Ramadan as Ritual Return
Islam’s holy month is a remembrance of our origin story.
The Islamic holy month of Ramadan began this morning. I’m sitting at my desk in a modified fast, some water and some floral cigarettes as part of my writing ritual — but no food till sunset. It’s not an entirely unusual form of practice. I remember a conversation I had a while ago with a decorated Muslim man who admitted he had the occasional beer during fasting. I promise you he’s more sincere in his practice of Islam than some of the folks showing up at the masjid tonight. One of the people showing up at the masjid tonight will be a man who observes all of Ramadan’s fasting rules but his prayer performance is a spectacle of horror that shocks even his young peers. A veteran, he races through prayer as if the imprint of boot camp is still within him. In public, among the elders of the community, his prayer is paced in rhythmic keeping with the group. In private, he can’t get through it fast enough, as if he is exorcising something within himself.
Such is Islam — a mixed bag of beliefs. An Islamic scholar and sheikh I once studied theology and history with asked a group of us what we thought Islam was. There were ten people in the group and nine different answers. To our surprise, he shared this was common crop yield. While we have a structure of support within Islam (the five…
