Fasting, The Hard Truth
This is my own truth. There are a million others.
There is, I believe, an implied etiquette for the Muslim who, even in the privacy of his or her own home, feels weighed by the unsounded burden that comes with being part of a collective that follows a universal set of rules. Of course, it goes without saying that no religion comes tailored to the individual, and there are many who insist that this one-size fits all garment can, and in fact must, be readjusted in a way that is particular to each person. I believe this, though at what point the tailored religion becomes something else entirely is an arbitrary line, and a deeply charged one.
But there remains certain obligations that must be carried out in a very specific manner if they are to be named by what they are. In Islam, prayer is prayer, fasting is fasting, hajj is hajj, and it is the rules of each, followed step by step, that completes each act. The Muslim in Eritrea prays the same way as the Muslim in Mexico; they recite the same lines, follow the same motions, pray the same number of times a day. Each one will unquestionably experience the act differently, but the structure remains one and the same.
And there is something alluring, something magnifienct about an action that is replicated simultaneously in the households of millions around the world. Just as the present circumstances have bound us all at once, with no exceptions to status, location, or wealth, to a collective quarantine, so too does the month of Ramadan deliver a solace of unity, a sort of suffering that is made less so because it is performed together.
But, I worry that in our efforts to explain, and even defend, Ramadan before those who think of it as an unusually cruel ordeal, we may, without meaning to, be imposing a single narrative that we claim all Muslims experience when fasting. We do this even amongst ourselves. I was taught, at a very young age, not only how to fast, but what it was supposed to make me feel. We teach the rituals while insisting on a sentiment that deeply troubles the individual when it isn’t felt. We are trained to evoke that experience until we’re no longer certain if it’s the training or the feeling itself that we harbor.
If I am told fasting is a deeply spiritual act, a sort of pilgrimage back to the self, and, out of the self, then it must be so. But what happens when we don’t feel this way?
As I write this, I wonder if my concerns are a fault of my own. I question if they are the natural results of a spiritual deficiency, a premature faith, a sinful, erring nature that separates me from other Muslims who fast with an enviable sincerity and an unquestioned authenticity that doesn’t come from a place of seeded fear, but from a love for the act itself. There is a part of me whose hunger to feel what other fasting Muslims claim to feel overwhelms the primitive hunger in me.
What I am about to say, I haven’t heard from any other Muslim, and there is a certain undeniable fear in being the first, among those I know, to say it.
I have no doubt that there is a part of Ramadan that is withheld from me, a sort of elation and ecstasy that I am denied. My strict, guilt-ridden Islamic upbringing tells me this is my fault, that I am lacking in faith, in patience, in detachment from the physical. And though I cannot tell you, with any honesty, what fasting is supposed to feel like, I can describe to you, in detail, the panic of exclusion that comes in its place.
It’s like being a bystander, lingering by the entrance to a significant event happening within a large arena. You tug your desperation in your pockets, pretending all is well, that you’re only waiting for a late friend to arrive. You’re hoping someone kind will notice and offer you, discreetly, a spare ticket. The whole city is attending. Something important and perhaps even life-changing will be missed if you don’t find a way inside. But there you are, watching them pass through the guarded gates, your own sorry self tucked in a corner, watching with envy.
Other times, fasting makes me feel like the child in a mosque imitating the movements of his father. He has no clue what the movements mean, what is being whipered under his father’s breath, why the words sung at the pulpit make his father close his eyes and bow his head the way he does. The child realizes he’s in the presence of something serious, but cannot understand what makes it so. He thinks if he closes his eyes, bows his head, holds his breath, whispers the few words he knows, he will make sense of it all, that somehow, in imitating the act, the sentiment naturally follows.
What does it mean to be hungry?
At times, I find myself wanting to know what fasting feels like for the one whose hunger is more than hunger, for whom hunger is a chance, an opportunity to transcend the physical barriers, for whom the calender is not a countdown away from hunger but a count towards something marvelous, something that cannot be shared, only felt.
And this is why I say my experience may be entirely my own and shared by no one else, because trauma plays an important part here.
The hunger is cruel to me because I knew hunger, unwillingly, forcefully, and in all its debilitating power. I know well what I am told to relive each year, and it is painful, and I wish I can say that without a tugging sense of guilt. I am scared of being hungry again. I hate it for what it reminds me of: the empty fridge, the batches of sugar cookies when sugar, flour, baking soda, and eggs were all we had sometimes, the Saturdays collecting day old loaves down the street from a mosque in DC, the schizophrenic stepmother who would hide all the food because she was convinced I was poisoning her, the end of fourth grade, suddenly without a mother, how I never seemed to wake up early enough to make my own lunch, the hour’s walk to CVS for chocolate.
I don’t say any of this out of self-pity. But I want people to really undersand what hunger means to some. I think, at times, Ramadan is overly romanticized. Those who choose to participate in hunger don’t realize how it really effects those for whom hunger is not a choice. And for those fortunate not to know, Ramadan returns and departs from their households with sentimentality, decorative lights, a Christmas-like gathering for every evening. But to some, and I believe to more people than we are aware of, it is a difficult reminder, a re-experiencing of a familiar helplessness that lives in every person who knew hunger at a young age.
I’ve heard what Ramadan is, and this is what, to some people, it may not be: a tranquil and humbling journey, a nearness to the divine, an experience of an unfamiliar hunger — that is, in fact, not unfamiliar at all.
“What makes hunger so awful is that its end is entirely uncertain, and hunger without this fear, becomes something else entirely.”
Hunger, when experienced willingly, is not hunger at all, not the thing we read about in the news and watch documentaries on. I think many people who fast don’t realize that. It’s a very different feeling, one far removed from those who live hunger, for whom hunger is a present-tense verb in a sentence without a period. We feel hunger when we fast, but we experience with it a sort of calm certainty that there is food to be had at the end of the day. And this certainty of the meal to come sheds the bark of hunger. It removes its coarsest part, it tempers the challenges, eases the thirst, lulls the stomach’s begging. And we are wrong to think that in fasting, we experience hunger, on equal terms, with the poor. What makes hunger so awful is that its end is entirely uncertain, and hunger without this fear, becomes something else entirely.
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There is another aspect that distances us from those who experience hunger on a daily basis. In Ramadan, we are, if I may go as far as to say this, suffering collectively. The collective challenge lessons the impact of hunger because it is shared. What many may not realize is that much of the agony of hunger comes from it being experienced individually.
While working in a clinic at a refugee camp in Lesbos, we were seeing patients from all over the world, fleeing different horrors, wars, and trauma. What we noticed was that for those fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq, Yemen (who had not been individually tortured in prison) their mental health, was, and I speak very generally, notably better than those fleeing from the more discreet and far less reported war in the DRC. What I and some of my collegues noticed was that refugees from the DRC were fleeing a far more private, targeted war. The government, having settled its gaze on a particular family, would proceed with a ruthless campaign against its members. It was not a collective, general war with a capital W. This was war, small, private, and entirely one’s own. It was, we realized, in a shared, communal suffering that the individual was spared the full impact of the horror, if only slightly.
There’s another thing about hunger; it’s murderous, and not in the obvious way. It occurred to me, after about 15 years of fasting, that we have lost something significant, something irreplaceable and unmeasureable to hunger. We maintain a meticulous record of those who die from it, but I am referring to another kind of ‘dying from hunger.’ I am thinking, instead, of what is killed inside the body deprived of what it needs to birth the products of the mind; I mean the small, pardoned, unseen murders of a billion passing thoughts in the body held in the cockhold of hunger.
Still worse is the thing we have killed by putting a man before two impossible choices: food, or this — we point to the books, the canvas, the instrument — and ask again, food or this? And each morning, he washes his face over the sink, combs his hair, and is forced to choose again. To eat, he says, of course, to eat, he repeats, trying to clear the rage in his head for having been forced to choose.
I am not exaggerating in saying that to not have to choose between life and hunger is a privelge. To be well-fed and living are two verbs that don’t fit neatly into one life sentence for far more people than we are comfortable admitting.
The full scale of our loss came to me by accident when I realized I was making two lists for each day in Ramadan. On one half of the paper was a list of the mindless tasks that I would work on while I was fasting, and on the other half, I’d written the important work — the work that mattered to me, that made the hours worth it — that I’d tend to after I’d eaten. I didn’t think much of it, until it came to me without warning.
I thought of all the lists kept in drawers until a nagging hunger was quieted, waiting patiently for a day when a warden named hunger would turn the key to his cell and let him loose, not for an hour’s worth, but for a lifetime. I was mourning a loss that had been birthed and buried without ceromony. I was staring at the margins of their days, reading what I imagined had been written hastily and with sure plans to return. And I saw it die waiting for what did not come or what came in negligible portions.
Of course, I recognize that this is my own experience and outlook on hunger, though I am certain it is shared by at least a few others. I am aware that there have been remarkable acts performed in the midst of hunger strikes and the unchosen hunger that accompanies one’s poverty. But I began this article with the hopes of expanding, however slightly, the worn line of etiquette that may be keeping many Muslims quiet about subjects they’d rather discuss without the fear of being ostracized or silenced with false notions of what can and cannot be said.
This is a reminder, too, that the month of Ramadan is only half fasting. The first half, the one we often hear about, is the time spent in trying to feel with the poor, which is where the seeds of empathy are planted, and the other half, where the roots emerge, lies in trying to alleviate what is now a shared experience, however different it may be from the original hunger (the one being imitated). In the second half lies an obligation we call zakat, a mandatory almsgiving in the month of Ramadan. The two are performed together because there’d be no worthy purpose to empathy if it doesn't elicit action. One feels the awful tugs of hunger, then, with this newly gained understanding, proceeds in taking part in eliminating the original hunger for which, I believe, the month of Ramadan returns each year to resolve, and, to (eventually) eliminate entirely.