouth.’ Our daily sustenance becomes a gift from God, rather than a thing we just purchase. It replaces desire with gratefulness, which are very different experiences. As the Quran says,
Can then he who takes his stand on clear evidence from his God be likened to those for whom the evil that they do is made to look beautiful, and who follow their own desires?
‘Following your own desires’ is the base programming of capitalism, higher interest is supposed to emerge out of self-interest (with compounding interest on top). Greed and usury are supposed to make good somehow. This is the supposed invisible hand we're supposed to trust our souls and societies to, but it sounds an awful lot like Satan if you think about it. Capitalism is an illusion which fades when you go on sin-strike for the month of Ramadan.
Islam, like all religions, calls the world an illusion (in Buddhist terms). The Quran says, “The life of this world is only a game, a pastime, but if you believe and are mindful of God, He will recompense you and will not ask you for your wealth.” You can read this all you want, but it's self-evident when you pray before breaking fast. It's a ritual thing which I can understand with my Christian wife, saying grace before dinner. Allah just means God in Arabic, it's the same God. All things come from Allah, and to Them all things return. There is obviously something higher—just look up—but what's interesting is that you can ritually get there by suppressing the lower urges, ie food and water.
You can get to this insight how you want (my opinion, not Quranic). The Ayatollah Khamenei, may he outlive 'Israel', recently said, “All of humanity today is suffering from moral ailments. They are afflicted with envy, stinginess, suspicion, laziness, selfishness, and the tendency to prioritize their own interests over those of the society as a whole. The solution to these ailments is in the Quran.” This is true, but Sinhalese like me are notoriously easy to convince but hard to convert. Apocryphally, when the Christian evangelists came (again, the Indic churches are older than Rome) many said, yes, that also, putting Jesus next to the Hindu gods we still worship next to the Buddha in our trishaws. I know this is wrong, my wife says you can't pick and choose, but I'll call the right Hail Mary on my deathbed, inshallah.
As the Bhagavad Gita says, “All beings (before birth) were unmanifest. Only during an interval (between birth and death), O Bharata, are they manifest; and then again, when death comes, they become (once more) unmanifest. What grief then is there in this?” There's obviously something higher than this life going on, being that we're above ground only for an instant and then we're gone. We're undead and then dead for much longer than we're ever alive. Even when we're here we're just a speck on a spinning rock, dimly remembering some deep connection like everything post Big-Bang remembers being one.
Following the cycles of the sun and moon (like Ramadan) is considered atavistic when we have nuclear clocks, but this is merely missing the higher point with high precision. The point is that we are not separate from the higher or lower, these are all relative terms, and we are all ultimately relations before a God we might as well call father, not understanding relations otherwise. Whether you get these signs through the moon or mews is literally immaterial. What does Ramadan—the time between crescent moons—mean for our present predicament? Nothing. What does the moon turning relative to the earth illuminated by the sun mean to the universe? Even less, but if you turn to Allah during the blessed month of Ramadan, it can surely illuminate a person nonetheless.