http://newagebd.com/detail.php?date=2013-07-18&nid=57387#.Uw-cIfmSz0d
by
Maqsoodul Haque
Be
honest about what you do not know, modest about what you do,
Stick
with what you know today, the tried and true, is the best for
you
Anon
RAMADAN,
the month for practicing sawm (seyam in Bengali) or abstinence and
restraint has commenced. As many of us go on a diurnal fast routines
that last fourteen hours or more, depending on which part of the
world we live, the stereotypical understanding among Muslims is: it
is the month of compassion and benevolence showered on us by Allah
and only appropriate that we ‘please’ the Creator by all
means possible.
Therefore, other than fasting, the list of
rituals we go through are quite extensive. Pre-dawn sehri, prayers
all five, recite the Qur’an and the special taraweeh prayers at
night. In between, just at dusk the sumptuous iftar when we formally
break our fast. The concept of fasting and abstinence, other than
‘pleasing’ the Creator, in general perception is also
about ‘feeling the pangs of the poor’.
However,
fasting is not an anomalous phenomenon, and there are hardly any
religions, or belief systems in the world that does not include it as
an incorporated rite of faith. In Buddhism it is a ‘penitential
discipline’ not limited to particular days or months, but an
ongoing act of faith that has far-reaching significance than those
that meet the eye. Some monks for instance fast not for days, but
months surviving just on water!
It is believed that in fasting,
humans reach a level of meditative transcendence that is otherwise
impossible to attain. That in turn leads to contemplative bliss and
‘sparks’ a nearness to the infinite Creator — the
Supreme Being. Scientifically stated, wilful yet systematic
starvation does more to provoke metabolic reactions in our system
that helps us gain insight into avenues of ‘access control’
— and a new beginning in a life full of discoveries. Those
discoveries, however, are not limited to our physical being, but are
also mind-specific.
Fasting,
if done with the right intention and earnestness, changes our
mindset. Its effect on the brain has, therefore, manifold importance,
and practices of ascetics and mystics dating back thousands of years
only reaffirm the same. For Muslims, sawm is an ascetic practice that
is virtuous and, other than cleansing the system, is in theory meant
for believers to rise above human pettiness and intolerance —
in other words, to attain ‘God consciousness’ or
taqwa.
Ramadan is the month when the Qur’an was revealed
to Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), yet little is known about his
contemplative, meditative or penitential practices in seclusion at
Mount Hira. We may, therefore, surmise that the practice of sawm
passed on to us some 1,500 years ago is a snapshot of the extensive
physical and mental conditioning that the prophet endured in the
scorching hot, barren and impassable deserts of Arabia.
His
proximity to the archangel Gabriel came because of his penance that
prepared him to handle the burden and preaching the complete message
from God — meant not just for Muslims, indeed for all humanity.
Yet fasting was nothing new. For all monotheistic prophets from
Abraham, Moses, Jesus and their respective followers, fasting and
other rites of penance was an integral and, in fact, overriding
aspect of faith. Preceding them, fasting was common even in pagan
rites and rituals.
The baffling question is why? Why should a
group of men and women starve themselves for the abject purpose of
‘pleasing’ such a difficult to explain or define entity
called ‘God’? In addition, what are the immediate
evidences available to validate that the act of ‘pleasing God’
benefits us in any way? Also, what conclusive proof do we at all have
that ‘Allah is pleased’ after a month spent literally on
a ‘hunger strike’?
Without
the need for implied, overt or covert pontification, researching
lofty volumes of religious books, theological texts, or running to
the nearest hujur or pir sahib for clearer understanding, if we can
simply put the faculty of our common sense to appropriate use —
the answers are closer at hand. While we are doing that, it may
actually be a good idea to dispel the thought of ‘pleasing God’
and start looking at more human and ‘humane’
answers.
Since
the Qur’an was revealed for the guidance and benefit of
mankind, the emphasis is surely on humans, ashraful makhlukat or
closely meaning the ‘best of His creation’. What is of no
benefit to man cannot be the focus, criteria or prerogative of any
religion whatsoever and there are precisely three things that are
undoubtedly ‘acts of God’ in our existence.
Firstly
our birth (hayat) or the times we live, secondly death (mauwt) and
third sustenance (rizik) — and life, as we know it, revolves
around these unfathomable realities. These realities are again ‘time
critical’, yet it is a time that is beyond the calculative
faculty of man. It is the third element, i.e. sustenance or how a
square meal will be placed on the table for us and our families, and
under what circumstances shall we be fed, is an equation that has of
course to be worked out by humans.
We
may well place our open mouth faced skywards and pray all day long,
but the truth is Allah is unlikely to drop a morsel of food from
‘heaven up high’, regardless of whether we are saints or
sinners. Human have to labour for food both physically and mentally,
and call it work, call it profession, the exact ratio as to how much
labour will result in amount of sustenance is unknown to us.
Sadly,
it is in this one explicit duty to Allah that we have failed Him,
i.e.to guarantee sustenance for mankind. The issue at the end of the
day is food, and hence we have been condemned to our penance and
punishments, as quite clearly all our depravities began here, when we
decided to deny others what was ‘common property’.
Imagine
the first humans on planet earth; let us put aside the gender-biased
tautology associated with who came first, Adam or Eve, and instead
ask ourselves who or what gave them sustenance. Did the earliest of
humans purchase food? No they did not, because quite simply there was
no ‘well stocked’ departmental or convenience store
available anywhere in the near vicinity!
Planet
earth as a biological laboratory had more than enough to sustain life
during the times of the first humans, as much as it is today. The
Creator’s food chain was created evenly to balance out
sustenance for every living creation; animals, plants, insect, beast
as well as humans. Yet, somewhere down the line, things went terribly
wrong. Whether it was an act of God, i.e. natural extremity such as
drought, flood, storms or pestilence, the balance of the food chain
was severely challenged and compromised.
What
makes us the ‘best creation’ of Allah is that He blessed
us with ‘consciousness’, the understanding of right from
wrong, the difference between moral and immoral, the uniqueness of
being fair as opposed to being unfair, the propriety in being just
from what is unjust — for these are the quintessential and
compassionate traits of the Creator, that of ‘reason’
passed on to us.
However, the difference between man and beast
is also very thin, and ironically, it was man that acquired
territorial traits of beasts and not vice versa. Creativity too is
one of the most important blessings on man from the Creator. Man used
its creative faculty and acquired skills in agriculture, in hunting
down animals, but on the flip side also went on to make food a
‘commodity’ for profit.
It resulted in the God-given
natural food chain to be stretched thin, and whether it was hoarding
by criminal intent or sheer bad luck, food shortages and hunger
threatened humanity. Yet animals, plant life, insects and others
continued to thrive and still do. The foreboding yet humiliating
realization we have is human’s are the only species on planet
earth that have to ‘buy’ food. When that happened, the
terms ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ entered mankind’s
vocabulary.
A
reminder: food like air and water came free to mankind from the
Creator.
Today in these so-called ‘enlightened times’,
we talk about ending the ‘vicious cycle of poverty’ and
therefore patronisingly extend ‘credit to the poor’,
while some of us even want to ‘condemn poverty to museums’
without considering that by so doing, we only demonstrate the
depraved poverty of our own souls. We ourselves are responsible for
our own fate — in that our Creator is neither vindictive nor
evil. In our ritualistic attempts at ‘pleasing’ the
Creator the attributes of benevolence, compassion and mercy eludes
us.
Man
therefore is man’s biggest enemy and extending ‘credit’
as a birthright or even ‘human right’ to end poverty is
not only a farcical supposition but also an affront to human dignity.
‘Credit’ is not charity and credits are extended today to
as a lien to the marginalised, as a means to an end, as a tool of
commerce, which leads to lewd profiteering and exploitation that
spirals up to usury that no known religion or belief system on earth
permits.
So
what are the lofty ideals of Ramadan and the practice of sawm that
Muslims are supposed to aspire for? Is it merely going to be fasting
all day that ends with gluttonous binging on food in the early
evenings until night? If it is the ‘pang of the poor’ we
are supposed to feel, do the so-called ‘poor’ have the
luxury of indulgence of a kind we the ‘well-to-do’ or
affluent most arrogantly tend to believe is an act of faith that
‘pleases’ our Creator?
Our so-called ‘religious
sentiments’ are more easily ‘bruised’ than our
human sentiments when rational questions are asked. Islam condones
blind faith and superstitions, yet there is no denying that very few
who indulge in the penultimate rites of penance sawm have even the
faintest notion about its significance. All we get to read in
newspapers, and all we get to see in discussions by alems and ulemas
on television are about the dos and don’ts of rituals that have
anything at all to do with Islam or the injunctions of the
Qur’an.
It
is all about finding excuses about how not to fast, about health
implications and complications, or as bizarre as whether or not,
whether we can break wind in public, whether it is permissible to
copulate with one’s partner during the month etc, etc. In fact,
our enquiries, and even well-meaning curiosities, are meant to
address anything and everything that is sickeningly carnal, as
opposed to the spiritual. And it is here that we commit our gravest
sin during the month of Ramadan. It is the display of our wanton
greed that leads to consumerism and avarice of an unimaginable
magnitude is the crux of our dilemma and we have no business to blame
Allah for the same.
Ideally, sawm is meant to bring back the
balance of the food chain which man has indeed compromised and
reduced to a farce. It is corrective penance for mankind’s
first collective crime against humanity and one that continues, and
has therefore been deemed mandatory on Muslims for one month of the
year. If billions of Muslims realised for once while fasting that
more than ‘pleasing’ the Creator, it is a simple act
meant for the welfare of mankind — of humanity, I think many of
our shortcomings on faith and religion would have been addressed.
In
fasting if there is any way at all we may ‘please’ our
Creator, is to understand that the savings on food, due to our
fasting and penance will lead on to food being stockpiled somewhere
else on earth or ‘food security’ as we know it today.
That in turn will guarantee that deserving humankind, whether they
are Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Buddhist, Christians, whether they are
theist or ‘atheist’ may live without the pangs of hunger,
without any man-made famine.
Thus,
if there is anything at all that ‘pleases’ the Creator —
it is in the continuation and survival of the human species. The
Qur’an (5:32) states unequivocally ‘killing one human is
killing of all humanity’; therefore, in annihilation or
killing, nothing can compare with one who is killed for want of food,
or ‘starved to death’ as we call it.
It is not only
abstinence in food that results in sawm becoming a complete cycle,
the lofty ideals of restraints is correlative and comes in
forcefully. Simply put, sawm exemplifies the earnestness in practice
of ‘see no evil, hear no evil and commit no evil’. All
three injunctions are addressed to control not just of our ‘carnal
desires’ as is the popular misconception, but also put a check
to greed, and the most hazardous of all, gluttony. It is perverse
overconsumption of food that creates the initial conditions of greed
to seep into our beings. What happens thereafter is a vicious cycle
that turns to envy, lust and corruption.
For
instance, much as sawm emphasises on fasting, if we just take a stock
of the amount of food we consume during iftar, (even those lavish
‘parties’ sanctioned by the government and the
opposition) the food and money we waste is more than enough indicator
to the state of institutionalised vulgar corporeal ‘zombies in
faith’ that we have been reduced to.
It
is only in our desire to go on unrestrained food binges during
Ramadan that results in price of food to skyrocket. It is evidently
the sole reason as our demand for food actually outstrips supplies
during the month, which is otherwise not the case in the eleven
months that we do not fast! In fact, more than contributing to food
chain, we create more diabolical pressures, which indeed leads on to
more food shortages. Ideally, sawm is meant to bring back the balance
of the food chain which man has indeed compromised and reduced to a
farce, and not the other way around.
All of the above happening
in a month that we are supposed to be ‘feeling the pangs of the
poor’ is not only laughable, but is indicative of the innate
‘hypocrisy of modesty’ we indulge in while practising
sawm. We quite shamelessly do the opposite of what we are directed by
Allah to acquire. The virtues of modesty, of being able to survive
and to do with the bare minimum, are lessons from Islam we
conveniently forget.
The idea of ‘pleasing’ the
Creator is a notorious misnomer for in reality we aim to please our
olfactory and sensual desires, which translates to nothing more than
greed, lascivious conducts by individuals, foul mouthing and a wanton
display of the superiority of our social status. All of this
contributes to downright demeaning the ideals of the piety,
plurality, restraint and tolerance that Islam teaches us. The
objective of attaining taqwa therefore is narrowed and boxed-in to
meaningless and insensitive cultural rituals, which have absolutely
no connections with Allah, the Qur’an or Prophet Muhammad
(pbuh).
Moreover, how more ruthless we are in our pursuit of
‘pleasing’ the Creator is all the more demonstrated
during the maniacal shopping spree we jump into in the last days of
Ramadan. Anywhere else in the ‘infidel West’ or even in
neighbouring ‘Hindu India’ whether it is Christmas,
Easter or Puja the discounts offered at retail shops and departmental
stores before any major religious festival is heart rendering. These
are perhaps the only times in the year, when ‘Godless
profiteering’ is never the foundation of any commercial
transaction.
Yet it is quite the reverse in Bangladesh. Like
price of food, everything else quadruples. The latest ‘Eid
fashion’ will compel or cajole you to buy dresses and
accessories at insane prices and yet none seems to object or even
think once that its neither dresses, nor our caps, nor the Essence of
Arabia attar, or our flashy sandals that ‘pleases’ Allah.
If there is anything at all that Allah will be ‘pleased’
and will judge us, it is in our intentions. Let our intentions
therefore be pristine and pure.
With that, here is wishing
everybody a rewarding Ramadan. Happy fasting and sensible feasting
please!
Maqsoodul
Haque is a Dhaka-based columnist, poet and jazz-rick fusion musician.
machaque@gmail.com. Blog http://tpoi.blogspot.com.