Ramadan is upon us and so we are officially in the holy season. If we wanted to be less charitable and closer to the truth, we would say that seasonal holiness is upon us. Needless to say, this is not how it was meant to be, but like many things in this life, we change to suit our weaknesses and illusions.
Personally, I have no problem with illusions so long as they stay put and leave others to be. Many people around here think of Ramadan as the washing machine that cleans all that was accumulated in the other eleven months of the year. It doesn’t work that way, and we all know it. Intent, in law as in ritual, is the crux of the matter. You simply cannot be holy one month and a monster the rest of the year with a greedy eye on Ramadan hoping to get away with what you stole, lied about, cheated, and indeed for some, killed outright. The Arabic proverb says it all: The God of any two months is the same. Do the self-proclaimed holy warriors killing people in Iraq think it time to stop? I have a feeling that they will think it doubly rewarding to spill blood in Ramadan. Brace yourselves then for another wave of mindless killings.
On a less tragic scale, supermarkets are selling perishable foodstuff like there is no tomorrow. For a month when people are not allowed to eat for at least half the day, this is puzzling if not outright illogical. The iftar (breaking the fast at sunset) table, should be loaded with good stuff that is easy to digest and help you rehydrate. Other than that, there is really not much to it.
Even if you wanted to be a glutton when allowed to eat, biology says you cannot. A stomach shrinks with fasting. If you drink two or three glasses of juice at iftar, which we all do, then your stomach balloons to something rather uncomfortable.
How then do you go to have dinner? Yet we cook and waste endlessly. And if a needy person comes to us asking for pennies, we simply manage not to find them.
God created the world out of love; not self-love, but the love of humanity and all that creeps, crawls, flies, swims, and even roars its way on this earth. This is not a new theology: Indeed it is the crux of revealed religion. The only thing that is miserably visible these days is the amount of hate going around.
If we can’t “love” the other, or bring ourselves to accept him or her, could we be neutral? Putting it bluntly, could we use Ramadan to start a way where we stop killing others? Yes, there is desperation in my tone, but we do live in desperate times and deal with manic and dangerous people.
The irony of it all is that I am writing in English to those who do not need to hear such things or can’t do anything about them. One of these days I will be allowed to write in Arabic and make the point. Till then, Happy Ramadan, and Peace on Earth.
