In Muslim tradition, Ramadan is a time of heightened commitment to piety and purification through special observances such as fasting, the performance of good deeds – including charitable giving and voluntary service – and through personal sacrifices of material comforts. These observances lead to spiritual fulfilment and a sense of renewal.
Ramadan is the holy month in which Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him and his family) received the first revelation of the Holy Qur'an. Together with other Muslims, Ismailis celebrate Ramadan as a month of special felicity “in which the Holy Qur'an was sent down as a guide to humankind…” (Qur'an 2:185).
In Muslim tradition, Ramadan is a time of heightened commitment to piety and purification through special observances such as fasting, the performance of good deeds – including charitable giving and voluntary service – and through personal sacrifices of material comforts. These observances lead to spiritual fulfilment and a sense of renewal.
The fast of Ramadan is among the pillars of the faith: “O believers, fasting has been prescribed for you as it was for those who preceded you that you may be God-fearing” (Qur'an 2:183). Thus, the fast continues a practice which pre-dates Islam, and has been rendered more humane since religion is not intended to be a cause of hardship. Muslims are urged to fast during Ramadan unless one is suffering from any physical ailment or is on a journey, in which case the prescribed period should be made up later in the year (Qur'an 2:184 – 185).
According to general Muslim belief shared by Shia and Sunni alike, the deeper purpose of fasting is understood as that of cultivating and reinforcing the spiritual and moral character of the faithful, who thus live a life of piety and balance, without forsaking the good things of this world bestowed by Allah's grace (Qur'an 7:31-32). Muslims are expected to practice self-restraint for the sake of Allah's pleasure, remaining ever conscious of His presence. Such are the truly God-fearing.
The emphasis on human character is especially underlined. A tradition of the Prophet's beloved daughter, Hazrat Bibi Fatima Zahra asks what benefit accrues to one who fasts if one does not safeguard one's tongue, ears and limbs. This ethic of self-restraint echoes strictures of the Qur'an: “the hearing, the sight, the heart – all of those shall be questioned.” (Qur'an 17:36). Only when the senses are reined in, does conscience make itself heard, and the soul experience tranquillity, well pleased with itself and well pleasing to its Lord (Qur'an 89:28).
https://the.ismaili/festival/ramadan
Fasting
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shivaathervedi_3
- Posts: 354
- Joined: Wed May 16, 2018 7:29 pm
On Ramadan chand raat, there was an article read in JK on blessings of Ramadan al Mubarak. Looks like it was partially adopted from an article on Ismaili gnosis. An important paragraph which was added read as, I quote:
Not only Ismailis fast in the month of Ramadan but they have to be vigil about their senses through out the year to avoid sins. The pleasant change was," Not only Ismailis fast in the month of Ramadan...", which I never heard before. It is an endorsement that Ismailis should fast in the month of Ramadan.
Not only Ismailis fast in the month of Ramadan but they have to be vigil about their senses through out the year to avoid sins. The pleasant change was," Not only Ismailis fast in the month of Ramadan...", which I never heard before. It is an endorsement that Ismailis should fast in the month of Ramadan.
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shivaathervedi_3
- Posts: 354
- Joined: Wed May 16, 2018 7:29 pm
The paper read on Ramadan Chand Raat was from ITREB. Let readers decide, was that announcement of practical value or only theological value.Admin wrote:"endorsement" in announcements are of no theological value to Ismailis. Only those in Farmans have value. There are many many pages of discussion here on that topic.
Two posts above my post, kmaherali has posted an article on Ramadan adopted from "the. ismaili", an official forum of Ismailis. Let me quote a crucial line from a paragraph, ' FAST OF RAMADAN IS THE PILLAR OF FAITH'.
Note: I have been discussing matters related to Ismailim from Ismaili printed literature.
In our Ismaili faith, we follow the Imam and is Farmans , not announcements written by any lalou... There are announcement everyday, sometimes so ridiculous that one should laugh loud when hearing them. We even have leaders who tell us NOT to follow what we hear from Imam's own mouth, to wait that they approve and edit and correct what our Imam told to us in person. I laugh at those stupid people.shivaathervedi wrote:The paper read on Ramadan Chand Raat was from ITREB. Let readers decide, was that announcement of practical value or only theological value..Admin wrote:"endorsement" in announcements are of no theological value to Ismailis. Only those in Farmans have value. There are many many pages of discussion here on that topic.
Imam is absolute, he is self sufficient. He is the Dasmu Avatar.
People who give priority to announcements over Farmans should find themselves some other religion, or create their own but not in this Forum.
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shivaathervedi_3
- Posts: 354
- Joined: Wed May 16, 2018 7:29 pm
You wrote: "Imam is absolute, he is self sufficient. He is the Dasmu Avatar".Admin wrote:In our Ismaili faith, we follow the Imam and is Farmans , not announcements written by any lalou... There are announcement everyday, sometimes so ridiculous that one should laugh loud when hearing them. We even have leaders who tell us NOT to follow what we hear from Imam's own mouth, to wait that they approve and edit and correct what our Imam told to us in person. I laugh at those stupid people.shivaathervedi wrote:The paper read on Ramadan Chand Raat was from ITREB. Let readers decide, was that announcement of practical value or only theological value..Admin wrote:"endorsement" in announcements are of no theological value to Ismailis. Only those in Farmans have value. There are many many pages of discussion here on that topic.
Imam is absolute, he is self sufficient. He is the Dasmu Avatar.
People who give priority to announcements over Farmans should find themselves some other religion, or create their own but not in this Forum.
The discussion is about fasting and you came up with with Dasmu Avtar!! The article was sent to all jamiats from ITREB and ITREB works under guidance from Hazar Imam.
The article was not an announcement but was on the importance of fasting in the month of Ramadan. If you do not want to fast, it is fine but do not discourage others not to fast.
An innocent question; The Ismailis of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazikistan, Syrian Ismailis, Chinese Ismailis and thousands who belong to khoja community they do fast in the month of Ramadan. Are they infidels? Are they disobeying Imam, or is there religion different than other followers of Imam, or are they from some other planet?
You keep laughing it is good for your health. Laughing is a good medicine, be happy, there is only one life to live.
People have been diverted from the Ismaili faith by following announcements. Ismaili fasting has nothing to do with 30 days fasting it has to do with 365 days fasting, batini fasting so nicely defined by Pir Shams..
People who followed announcements from the institutions of that time also followed Musteali instead of Mowlana Nizar. As I said many of these announcements are useless and some times even prepared by useless people who have no clues on what is exactly the Ismaili faith.
Announcements encouraging Shariati interpretations are from these categories, mostly composed by people who do not know that our Imam said one road leads to Namaz and Roza and the other leads to freedom and these two will never meet.
I will not say here what Aga Ali Shah said in his Farmans about Shariati Rozas in his time, it will hurt feelings of many who have already converted to shariatism.... And in any case Farmans are not for that category of people.
People who followed announcements from the institutions of that time also followed Musteali instead of Mowlana Nizar. As I said many of these announcements are useless and some times even prepared by useless people who have no clues on what is exactly the Ismaili faith.
Announcements encouraging Shariati interpretations are from these categories, mostly composed by people who do not know that our Imam said one road leads to Namaz and Roza and the other leads to freedom and these two will never meet.
I will not say here what Aga Ali Shah said in his Farmans about Shariati Rozas in his time, it will hurt feelings of many who have already converted to shariatism.... And in any case Farmans are not for that category of people.
I was in Syria where Sunnis of Hama travel 30 km to Salamieh to eat lunch there during your "Ramadhan". Are you saying people in Salamieh are kafirs? What Chinese Ismailis do you know who fast? Please do not just trow names of countries, we can do same.shivaathervedi wrote: An innocent question; The Ismailis of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazikistan, Syrian Ismailis, Chinese Ismailis and thousands who belong to khoja community they do fast in the month of Ramadan. Are they infidels?
I have requested you not to take part in theological discussion. Please stick to subject which you are more comfortable with.
Truly Mowlana Sultan Muhammad Shah was right to say the those who are engrossed in Shariah will never understand his Farmans.
DAWN English Newspaper
Eating in public in Ramazan (1)
From the Newspaper, May 18, 2018
Facebook Count 478
Twitter Share
Some 30% of our population is under the age of 12, and is not obligated to fast. At any given point in time, one in four women cannot fast because of their monthly cycle.
The ill, the old and travellers are not obligated to fast. There are also 4.5% of people who are over the age of 65. And let’s add one per cent for the ill, and one per cent for travellers. The minorities make up another 3.6% of our population.
So, on any given day of Ramazan, there are approximately 50% people in Pakistan who cannot or are not obligated to fast. These are mainly people for whom fasting will be a hardship; that is why they are not obligated or in some cases even forbidden to fast.
How can a law be passed that makes it illegal for almost 50% of the population to eat in public, a right given to them by Islam? Even the Quran and Hadith do not forbid them from eating in public.
They are not obligated to fast and hence they have not been forbidden by Islam to eat in public or private. Anyone who is too ill to fast is obligated by Islam to break their fast before they do their body and life harm. That moment can be in public or private, based on how God willed it. Who are we as humans to take away the rights that God has given?
We Pakistanis have made a law that is contrary to the Holy Quran and the Hadith and tarnishes the name of Islam.
Nida. R. Farid
Karachi
Published in Dawn, May 18th, 2018
=================================================================
Reconciling Faith and Modernity for Ramadan (2)
By Mustafa Akyol
Contributing Opinion Writer
New York Times. May 14, 2018
This year, the Muslim holy month of Ramadan begins on Tuesday. That means a big portion of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, my coreligionists, will be fasting for 30 days, which is really no easy task. Every day, from dawn till dusk, they will neither eat any food nor drink a drop of water. They will be hungry and thirsty but will wait patiently between the pre-dawn sahur meal and the iftar dinner at night — just for the sake of God. It is a great experience of self-discipline, devotion and piety. It is also a good opportunity, Islamic scholars often say, for reflecting about and developing empathy with those who starve because they are destitute.
For some of the world’s most far-flung Muslims, Ramadan will be even more difficult. These are the Muslims who live in the high latitudes, where “dawn till dusk” can equal almost the entire 24-hour day. In Reykjavik, Iceland, for example, which is now home to nearly 1,000 Muslims, the sun will set at midnight, only to come back in about two hours. That means the fasting time will be as long as 22 hours, allowing for only one meal a day.
No wonder this challenge has become a major point of discussion among Muslim scholars in the past few decades, particularly as increasing numbers of Muslims have migrated to northern countries like Norway and Sweden. Were the believers among these migrants supposed to follow the traditional Quranic timetable? Or could there be some gracious adjustment?
Answers varied. Saudi scholars, who typically represent the most literal and strict interpretation of Sunni Islam, ruled that no adjustment should be made. In a fatwa, or religious ruling, they declared that Islamic law is “universal and applies to all people in all countries.” Perhaps they could not empathize enough with their northern co-religionists, accustomed as the Saudis are to the mild fasting times in the Arabian Peninsula, where days are pretty standard in length throughout the year and fasting never exceeds 15 hours. Muslims nearer to the North Pole, accordingly, would just have to deal with their bad luck.
Fortunately, other Sunni jurists, such as those at Al-Azhar University in Egypt, have been a bit more amenable. Two compromises have been offered: Muslims in extremely high latitudes could ignore the natural day in their location and follow the timetables in Mecca or the nearest Muslim-majority country. This has allowed some Icelandic Muslims, for example, to follow the time in Turkey and fast for 18 hours instead of 22, allowing for a breakfast and a dinner during the waxing and waning hours of daylight.
This practical solution to a problem of jurisprudence must be welcome in the high latitudes. But it also raises a more complex, two-part theoretical question that is often ignored by Islam’s jurists but that deserves to be probed because it’s at the tip of a theological iceberg: How historical is the Quran’s language? And how literally should it be interpreted today?
This is a question raised by modern Muslim theologians like Fazlur Rahman Malik, who died in 1988; his reformist ideas led to his exile from his home country, Pakistan, and then to a safe haven at the University of Chicago. Like every Muslim worthy of the name, Dr. Rahman believed that the Quran is the word of God revealed to the Prophet Muhammad.
Yet, in Dr. Rahman’s opinion, God had not spoken in a vacuum. He had instead spoken to a specific community, the Arabs, and at a specific time, the early seventh century. This context, Dr. Rahman argued, played a role in the composition of the Quran’s text. And when new contexts arose, the injunctions of the Quran had to be reinterpreted in the light of the moral intentions behind the text.
The discussion over fasting is, in fact, a minor case of the need for such reinterpretations. Some more important issues include corporal punishments, which create some of the most controversial perceptions of Islam in the modern world. The Quran, in fact, is free of some of the harsh corporal punishments commonly associated with Islamic law — such as stoning of adulterers — but it does include others. “As for the thieves,” it decrees, “amputate their hands in recompense for what they committed.”
The Saudis take that Quranic injunction literally and carry it out without any doubt. So do the Iranians and the Sudanese. They see it is a commandment from God that must be obeyed as is. Yet there is also a contextual way of understanding God’s commandments. As explained by another proponent of reform within Islam, the Moroccan scholar Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, who died in 2010, there were simply no prisons in early-seventh-century Arabia, where the Quran was revealed. There was no state bureaucracy to run jails in a society that lived in tents and huts, so detaining and feeding someone within strong walls was neither possible nor feasible. As a result, all punishments had to be immediate, and corporal.
No wonder pre-Islamic Arabs also punished theft with the amputation of hands, as we learn from
Islamic literature itself; the Quran simply affirmed this tradition. Therefore, in Dr. Jabri’s view, the Quran’s verdict on theft was that it is a crime that should be punished by available means. Today, these means can be fines or prison sentences — a step forward that the Ottoman Empire, the very seat of the caliphate, had already taken in its Penal Code of 1858, which was influenced by French legal norms.
Conservative Muslims may find this interpretive take on the Quran too permissive. But even they do not take literally the Quran’s call to build self-defense by raising “war horses.” Instead, the call is interpreted to mean that the mounts are a reference to vehicles. And while the Saudi clerics may insist on taking the Quran literally on fasting for 22 hours from dawn till dusk, a future Muslim colony right at the North Pole, which gets only darkness at the winter solstice and only daylight at the arrival of summer — or, more radically, on Mars would force even them to change their minds. The heart of the matter is that Islam is facing a challenge that Jews and Christians have also faced in the past few centuries: There are new realities in the world, and we should figure out how much of our religious tradition is meant to be preserved as it was at its genesis. It is easy to say that God has already given us all the answers. But it may be more prudent to say that he also gave us the reason to think, rethink and reinterpret the meaning of his words.
Mustafa Akyol, a contributing opinion writer, is the author, most recently, of “The Islamic Jesus.”
ISIS's Perverse, Bloody Interpretation of Ramadan (3)
By: Amarnath Amarasingam & Charlie Winter
ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria)
“What of the person who spends the sacred month ... oppressing people and killing innocents?”
For the overwhelming majority of Muslims, Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, is a time of prayer and atonement. In addition to fasting for its duration and praying five times per day (as normal), many Muslims add special readings from the Koran to their daily worship, so that, by the end of the holy month—which, this year, begins today and ends on June 24—the text has been read in its entirety.
Sadly, in recent years, Ramadan has been marred by increased terrorist violence around the world, as the Islamic State has attempted to transform it into a month of unparalleled bloodshed. To some extent, it appears that its supporters are willing to help it do so.
On June 23, 2015, six days into Ramadan, then-ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani called for attacks to commemorate the holy month. Three days later, a Shia mosque in Kuwait was hit by an ISIS suicide bomb that killed 26 Muslim worshippers. Later that same day, a tourist resort near the city of Sousse in Tunisia came under fire, with the attacker killing 38 people and injuring dozens more. On May 21, 2016, about two weeks before the start of Ramadan, Adnani made another speech. “Get prepared, be ready,” he said, “to make it a month of calamity everywhere for nonbelievers.” He argued that the targeting of civilians in the West was not only permissible, but desirable, and that as long as coalition forces were at war with ISIS there were no “innocents.”
Ramadan in 2016 proved to be particularly deadly. On June 12, U.S. citizen Omar Mateen opened fire in a nightclub in Orlando, killing 49 people. On June 27, eight suspected ISIS suicide bombers launched several waves of attacks on a Christian village in northeast Lebanon. A day later, more than 40 people were killed during an attack on Ataturk airport in Turkey. Three days later, more than 20 people were brutally killed at a café in Bangladesh. The next day, almost 300 people died when a large truck bomb exploded in Baghdad. As Ramadan came to a close on July 4, four suicide attacks hit three locations across Saudi Arabia, including one in the holy city of Medina.
While it is impossible to know whether any of these attackers had Ramadan on their minds, it now seems undeniable that jihadist groups regard the occasion, seen by most Muslims as a time of spiritual reflection, as a time of enhanced militancy. “Ramadan is the holy month of jihad,” one ISIS supporter told us over Twitter. “People want to win the honor of attaining martyrdom in Ramadan.” After all, Ramadan is a month in which all good deeds are rewarded manifold; for jihadists, such “good deeds” include terrorist attacks.
To validate this position, jihadists often evoke the Battle of Badr, a key moment in early Muslim history that occurred during the month of Ramadan in the year 624 CE. During the battle, Muslim forces overwhelmed their enemies despite being massively outnumbered. Against all odds, their victory ensured the survival of the fledgling community of believers. It’s no surprise that jihadists like to draw attention to this example, manipulating it to their political ends.
“What they are doing is not jihad in any sense according to Islamic tradition,” Abu Ali, a former extremist who has renounced his past views, pointed out. “I would counter by saying that just as one receives multiplied rewards for good deeds in Ramadan, they receive multiplied bad deeds for sins. So what of the person who spends the sacred month of Ramadan oppressing people and killing innocents?”
With the attack in Manchester, which ISIS claimed the next day, and the brutal killing Coptic Christians in Egypt, which ISIS has now claimed credit for, terrorism researchers and law-enforcement officials worry that this year’s Ramadan could once again see a flurry of attacks. Compounding these fears, a day before Ramadan began, ISIS supporters released a 12-minute statement in Arabic reiterating the words of their current spokesman, Abul Hasan al-Muhajir. In it, Abul Hasan could again be heard calling for attacks and repeating that civilians in the West are legitimate targets.
As abhorrent as this rhetoric is, it contains a sort of strategic logic. While it may be true that ISIS encourages the murder of civilians—killing “crusader” non-combatants is framed as the ultimate act of retribution—it would be wrong to think the organization considers such violence an end in itself.
With the leadership of ISIS slowly being snuffed out, and the campaigns against it in Mosul and around Raqqa gaining ground, the group is guaranteed to try to showcase its strength in the weeks and months to come—to show it is still as strong as ever. For ISIS, “inspired” and “directed” attacks (and anything in between) are the best way to do this. These operations are communicative acts and information weapons with which to buoy supporters’ morale and offset the ideological damage brought about by territorial loss and depleted leadership.
For ISIS, attacks like the one in Manchester aren’t just about gratuitous violence dressed up as Islam. They are image-management tools, ways to reset global perceptions and boost the hopes of the true believers fighting on the front lines in Iraq and Syria. It used to be that this triumphalist effect could be achieved through slick execution videos intended to terrorize the international community. Increasingly, though, encouraging attacks outside of the self-proclaimed caliphate heartlands is its chief means of resetting the global media agenda.
Besides that, inspiring such attacks is also a way to pit communities against each other, inflame anti-Muslim sentiment, and sow discord among Muslim communities and with the wider society. As Abul Hasan himself noted: “Make them forget sleep, terrorize them so that the neighbor fears his neighbor.”
For most Muslims, ramped-up attacks during Ramadan are perhaps the clearest evidence that organizations like ISIS are un-Islamic and pervert the core message of their faith. For ISIS fighters and supporters, though, the perception is that engaging in jihad during this holy month results in heightened rewards in the afterlife.
Atlanic Daily, Washington
26th May, 2017
Ramadan fasting: Modern opposition to age-old rules (4)
By: Tehmina Kazi
Tuesday 16 June 2015 19:21 BST (INDY/LIFE NEWSLETTER, UK)
It's that time of year again. Gentle squabbles over moon sightings, the stockpiling of frozen samosas, and the dreaded "Ramadan breath", which means we have to keep a miswak teeth-cleaning stick (or, more likely, a toothbrush) on us at all times. For tomorrow is the start of Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar.
This kicks off four weeks of introspection (maybe), God-consciousness (hopefully) and abstinence from food, water, smoking and marital sex (you're having a laugh, aren't you?) during daylight hours. The only exemptions from fasting are for older people or those with medical conditions, as well as children (who may fast if they wish to). Further, menstruating women can expect a break during their time of the month.
Faced with the intricacies and possible etiquette blips of these rituals in a country where non-Muslims are in the majority, you'd think advice from a compassionate and highly intelligent scholar would be lapped up. However, over the past few days, my Facebook feed has been heaving with high-handed dismissals of Dr Usama Hasan's excellent juristic opinion, or fatwa, on the reduction of fasting hours. He reasons that summertime fasts in northern Europe are far longer than they were possibly intended to be, with the worshipper receiving only five hours of eating and drinking time in one 24-hour period. After going through the religious precedents in detail, he encourages people who want to keep these long fasts to continue, but states that it is acceptable for others to keep 12- or 16-hour fasts if that is more comfortable for them.
The original principle of the fast (empathy with the poor, charity, service to humanity) is maintained, but it is fused with common sense and an awareness of practical considerations. This goes a step further than the usual dispensations for Muslims whose health is affected, and has ruffled a lot of feathers. Social-media blatherers wrongly accused Dr Hasan of instituting 12-hour fasts for all British Muslims, and tried to make out that he was subordinating God's will to the "desires" of human beings, failing to see that one of the highest virtues is actually reason.
The issue of fasting becomes even more politicised when children are concerned. Even under orthodox interpretations of Islamic law, as mentioned above, fasting is not obligatory for those who have not entered puberty. This doesn't stop some parents and children going ahead with the practice in school hours, however.
One primary-school trust grew so concerned about children fainting, becoming ill or missing out on parts of the curriculum, that it banned fasting this month. Justin James, the chief executive of the Lion Academy Trust, which covers a number of schools in east London, cited the delicate balancing act of the school's obligations under child-protection law versus working with the local communities it serves. It is a balance that my organisation, British Muslims for Secular Democracy, knows only too well. We recently received funding to revise and update our advice for schools, which helps teachers to negotiate these thorny issues, establish open channels of communication with parents, and find the best outcome for everyone concerned.
In many Muslim communities, there is a knee-jerk negative reaction to anything progressive or sensible, with certain people assuming that these measures automatically "water down" the faith. This is borne of an insecurity which deems the most severe version of a religion to be the most "authentic", and means that dissenting voices end up feeling isolated and unheard. A friend was recently looking to interview some non-fasting Muslims in Yorkshire. Hardly anyone answered her call, and her original request was met with snorts of derision on Facebook.
Contrary to what the snorters may think, their actions represent a departure from the spirit of this month, where people are supposed to work on their own spirituality and actions. Some of my best Ramadan memories involve dishing out fried chicken to homeless people at Lincoln's Inn (with Muslims and non-Muslims), and having the accompanying dhal and bananas handed right back with a cheeky grin. It would be great to see more of these events emblazoned on to the public consciousness, rather than toy-throwing defensiveness and exceptionalism.
Tehmina Kazi is the director of British Muslims for Secular Democracy
Eating in public in Ramazan (1)
From the Newspaper, May 18, 2018
Facebook Count 478
Twitter Share
Some 30% of our population is under the age of 12, and is not obligated to fast. At any given point in time, one in four women cannot fast because of their monthly cycle.
The ill, the old and travellers are not obligated to fast. There are also 4.5% of people who are over the age of 65. And let’s add one per cent for the ill, and one per cent for travellers. The minorities make up another 3.6% of our population.
So, on any given day of Ramazan, there are approximately 50% people in Pakistan who cannot or are not obligated to fast. These are mainly people for whom fasting will be a hardship; that is why they are not obligated or in some cases even forbidden to fast.
How can a law be passed that makes it illegal for almost 50% of the population to eat in public, a right given to them by Islam? Even the Quran and Hadith do not forbid them from eating in public.
They are not obligated to fast and hence they have not been forbidden by Islam to eat in public or private. Anyone who is too ill to fast is obligated by Islam to break their fast before they do their body and life harm. That moment can be in public or private, based on how God willed it. Who are we as humans to take away the rights that God has given?
We Pakistanis have made a law that is contrary to the Holy Quran and the Hadith and tarnishes the name of Islam.
Nida. R. Farid
Karachi
Published in Dawn, May 18th, 2018
=================================================================
Reconciling Faith and Modernity for Ramadan (2)
By Mustafa Akyol
Contributing Opinion Writer
New York Times. May 14, 2018
This year, the Muslim holy month of Ramadan begins on Tuesday. That means a big portion of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, my coreligionists, will be fasting for 30 days, which is really no easy task. Every day, from dawn till dusk, they will neither eat any food nor drink a drop of water. They will be hungry and thirsty but will wait patiently between the pre-dawn sahur meal and the iftar dinner at night — just for the sake of God. It is a great experience of self-discipline, devotion and piety. It is also a good opportunity, Islamic scholars often say, for reflecting about and developing empathy with those who starve because they are destitute.
For some of the world’s most far-flung Muslims, Ramadan will be even more difficult. These are the Muslims who live in the high latitudes, where “dawn till dusk” can equal almost the entire 24-hour day. In Reykjavik, Iceland, for example, which is now home to nearly 1,000 Muslims, the sun will set at midnight, only to come back in about two hours. That means the fasting time will be as long as 22 hours, allowing for only one meal a day.
No wonder this challenge has become a major point of discussion among Muslim scholars in the past few decades, particularly as increasing numbers of Muslims have migrated to northern countries like Norway and Sweden. Were the believers among these migrants supposed to follow the traditional Quranic timetable? Or could there be some gracious adjustment?
Answers varied. Saudi scholars, who typically represent the most literal and strict interpretation of Sunni Islam, ruled that no adjustment should be made. In a fatwa, or religious ruling, they declared that Islamic law is “universal and applies to all people in all countries.” Perhaps they could not empathize enough with their northern co-religionists, accustomed as the Saudis are to the mild fasting times in the Arabian Peninsula, where days are pretty standard in length throughout the year and fasting never exceeds 15 hours. Muslims nearer to the North Pole, accordingly, would just have to deal with their bad luck.
Fortunately, other Sunni jurists, such as those at Al-Azhar University in Egypt, have been a bit more amenable. Two compromises have been offered: Muslims in extremely high latitudes could ignore the natural day in their location and follow the timetables in Mecca or the nearest Muslim-majority country. This has allowed some Icelandic Muslims, for example, to follow the time in Turkey and fast for 18 hours instead of 22, allowing for a breakfast and a dinner during the waxing and waning hours of daylight.
This practical solution to a problem of jurisprudence must be welcome in the high latitudes. But it also raises a more complex, two-part theoretical question that is often ignored by Islam’s jurists but that deserves to be probed because it’s at the tip of a theological iceberg: How historical is the Quran’s language? And how literally should it be interpreted today?
This is a question raised by modern Muslim theologians like Fazlur Rahman Malik, who died in 1988; his reformist ideas led to his exile from his home country, Pakistan, and then to a safe haven at the University of Chicago. Like every Muslim worthy of the name, Dr. Rahman believed that the Quran is the word of God revealed to the Prophet Muhammad.
Yet, in Dr. Rahman’s opinion, God had not spoken in a vacuum. He had instead spoken to a specific community, the Arabs, and at a specific time, the early seventh century. This context, Dr. Rahman argued, played a role in the composition of the Quran’s text. And when new contexts arose, the injunctions of the Quran had to be reinterpreted in the light of the moral intentions behind the text.
The discussion over fasting is, in fact, a minor case of the need for such reinterpretations. Some more important issues include corporal punishments, which create some of the most controversial perceptions of Islam in the modern world. The Quran, in fact, is free of some of the harsh corporal punishments commonly associated with Islamic law — such as stoning of adulterers — but it does include others. “As for the thieves,” it decrees, “amputate their hands in recompense for what they committed.”
The Saudis take that Quranic injunction literally and carry it out without any doubt. So do the Iranians and the Sudanese. They see it is a commandment from God that must be obeyed as is. Yet there is also a contextual way of understanding God’s commandments. As explained by another proponent of reform within Islam, the Moroccan scholar Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, who died in 2010, there were simply no prisons in early-seventh-century Arabia, where the Quran was revealed. There was no state bureaucracy to run jails in a society that lived in tents and huts, so detaining and feeding someone within strong walls was neither possible nor feasible. As a result, all punishments had to be immediate, and corporal.
No wonder pre-Islamic Arabs also punished theft with the amputation of hands, as we learn from
Islamic literature itself; the Quran simply affirmed this tradition. Therefore, in Dr. Jabri’s view, the Quran’s verdict on theft was that it is a crime that should be punished by available means. Today, these means can be fines or prison sentences — a step forward that the Ottoman Empire, the very seat of the caliphate, had already taken in its Penal Code of 1858, which was influenced by French legal norms.
Conservative Muslims may find this interpretive take on the Quran too permissive. But even they do not take literally the Quran’s call to build self-defense by raising “war horses.” Instead, the call is interpreted to mean that the mounts are a reference to vehicles. And while the Saudi clerics may insist on taking the Quran literally on fasting for 22 hours from dawn till dusk, a future Muslim colony right at the North Pole, which gets only darkness at the winter solstice and only daylight at the arrival of summer — or, more radically, on Mars would force even them to change their minds. The heart of the matter is that Islam is facing a challenge that Jews and Christians have also faced in the past few centuries: There are new realities in the world, and we should figure out how much of our religious tradition is meant to be preserved as it was at its genesis. It is easy to say that God has already given us all the answers. But it may be more prudent to say that he also gave us the reason to think, rethink and reinterpret the meaning of his words.
Mustafa Akyol, a contributing opinion writer, is the author, most recently, of “The Islamic Jesus.”
ISIS's Perverse, Bloody Interpretation of Ramadan (3)
By: Amarnath Amarasingam & Charlie Winter
ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria)
“What of the person who spends the sacred month ... oppressing people and killing innocents?”
For the overwhelming majority of Muslims, Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, is a time of prayer and atonement. In addition to fasting for its duration and praying five times per day (as normal), many Muslims add special readings from the Koran to their daily worship, so that, by the end of the holy month—which, this year, begins today and ends on June 24—the text has been read in its entirety.
Sadly, in recent years, Ramadan has been marred by increased terrorist violence around the world, as the Islamic State has attempted to transform it into a month of unparalleled bloodshed. To some extent, it appears that its supporters are willing to help it do so.
On June 23, 2015, six days into Ramadan, then-ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani called for attacks to commemorate the holy month. Three days later, a Shia mosque in Kuwait was hit by an ISIS suicide bomb that killed 26 Muslim worshippers. Later that same day, a tourist resort near the city of Sousse in Tunisia came under fire, with the attacker killing 38 people and injuring dozens more. On May 21, 2016, about two weeks before the start of Ramadan, Adnani made another speech. “Get prepared, be ready,” he said, “to make it a month of calamity everywhere for nonbelievers.” He argued that the targeting of civilians in the West was not only permissible, but desirable, and that as long as coalition forces were at war with ISIS there were no “innocents.”
Ramadan in 2016 proved to be particularly deadly. On June 12, U.S. citizen Omar Mateen opened fire in a nightclub in Orlando, killing 49 people. On June 27, eight suspected ISIS suicide bombers launched several waves of attacks on a Christian village in northeast Lebanon. A day later, more than 40 people were killed during an attack on Ataturk airport in Turkey. Three days later, more than 20 people were brutally killed at a café in Bangladesh. The next day, almost 300 people died when a large truck bomb exploded in Baghdad. As Ramadan came to a close on July 4, four suicide attacks hit three locations across Saudi Arabia, including one in the holy city of Medina.
While it is impossible to know whether any of these attackers had Ramadan on their minds, it now seems undeniable that jihadist groups regard the occasion, seen by most Muslims as a time of spiritual reflection, as a time of enhanced militancy. “Ramadan is the holy month of jihad,” one ISIS supporter told us over Twitter. “People want to win the honor of attaining martyrdom in Ramadan.” After all, Ramadan is a month in which all good deeds are rewarded manifold; for jihadists, such “good deeds” include terrorist attacks.
To validate this position, jihadists often evoke the Battle of Badr, a key moment in early Muslim history that occurred during the month of Ramadan in the year 624 CE. During the battle, Muslim forces overwhelmed their enemies despite being massively outnumbered. Against all odds, their victory ensured the survival of the fledgling community of believers. It’s no surprise that jihadists like to draw attention to this example, manipulating it to their political ends.
“What they are doing is not jihad in any sense according to Islamic tradition,” Abu Ali, a former extremist who has renounced his past views, pointed out. “I would counter by saying that just as one receives multiplied rewards for good deeds in Ramadan, they receive multiplied bad deeds for sins. So what of the person who spends the sacred month of Ramadan oppressing people and killing innocents?”
With the attack in Manchester, which ISIS claimed the next day, and the brutal killing Coptic Christians in Egypt, which ISIS has now claimed credit for, terrorism researchers and law-enforcement officials worry that this year’s Ramadan could once again see a flurry of attacks. Compounding these fears, a day before Ramadan began, ISIS supporters released a 12-minute statement in Arabic reiterating the words of their current spokesman, Abul Hasan al-Muhajir. In it, Abul Hasan could again be heard calling for attacks and repeating that civilians in the West are legitimate targets.
As abhorrent as this rhetoric is, it contains a sort of strategic logic. While it may be true that ISIS encourages the murder of civilians—killing “crusader” non-combatants is framed as the ultimate act of retribution—it would be wrong to think the organization considers such violence an end in itself.
With the leadership of ISIS slowly being snuffed out, and the campaigns against it in Mosul and around Raqqa gaining ground, the group is guaranteed to try to showcase its strength in the weeks and months to come—to show it is still as strong as ever. For ISIS, “inspired” and “directed” attacks (and anything in between) are the best way to do this. These operations are communicative acts and information weapons with which to buoy supporters’ morale and offset the ideological damage brought about by territorial loss and depleted leadership.
For ISIS, attacks like the one in Manchester aren’t just about gratuitous violence dressed up as Islam. They are image-management tools, ways to reset global perceptions and boost the hopes of the true believers fighting on the front lines in Iraq and Syria. It used to be that this triumphalist effect could be achieved through slick execution videos intended to terrorize the international community. Increasingly, though, encouraging attacks outside of the self-proclaimed caliphate heartlands is its chief means of resetting the global media agenda.
Besides that, inspiring such attacks is also a way to pit communities against each other, inflame anti-Muslim sentiment, and sow discord among Muslim communities and with the wider society. As Abul Hasan himself noted: “Make them forget sleep, terrorize them so that the neighbor fears his neighbor.”
For most Muslims, ramped-up attacks during Ramadan are perhaps the clearest evidence that organizations like ISIS are un-Islamic and pervert the core message of their faith. For ISIS fighters and supporters, though, the perception is that engaging in jihad during this holy month results in heightened rewards in the afterlife.
Atlanic Daily, Washington
26th May, 2017
Ramadan fasting: Modern opposition to age-old rules (4)
By: Tehmina Kazi
Tuesday 16 June 2015 19:21 BST (INDY/LIFE NEWSLETTER, UK)
It's that time of year again. Gentle squabbles over moon sightings, the stockpiling of frozen samosas, and the dreaded "Ramadan breath", which means we have to keep a miswak teeth-cleaning stick (or, more likely, a toothbrush) on us at all times. For tomorrow is the start of Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar.
This kicks off four weeks of introspection (maybe), God-consciousness (hopefully) and abstinence from food, water, smoking and marital sex (you're having a laugh, aren't you?) during daylight hours. The only exemptions from fasting are for older people or those with medical conditions, as well as children (who may fast if they wish to). Further, menstruating women can expect a break during their time of the month.
Faced with the intricacies and possible etiquette blips of these rituals in a country where non-Muslims are in the majority, you'd think advice from a compassionate and highly intelligent scholar would be lapped up. However, over the past few days, my Facebook feed has been heaving with high-handed dismissals of Dr Usama Hasan's excellent juristic opinion, or fatwa, on the reduction of fasting hours. He reasons that summertime fasts in northern Europe are far longer than they were possibly intended to be, with the worshipper receiving only five hours of eating and drinking time in one 24-hour period. After going through the religious precedents in detail, he encourages people who want to keep these long fasts to continue, but states that it is acceptable for others to keep 12- or 16-hour fasts if that is more comfortable for them.
The original principle of the fast (empathy with the poor, charity, service to humanity) is maintained, but it is fused with common sense and an awareness of practical considerations. This goes a step further than the usual dispensations for Muslims whose health is affected, and has ruffled a lot of feathers. Social-media blatherers wrongly accused Dr Hasan of instituting 12-hour fasts for all British Muslims, and tried to make out that he was subordinating God's will to the "desires" of human beings, failing to see that one of the highest virtues is actually reason.
The issue of fasting becomes even more politicised when children are concerned. Even under orthodox interpretations of Islamic law, as mentioned above, fasting is not obligatory for those who have not entered puberty. This doesn't stop some parents and children going ahead with the practice in school hours, however.
One primary-school trust grew so concerned about children fainting, becoming ill or missing out on parts of the curriculum, that it banned fasting this month. Justin James, the chief executive of the Lion Academy Trust, which covers a number of schools in east London, cited the delicate balancing act of the school's obligations under child-protection law versus working with the local communities it serves. It is a balance that my organisation, British Muslims for Secular Democracy, knows only too well. We recently received funding to revise and update our advice for schools, which helps teachers to negotiate these thorny issues, establish open channels of communication with parents, and find the best outcome for everyone concerned.
In many Muslim communities, there is a knee-jerk negative reaction to anything progressive or sensible, with certain people assuming that these measures automatically "water down" the faith. This is borne of an insecurity which deems the most severe version of a religion to be the most "authentic", and means that dissenting voices end up feeling isolated and unheard. A friend was recently looking to interview some non-fasting Muslims in Yorkshire. Hardly anyone answered her call, and her original request was met with snorts of derision on Facebook.
Contrary to what the snorters may think, their actions represent a departure from the spirit of this month, where people are supposed to work on their own spirituality and actions. Some of my best Ramadan memories involve dishing out fried chicken to homeless people at Lincoln's Inn (with Muslims and non-Muslims), and having the accompanying dhal and bananas handed right back with a cheeky grin. It would be great to see more of these events emblazoned on to the public consciousness, rather than toy-throwing defensiveness and exceptionalism.
Tehmina Kazi is the director of British Muslims for Secular Democracy
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Dawn News Television
'I can never forget the fasting experience in space'
Web Desk 05 May 201
Ramadan is going to begin in the month, but will you believe at least one person in the world who fasted in space outside the earth.
Yes, in 1985, the first Arab astronomer Prince Sultan bin Salman fasted in the 1405 AH Ramadan during the trip to the US Space Shuttle Discovery.
Shortly before interviewing Arab News, Prince Sultan told about his impression.
He said that during his unforgettable space trip, he finished the Quran in 6 days, and for that he had allotted his golden time.
He was on a daily journey on the 29th fast, and he declared fasting as an unforgettable experience in space.
He said that Ramadan had come in hot weather this year, while I was taking special training for this trip in the Houston center in Houston, during the training, we were with severe heat and thirsty condition, There was a schedule for 24 Ramadan, but went on to Tawawa for the 29th fast.
During this training, he remained fasting and the doctors of NASA analyzed the effects of fasting on their health.
He fasted on the 29th fast with his team on the space shuttle, while consulting Saudi scholar Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz regarding the fasting times in space.
Saudi princes say, 'The religious scholar told me that I should do Sahar and Aftar according to the time where I was fasting on fasting, I did my journey from Florida.'
He spit in the time of sunrise sunset in the US state, whereas he heard in radio that the next day in Saudi Arabia is Eid.
However, he saw in the space that the new moon did not see him, but on the next day he saw the new moon and informed the Saudi scientist team.
After this, the Saudi authorities have confirmed that Ramadan has remained a day and he has to pay a penalty.
During this space trip, during prayers, according to the hours of the earth, while wet napkins used for Wudoo because there was no gravity.
/translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=ur&tl=en&text=Dawn%20News%20Television%20%0A'
'I can never forget the fasting experience in space'
Web Desk 05 May 201
Ramadan is going to begin in the month, but will you believe at least one person in the world who fasted in space outside the earth.
Yes, in 1985, the first Arab astronomer Prince Sultan bin Salman fasted in the 1405 AH Ramadan during the trip to the US Space Shuttle Discovery.
Shortly before interviewing Arab News, Prince Sultan told about his impression.
He said that during his unforgettable space trip, he finished the Quran in 6 days, and for that he had allotted his golden time.
He was on a daily journey on the 29th fast, and he declared fasting as an unforgettable experience in space.
He said that Ramadan had come in hot weather this year, while I was taking special training for this trip in the Houston center in Houston, during the training, we were with severe heat and thirsty condition, There was a schedule for 24 Ramadan, but went on to Tawawa for the 29th fast.
During this training, he remained fasting and the doctors of NASA analyzed the effects of fasting on their health.
He fasted on the 29th fast with his team on the space shuttle, while consulting Saudi scholar Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz regarding the fasting times in space.
Saudi princes say, 'The religious scholar told me that I should do Sahar and Aftar according to the time where I was fasting on fasting, I did my journey from Florida.'
He spit in the time of sunrise sunset in the US state, whereas he heard in radio that the next day in Saudi Arabia is Eid.
However, he saw in the space that the new moon did not see him, but on the next day he saw the new moon and informed the Saudi scientist team.
After this, the Saudi authorities have confirmed that Ramadan has remained a day and he has to pay a penalty.
During this space trip, during prayers, according to the hours of the earth, while wet napkins used for Wudoo because there was no gravity.
/translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=ur&tl=en&text=Dawn%20News%20Television%20%0A'
Arab states waste heaps of food during Ramadan
Hotels and restaurants have come up with some novel solutions
AS MUSLIMS HAVE for centuries, Ahmed Toufiq broke his Ramadan fast by nibbling a date while the call to prayer echoed across the Nile. Then he turned to the heaping plates in front of him. He made short work of a fragrant lentil soup, but his pace slowed as he picked through salads and scooped dips with steaming pita bread. When he walked outside for a cigarette 20 minutes after sunset, a server collected half a plate of untouched kebab and rice. “Before iftar, you feel like you want to eat for two,” he said.
Arab states waste a lot of food. A study in 2016 by the Economist Intelligence Unit, our sister company, found that Saudi Arabia bins 427kg per person annually, triple the average in Europe and North America. Some may chalk this up to traditions of hospitality: even a “light lunch” in Cairo or Beirut leaves guests in a torpor. The reasons are more varied, though. Half of the fruits and vegetables grown in Egypt are never eaten because they are often moved to market in open-air trucks and wilt quickly in the heat.
The problem gets worse during Ramadan. Residents of the United Arab Emirates each produce an extra 1.8kg of waste per day in the holy month, a 67% increase. Food accounts for 55% of Dubai’s trash, up from 22% in other months. Bahrain’s food waste increases by half to 600 tonnes daily. Buffets are a major culprit, especially in the Gulf, where hotels and restaurants often serve through the night. A study by researchers at Masdar, a state-owned renewable-energy firm in Abu Dhabi, found that just 53% of food at iftar buffets is eaten.
This is an expensive waste. Some governments see it as a security risk, too. The region is a net food importer. In the weeks before Ramadan, state-run media admonish their citizens to be less wasteful. On social media diners now swap recommendations not on lavish buffets but on a la carte options. Autocratic regimes that frown on civil society are happy for their citizens to take up the cause of food waste. Wahab, a Qatari start-up, sends volunteers to collect leftovers from hotels and restaurants.
A few hotels in Dubai have installed cameras and scales to track what winds up in the bin. Chefs use the data to cook less of unpopular dishes. One Hilton property says the system cut buffet waste by 70%. Others are doing away with the buffet altogether—if not for iftar then for suhour, the pre-dawn “dinner”. A growing number of restaurants advertise prix fixe menus as a waste-free way to break fasts. As an added perk, in an emirate struggling with an economic slump, these meals are cheaper. A lavish hotel buffet might set customers back 200 dirhams ($54). Set menus cost about half that.
Egypt’s national food bank feeds about 1.8m families during Ramadan. Some of the food is sourced from hotels that package leftovers from their buffet trays. For health reasons, though, uneaten food from a customer’s plate must be thrown away. After 15 hours of fasting eyes are bigger than stomachs. High-tech cameras will not help. So one Cairo hotel found a low-tech solution for its buffet: it made the plates smaller.
https://www.economist.com/middle-east-a ... a/243928/n
Hotels and restaurants have come up with some novel solutions
AS MUSLIMS HAVE for centuries, Ahmed Toufiq broke his Ramadan fast by nibbling a date while the call to prayer echoed across the Nile. Then he turned to the heaping plates in front of him. He made short work of a fragrant lentil soup, but his pace slowed as he picked through salads and scooped dips with steaming pita bread. When he walked outside for a cigarette 20 minutes after sunset, a server collected half a plate of untouched kebab and rice. “Before iftar, you feel like you want to eat for two,” he said.
Arab states waste a lot of food. A study in 2016 by the Economist Intelligence Unit, our sister company, found that Saudi Arabia bins 427kg per person annually, triple the average in Europe and North America. Some may chalk this up to traditions of hospitality: even a “light lunch” in Cairo or Beirut leaves guests in a torpor. The reasons are more varied, though. Half of the fruits and vegetables grown in Egypt are never eaten because they are often moved to market in open-air trucks and wilt quickly in the heat.
The problem gets worse during Ramadan. Residents of the United Arab Emirates each produce an extra 1.8kg of waste per day in the holy month, a 67% increase. Food accounts for 55% of Dubai’s trash, up from 22% in other months. Bahrain’s food waste increases by half to 600 tonnes daily. Buffets are a major culprit, especially in the Gulf, where hotels and restaurants often serve through the night. A study by researchers at Masdar, a state-owned renewable-energy firm in Abu Dhabi, found that just 53% of food at iftar buffets is eaten.
This is an expensive waste. Some governments see it as a security risk, too. The region is a net food importer. In the weeks before Ramadan, state-run media admonish their citizens to be less wasteful. On social media diners now swap recommendations not on lavish buffets but on a la carte options. Autocratic regimes that frown on civil society are happy for their citizens to take up the cause of food waste. Wahab, a Qatari start-up, sends volunteers to collect leftovers from hotels and restaurants.
A few hotels in Dubai have installed cameras and scales to track what winds up in the bin. Chefs use the data to cook less of unpopular dishes. One Hilton property says the system cut buffet waste by 70%. Others are doing away with the buffet altogether—if not for iftar then for suhour, the pre-dawn “dinner”. A growing number of restaurants advertise prix fixe menus as a waste-free way to break fasts. As an added perk, in an emirate struggling with an economic slump, these meals are cheaper. A lavish hotel buffet might set customers back 200 dirhams ($54). Set menus cost about half that.
Egypt’s national food bank feeds about 1.8m families during Ramadan. Some of the food is sourced from hotels that package leftovers from their buffet trays. For health reasons, though, uneaten food from a customer’s plate must be thrown away. After 15 hours of fasting eyes are bigger than stomachs. High-tech cameras will not help. So one Cairo hotel found a low-tech solution for its buffet: it made the plates smaller.
https://www.economist.com/middle-east-a ... a/243928/n
‘We Will Make the Best Out of It’: Ramadan Amid a Pandemic
Some Muslim doctors are saving lives while fasting. For the rest of us, this holy month won’t be heroic but it will be enough.
The Prophet Muhammad once told his followers never to enter or leave a town that has the plague, to avoid spreading the disease.
That advice seems timely for this year’s Ramadan. The annual Islamic holy month is upon us, during which Muslims fast from food, drink (Not even water? No, not even water) and sex from sunrise to sunset. Thanks to social-distancing measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, most of us won’t be leaving our homes, let alone our towns, this month. My family’s Google calendar is completely empty. There are no community iftars, the fast-breaking meals. The local mosques are all shut down.
In the years before this pandemic, despite the hangry, exhausted moments that tend to accompany fasting, Ramadan always left me with a faint smile. I’d relish the memories of the month’s daily rituals and the beautiful chaos of a community in constant motion.
This time, everyday life has been upended, and we will confront a different kind of chaos. How can there be community engagement and worship, which is as central to Ramadan as the fast, during a lockdown and quarantine?
During a normal Ramadan, we feast on a delicious spread of food every night, at someone’s home or at the mosque. This gathering is especially important for people without families and those without income, which is unfortunately common right now. Nobody wants our most vulnerable community members to be breaking their fasts alone in their home.
This year, we’ll have to improvise.
Recently, a friend proposed this: Families cook a meal, meet in the parking lot and leave our dishes in our open trunks so that everyone can enjoy a self-serve buffet. My wife, a physician, quickly said this sounded like the perfect recipe to get infected.
Another friend, Brenda Abdelall, tried to refine the idea. She wants to attempt “social-distancing potluck iftars,” where we each cook a meal and leave samples on one another’s doorsteps and the doorsteps of those who might need help providing food for their families. My wife says this sounds reasonable (so long as I’m the one cooking — a skill I’ve finally picked up while stuck in the house).
Mohamed Magid, the imam of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society Center, a large Virginia mosque, told me he would normally expect 600 people to show up for communal prayers each night during Ramadan. This year, he’ll instead offer nightly Zoom sessions featuring a rotating group of Quran reciters so that everyone can listen from home. A social worker will organize and coordinate grocery deliveries to vulnerable members.
It’s challenging to adjust. But he told me that any time he feels like complaining, he thinks of the Rohingya Muslims he visited in the refugee camps in Bangladesh. Even in the most dire of conditions, he said, they fasted without complaint.
“God tested the Prophet, peace be upon him, during Ramadan many times,” the imam said. “It’s a month where we learn perseverance and patience. We will make the best out of it.”
I am always inspired by such stories, but I confess I’m also prone to moments of doubt and fear. How do I concentrate on godliness when I’m trying to avoid the virus to protect my immuno-compromised daughter who just survived cancer?
I know I’m not alone in my anxiety, but I also know there are people in much more difficult situations this Ramadan. I especially think of the front-line health care workers, putting in long hours and without adequate supplies, who will be fasting alone while trying to save lives.
Saquib Rahim, an internal-medicine doctor working in Flushing, Queens, who has been treating Covid-19 patients since the first days of the pandemic, plans to fast this year. “I can’t think of a more appropriate way to show one’s commitment to faith and God than taking care of patients during this time,” he told me. He’s temporarily living apart from his family to avoid the possibility of spreading the virus if he contracts it, and he admits the lack of community will be very difficult. “It will be a unique challenge to immerse myself in faith while spending significant time alone,” he said.
As I listen to people’s stories, I’m reminded that God wants ease for his believers, not difficulty. Those who are sick or traveling are commanded not to fast. We are asked to do the most good and the least amount of harm, valuing life above all else.
So this year I will emulate prophetic behavior by being responsible, staying at home, praying with my family, being grateful and simply trying my best. It won’t be heroic or extraordinary, but during these challenging times, it will be enough.
If we’re blessed, it might even be next to godliness.
Wajahat Ali is a playwright, lawyer and contributing Opinion writer.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Some Muslim doctors are saving lives while fasting. For the rest of us, this holy month won’t be heroic but it will be enough.
The Prophet Muhammad once told his followers never to enter or leave a town that has the plague, to avoid spreading the disease.
That advice seems timely for this year’s Ramadan. The annual Islamic holy month is upon us, during which Muslims fast from food, drink (Not even water? No, not even water) and sex from sunrise to sunset. Thanks to social-distancing measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, most of us won’t be leaving our homes, let alone our towns, this month. My family’s Google calendar is completely empty. There are no community iftars, the fast-breaking meals. The local mosques are all shut down.
In the years before this pandemic, despite the hangry, exhausted moments that tend to accompany fasting, Ramadan always left me with a faint smile. I’d relish the memories of the month’s daily rituals and the beautiful chaos of a community in constant motion.
This time, everyday life has been upended, and we will confront a different kind of chaos. How can there be community engagement and worship, which is as central to Ramadan as the fast, during a lockdown and quarantine?
During a normal Ramadan, we feast on a delicious spread of food every night, at someone’s home or at the mosque. This gathering is especially important for people without families and those without income, which is unfortunately common right now. Nobody wants our most vulnerable community members to be breaking their fasts alone in their home.
This year, we’ll have to improvise.
Recently, a friend proposed this: Families cook a meal, meet in the parking lot and leave our dishes in our open trunks so that everyone can enjoy a self-serve buffet. My wife, a physician, quickly said this sounded like the perfect recipe to get infected.
Another friend, Brenda Abdelall, tried to refine the idea. She wants to attempt “social-distancing potluck iftars,” where we each cook a meal and leave samples on one another’s doorsteps and the doorsteps of those who might need help providing food for their families. My wife says this sounds reasonable (so long as I’m the one cooking — a skill I’ve finally picked up while stuck in the house).
Mohamed Magid, the imam of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society Center, a large Virginia mosque, told me he would normally expect 600 people to show up for communal prayers each night during Ramadan. This year, he’ll instead offer nightly Zoom sessions featuring a rotating group of Quran reciters so that everyone can listen from home. A social worker will organize and coordinate grocery deliveries to vulnerable members.
It’s challenging to adjust. But he told me that any time he feels like complaining, he thinks of the Rohingya Muslims he visited in the refugee camps in Bangladesh. Even in the most dire of conditions, he said, they fasted without complaint.
“God tested the Prophet, peace be upon him, during Ramadan many times,” the imam said. “It’s a month where we learn perseverance and patience. We will make the best out of it.”
I am always inspired by such stories, but I confess I’m also prone to moments of doubt and fear. How do I concentrate on godliness when I’m trying to avoid the virus to protect my immuno-compromised daughter who just survived cancer?
I know I’m not alone in my anxiety, but I also know there are people in much more difficult situations this Ramadan. I especially think of the front-line health care workers, putting in long hours and without adequate supplies, who will be fasting alone while trying to save lives.
Saquib Rahim, an internal-medicine doctor working in Flushing, Queens, who has been treating Covid-19 patients since the first days of the pandemic, plans to fast this year. “I can’t think of a more appropriate way to show one’s commitment to faith and God than taking care of patients during this time,” he told me. He’s temporarily living apart from his family to avoid the possibility of spreading the virus if he contracts it, and he admits the lack of community will be very difficult. “It will be a unique challenge to immerse myself in faith while spending significant time alone,” he said.
As I listen to people’s stories, I’m reminded that God wants ease for his believers, not difficulty. Those who are sick or traveling are commanded not to fast. We are asked to do the most good and the least amount of harm, valuing life above all else.
So this year I will emulate prophetic behavior by being responsible, staying at home, praying with my family, being grateful and simply trying my best. It won’t be heroic or extraordinary, but during these challenging times, it will be enough.
If we’re blessed, it might even be next to godliness.
Wajahat Ali is a playwright, lawyer and contributing Opinion writer.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/opin ... 778d3e6de3
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- Joined: Mon Aug 19, 2019 8:18 pm
In Muslim tradition, Ramadan is a time of heightened commitment to piety and purification through special observances such as fasting, the performance of good deeds – including charitable giving and voluntary service – and through personal sacrifices of material comforts. These observances can lead to spiritual fulfilment and a sense of renewal.
Ramadan is the holy month in which Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him and his family) received the first revelation of the Holy Qur'an. Together with other Muslims, Ismailis celebrate Ramadan as a month of special felicity “in which the Holy Qur'an was sent down as a guide to humankind…” (Qur'an 2:185).
The fast of Ramadan is among the pillars of the faith: “O believers, fasting has been prescribed for you as it was for those who preceded you that you may be God-fearing” (Qur'an 2:183). Thus, the fast continues a practice which pre-dates Islam, and has been rendered more humane since religion is not intended to be a cause of hardship. Muslims are urged to fast during Ramadan unless one is suffering from any physical ailment or is on a journey, in which case the prescribed period should be made up later in the year (Qur'an 2:184 – 185).
According to general Muslim belief shared by Shia and Sunni alike, the deeper purpose of fasting is understood as that of cultivating and reinforcing the spiritual and moral character of the faithful, who thus live a life of piety and balance, without forsaking the good things of this world bestowed by Allah's grace (Qur'an 7:31-32). Muslims are expected to practice self-restraint for the sake of Allah's pleasure, remaining ever conscious of His presence. Such are the truly God-fearing.
The emphasis on human character is especially underlined. A tradition of the Prophet's beloved daughter, Hazrat Bibi Fatima Zahra asks what benefit accrues to one who fasts if one does not safeguard one's tongue, ears and limbs. This ethic of self-restraint echoes strictures of the Qur'an: “the hearing, the sight, the heart – all of those shall be questioned.” (Qur'an 17:36). Only when the senses are reined in, does conscience make itself heard, and the soul experience tranquillity, well pleased with itself and well pleasing to its Lord.
https://the.ismaili/ramadan
Ramadan is the holy month in which Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him and his family) received the first revelation of the Holy Qur'an. Together with other Muslims, Ismailis celebrate Ramadan as a month of special felicity “in which the Holy Qur'an was sent down as a guide to humankind…” (Qur'an 2:185).
The fast of Ramadan is among the pillars of the faith: “O believers, fasting has been prescribed for you as it was for those who preceded you that you may be God-fearing” (Qur'an 2:183). Thus, the fast continues a practice which pre-dates Islam, and has been rendered more humane since religion is not intended to be a cause of hardship. Muslims are urged to fast during Ramadan unless one is suffering from any physical ailment or is on a journey, in which case the prescribed period should be made up later in the year (Qur'an 2:184 – 185).
According to general Muslim belief shared by Shia and Sunni alike, the deeper purpose of fasting is understood as that of cultivating and reinforcing the spiritual and moral character of the faithful, who thus live a life of piety and balance, without forsaking the good things of this world bestowed by Allah's grace (Qur'an 7:31-32). Muslims are expected to practice self-restraint for the sake of Allah's pleasure, remaining ever conscious of His presence. Such are the truly God-fearing.
The emphasis on human character is especially underlined. A tradition of the Prophet's beloved daughter, Hazrat Bibi Fatima Zahra asks what benefit accrues to one who fasts if one does not safeguard one's tongue, ears and limbs. This ethic of self-restraint echoes strictures of the Qur'an: “the hearing, the sight, the heart – all of those shall be questioned.” (Qur'an 17:36). Only when the senses are reined in, does conscience make itself heard, and the soul experience tranquillity, well pleased with itself and well pleasing to its Lord.
https://the.ismaili/ramadan
Breaking the Ramadan Fast in Quarantine
The evening meal is usually a time for community, but this year, Muslims have to adapt.
For many Muslim families, Ramadan is one of the most social months of the year.
In the United States, mosques host large meals, catered by local restaurants or prepared by members of the community. In homes, extended families come together — grandparents, grandchildren, aunts and cousins — and add all the extra leaves to expand their tables. Friends gather to pray, to share, to taste. It is a month of meals eaten with intention, ending in a joyous celebration: Eid al-Fitr, which begins the evening of May 23.
During the pandemic, the suhoor meals before sunrise and the evening iftars that break the daylong fast have taken on a new cast. Families sometimes eat together over video calls with relatives. The celebration can feel more intimate, more immediate. The 30 meals eaten night after night become opportunities to reflect privately on faith and history.
Across the country, shared food is a source of comfort and of continuity in a ruptured time. We checked in with eight people about the meals and moments that have felt especially meaningful this year.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/dini ... 778d3e6de3
The evening meal is usually a time for community, but this year, Muslims have to adapt.
For many Muslim families, Ramadan is one of the most social months of the year.
In the United States, mosques host large meals, catered by local restaurants or prepared by members of the community. In homes, extended families come together — grandparents, grandchildren, aunts and cousins — and add all the extra leaves to expand their tables. Friends gather to pray, to share, to taste. It is a month of meals eaten with intention, ending in a joyous celebration: Eid al-Fitr, which begins the evening of May 23.
During the pandemic, the suhoor meals before sunrise and the evening iftars that break the daylong fast have taken on a new cast. Families sometimes eat together over video calls with relatives. The celebration can feel more intimate, more immediate. The 30 meals eaten night after night become opportunities to reflect privately on faith and history.
Across the country, shared food is a source of comfort and of continuity in a ruptured time. We checked in with eight people about the meals and moments that have felt especially meaningful this year.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/dini ... 778d3e6de3
Please can you then show a farman where imam says NOT to fast in Ramadan?Admin wrote:In our Ismaili faith, we follow the Imam and is Farmans , not announcements written by any lalou... There are announcement everyday, sometimes so ridiculous that one should laugh loud when hearing them. We even have leaders who tell us NOT to follow what we hear from Imam's own mouth, to wait that they approve and edit and correct what our Imam told to us in person. I laugh at those stupid people.shivaathervedi wrote:The paper read on Ramadan Chand Raat was from ITREB. Let readers decide, was that announcement of practical value or only theological value..Admin wrote:"endorsement" in announcements are of no theological value to Ismailis. Only those in Farmans have value. There are many many pages of discussion here on that topic.
Imam is absolute, he is self sufficient. He is the Dasmu Avatar.
People who give priority to announcements over Farmans should find themselves some other religion, or create their own but not in this Forum.
In his Memoirs, MSMS says:ZubKhim wrote: Please can you then show a farman where imam says NOT to fast in Ramadan?
Reasonable fasting for a month in every year, provided a man's health is not impaired thereby, is an essential part of the body's discipline-through which the body learns to renounce all impure desires.
http://www.ismaili.net/Source/0016b.html
There are two things we have to keep in mind. The fasting has to be reasonable and the health is not effected thereby.
Reasonable fasting does not mean that it is compulsory. Each individual fasts according to his/her understanding and capacity bearing in mind the purpose of the fast - to renounce all impure desires.ZubKhim wrote:This means that it is COMPULSORY for the healthy to fast? SMS is saying the same as Quran? Then why are we the ismailis not fasting in Ramadan? [/b]
Because they fast 360 days a year. One does not have to be named Haysal to understand what Islam is all about.ZubKhim wrote:This means that it is COMPULSORY for the healthy to fast? SMS is saying the same as Quran? Then why are we the ismailis not fasting in Ramadan? [/b]
When you die, Allah will not ask how many fasts you kept, especially your fast is only serving your own purpose.
Allah will ask what did you do for humanity. When you reply I fasted, then Allah will ask you, how did your fast help poor people being less poor, how did your fast help sick people being less sick, how did your fast protect the orphan and the widow, how did your fast help the old people who do not have anyone to take care of them. Then please inform Allah that Islam means fasting and listen to his reply.
And please do not say "we Ismaili" when you have no faint idea of what Islam is and what Ismailism is. Once you know the meaning of Islam, you will also know that there is no difference between Islam and Ismailism.
And what is the purpose of asking a question you have already asked previously in this same thread?
Published by Ivan M. Granger
We just had a new moon, which means we are about a day into the crescent moon. For Muslims this signals the beginning of Ramadan, the month of fasting between dawn and sunset while the moon waxes and wanes through all its phases. Ramadan is also a time of almsgiving, prayer, and spiritual study.
I thought this might be a good opportunity to once again share some past thoughts on food, fasting and spirituality —
Fasting is something we’re not too comfortable with in the affluent West. Even though all religious traditions, including Christianity and Judaism, have rich, ancient traditions of fasting, we often don’t have a real sense of what spirituality has to do with food — or its avoidance. We tend to take a rather intellectual approach to spirituality. Even in modern New Age teachings, we have the notion that all we have to do is change our thinking and transformation occurs. But the results of that approach are often spotty. One reason is that mind is much more than thoughts, and transforming the mind requires deeper work. Thoughts are built on ingrained energetic patterns. For real transformation to occur, we have to get down to those foundational patterns. Very often this requires not merely changing one’s thoughts, but tunneling beneath them. This is the purpose of deeper spiritual practice.
Fasting is a simple, universal, and powerful way to clear the mind and confront those more fundamental energies in the awareness.
But why? What does food have to do with any of this? We are not two things, a mind separate from a body, or even a mind that inhabits a body. The mind and body interpenetrate one another. If your body is injured, that physical pain demands attention, affecting the awareness. The state of the body impacts the clarity and focus of the mind. Feeding the body pure, healthy foods in general, and periodically allowing it to rest from the exhausting work of digestion can profoundly free up energies for the awareness to tap into.
Here’s something else you won’t hear much: Food is a drug. Every food is a narcotic. Does that sound bizarre to you? I don’t mean that foods are literally hallucinogenic. But every single thing you put into your mouth, affects consciousness in some way. We use food to control emotions. We use food to shift moods and change awareness. Think of the instinct to grab a pint of ice cream from the freezer after a terrible breakup. Everything, even a salad, affects consciousness in some way. The resulting psychic shift after eating something can be relatively positive or relatively negative. It can help us to feel solid and grounded or expanded and open. It can tantalize the senses and flood us with feelings of satiation or leave us frustrated. None of this is necessarily bad, but we must understand how profoundly food affects awareness, and utilize food wisely… and sometimes not to consume food at all.
A fascinating thing happens when you fast as part of a spiritual practice: After you ease past the initial psychic tension and your body moves through any initial discomforts — the mind naturally settles and grows quiet. So much of the agitation of the mind arises from the foods we eat.
Recognizing this, food and fasting become an important part of spiritual practice.
The first few times I tried to do just a one day fast, I was frankly terrified. I knew intellectually that a healthy human body can go for days without food, no problem. Many times in the past I had forgotten to eat breakfast, and it was no big deal, but on a day when I intentionally decided to fast, I’d be sweating and panicky by mid-morning. It took me a while to understand that fasting, even a mild fast, is a confrontation with death. It is the willingness to temporarily abandon that constant hunt to satisfy every desire by attempting to slough off the fundamental hunger for food. How do you just have a desire and sit with it, without attempting to immediately satisfy it? That’s a pretty frightening question, when you really ask it.
With a little practice, you discover that what we often assume is physical hunger is actually mental hunger. For well-fed Westerners, it can take days, literally days, for true physical hunger to arise. The hunger we feel when we miss a couple of meals is really just mental habit, the reflexive desire to use food in order to regulate consciousness and control emotion. Follow that reflex to its root, and we find it originating from the ever-fearful ego, which is endlessly attempting to reinforce its fragile construction of a limited self inside a limited world by keeping the mind perpetually agitated.
Fasting, used carefully, with balance, and as part of a larger spiritual practice, becomes a way to help identify and unseat the despotic ego.
This is why fasting is practiced in all religions. And you don’t even have to have a religious “faith.” Just try it sometime, for a day, for half a day, wrestle your way through, and see what happens in you.
https://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/blog/2011/08/01/
We just had a new moon, which means we are about a day into the crescent moon. For Muslims this signals the beginning of Ramadan, the month of fasting between dawn and sunset while the moon waxes and wanes through all its phases. Ramadan is also a time of almsgiving, prayer, and spiritual study.
I thought this might be a good opportunity to once again share some past thoughts on food, fasting and spirituality —
Fasting is something we’re not too comfortable with in the affluent West. Even though all religious traditions, including Christianity and Judaism, have rich, ancient traditions of fasting, we often don’t have a real sense of what spirituality has to do with food — or its avoidance. We tend to take a rather intellectual approach to spirituality. Even in modern New Age teachings, we have the notion that all we have to do is change our thinking and transformation occurs. But the results of that approach are often spotty. One reason is that mind is much more than thoughts, and transforming the mind requires deeper work. Thoughts are built on ingrained energetic patterns. For real transformation to occur, we have to get down to those foundational patterns. Very often this requires not merely changing one’s thoughts, but tunneling beneath them. This is the purpose of deeper spiritual practice.
Fasting is a simple, universal, and powerful way to clear the mind and confront those more fundamental energies in the awareness.
But why? What does food have to do with any of this? We are not two things, a mind separate from a body, or even a mind that inhabits a body. The mind and body interpenetrate one another. If your body is injured, that physical pain demands attention, affecting the awareness. The state of the body impacts the clarity and focus of the mind. Feeding the body pure, healthy foods in general, and periodically allowing it to rest from the exhausting work of digestion can profoundly free up energies for the awareness to tap into.
Here’s something else you won’t hear much: Food is a drug. Every food is a narcotic. Does that sound bizarre to you? I don’t mean that foods are literally hallucinogenic. But every single thing you put into your mouth, affects consciousness in some way. We use food to control emotions. We use food to shift moods and change awareness. Think of the instinct to grab a pint of ice cream from the freezer after a terrible breakup. Everything, even a salad, affects consciousness in some way. The resulting psychic shift after eating something can be relatively positive or relatively negative. It can help us to feel solid and grounded or expanded and open. It can tantalize the senses and flood us with feelings of satiation or leave us frustrated. None of this is necessarily bad, but we must understand how profoundly food affects awareness, and utilize food wisely… and sometimes not to consume food at all.
A fascinating thing happens when you fast as part of a spiritual practice: After you ease past the initial psychic tension and your body moves through any initial discomforts — the mind naturally settles and grows quiet. So much of the agitation of the mind arises from the foods we eat.
Recognizing this, food and fasting become an important part of spiritual practice.
The first few times I tried to do just a one day fast, I was frankly terrified. I knew intellectually that a healthy human body can go for days without food, no problem. Many times in the past I had forgotten to eat breakfast, and it was no big deal, but on a day when I intentionally decided to fast, I’d be sweating and panicky by mid-morning. It took me a while to understand that fasting, even a mild fast, is a confrontation with death. It is the willingness to temporarily abandon that constant hunt to satisfy every desire by attempting to slough off the fundamental hunger for food. How do you just have a desire and sit with it, without attempting to immediately satisfy it? That’s a pretty frightening question, when you really ask it.
With a little practice, you discover that what we often assume is physical hunger is actually mental hunger. For well-fed Westerners, it can take days, literally days, for true physical hunger to arise. The hunger we feel when we miss a couple of meals is really just mental habit, the reflexive desire to use food in order to regulate consciousness and control emotion. Follow that reflex to its root, and we find it originating from the ever-fearful ego, which is endlessly attempting to reinforce its fragile construction of a limited self inside a limited world by keeping the mind perpetually agitated.
Fasting, used carefully, with balance, and as part of a larger spiritual practice, becomes a way to help identify and unseat the despotic ego.
This is why fasting is practiced in all religions. And you don’t even have to have a religious “faith.” Just try it sometime, for a day, for half a day, wrestle your way through, and see what happens in you.
https://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/blog/2011/08/01/
Here's What You Should Know About Ramadan and How it is Celebrated
Jamie Ballard
Woman's Day Fri, January 29, 2021, 6:15 AM
From Woman's Day
Each year, Muslims around the world celebrate the holy month of Ramadan. Many people know that fasting is a common practice during Ramadan, but there are a number of other traditions associated with the holiday that are less well known.
Hina Khan-Mukhtar, a teacher and writer who is on the Board of Directors for the Muslim Community Center East Bay in northern California, says that Ramadan is a joyous time.
“The Islamic centers and mosques are very full of life and full of light during that time,” Khan-Mukhtar tells Woman's Day. “It’s as if you can imagine Christmas being celebrated every night for a month. The community comes together, people bring food to share, even children love going to the mosque at night. It's a time of community and gathering.”
Here’s what you should know about Ramadan, from its history to how it’s celebrated today.
What does Ramadan celebrate?
Ramadan is a holy month of fasting, worship, and prayer. It celebrates the creation of the Quran, which is the holy book for people who practice the Islamic faith. Muslims believe that the prophet Muhammad received revelations directly from God, which were documented and collected in what eventually became the holy book. A passage in the Quran explains, “The month of Ramadan is the one in which the Quran was revealed as guidance for mankind, and as clear signs that show the right way and distinguish between right and wrong.”
Khan-Mukhtar says that Ramadan is also celebrated as a time for a clean start.
“What I would love for people to know is that Ramadan is a time of hope and renewal and trying to have a fresh start,” she explains. “It’s really a time of rejuvenation, where it’s like ‘I'm going to go through this month and I'm really going to turn to God, and ask for forgiveness and ask for blessings,’ and then you come out of it with a lot of hope for starting all over again on a good foot.”
When is Ramadan celebrated?
The Islamic calendar is based on the lunar cycle, which means that the beginning of each new month starts on the new moon. Ramadan takes place in the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, but because of the lunar cycle, the specific dates for Ramadan vary year to year.
This year, Ramadan is expected to begin on Monday, April 12th, 2021 and conclude on Tuesday, May 11th.
Why do people fast during Ramadan?
During Ramadan, healthy adult Muslims fast during daylight hours. As part of the fast, they abstain from all food and drink, as well as sexual activity. Fasting during Ramadan is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, which are the core beliefs and practices that define the religion.
In an piece about Ramadan written for Vox, Muslim writer Jennifer Williams explained, “The practice of fasting serves several spiritual and social purposes: to remind you of your human frailty and your dependence on God for sustenance, to show you what it feels like to be hungry and thirsty so you feel compassion for (and a duty to help) the poor and needy, and to reduce the distractions in life so you can more clearly focus on your relationship with God.”
Khan-Mukhtar also explained that while there are lots of reasons for Muslims to abstain from food and drink during Ramadan, ultimately the main reason to fast is because they are commanded to do so in the Quran.
Do all Muslims during Ramadan?
According to an article written by community health sciences educator Sara Elnakib for Eat Right, certain groups are exempt from fasting during Ramadan. These groups include children who have not reached puberty, the elderly, those who are physically or mentally incapable of fasting, pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers, and people who are traveling.
Besides fasting, what are some of the other ways people celebrate Ramadan?
Khan-Mukhtar says that in addition to fasting, Ramadan is also a time for reflection. “It's a time for being really mindful about how we talk to people, what kind of language we use, what we're absorbing, even with our eyes — like what kinds of things we're looking at or watching. We're seeing how it affects our heart.”
Besides fasting and being mindful, there are some other special Ramadan traditions.
Kahn-Mukhtar explained that one special tradition is “moonsighting.” Since the timing of Ramadan is determined by when the new moon appears in the ninth lunar month, the spotting of that new moon is significant. “It's often a tradition that people go out to scenic vista points to try and look for the moon, and then when the new moon is sighted, it's super exciting," Kahn-Mukhtar says. "When it’s sighted, then you know that it is Ramadan and we get to start fasting tomorrow. It's a good way to connect with the heavens and with nature, it's a good way to get outside.”
In the evening, Muslims will break their fast with a date (the fruit) and water. Traditionally, people also gather at mosques and Islamic centers in the evenings for prayer and worship, though things are understandably different during the pandemic.
What should I do to be respectful of my Muslim friends and coworkers during Ramadan?
“A good way to support is just having a very positive mindset about Ramadan, being excited for people, and saying things like, ‘How is your Ramadan going?’” Kahn-Mukhtar explains.
Keeping a positive mindset can also mean questioning your own assumptions. She says that as a parent, a misunderstanding she encounters often is that people assume the children must dislike fasting — which she says isn’t really the case. “That idea is actually completely the opposite of the truth. Fasting is seen as a right of passage. A lot of kids are very, very eager to start fasting.”
Although it’s not expected that non-Muslims fast during Ramadan, Kahn-Mukhtar also says that she’s had experiences where someone decided to fast with her in solidarity. “It's really heartwarming to see someone is wanting to experience what you're experiencing.”
Lastly, if you’re at an event like a work party and you know you have Muslim coworkers who are fasting, it would be a thoughtful gesture to prepare a plate for them and cover it so that they can take it home and eat it when they break their fast that evening.
Has COVID-19 changed anything about how people are celebrating Ramadan?
Last year’s Ramadan took place from April to May 2020, during the early months of the pandemic. “This last Ramadan was very disorienting for a lot of us,” Kahn-Mukhtar says. “It is a very communal thing, to share food with the poor, to share food with our neighbors, to share food with our loved ones, relatives, friends, community members. That's a big part of Ramadan.”
She explained that like with many things during the pandemic, Ramadan worship was done via Zoom. Many mosques would open for the imam (worship leader), and that person would go in and pray by himself out loud, and it was live-streamed so people could watch and participate via Zoom.
“I know many who said it's actually kind of a beautiful experience, because Ramadan in the evenings used to be pretty hectic,” Khan-Mukhtar notes. “Usually, we would break our fast together at home and then eat dinner and then quickly rush to go to the local mosque or Islamic center to join the rest of the community. So there were a lot of moving parts, but now, it was all at home so it was a slower pace. Some of us actually enjoyed it in that it gave us time to slow down. We were able to focus on our prayers and our worship at home."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/lifesty ... 00327.html
Jamie Ballard
Woman's Day Fri, January 29, 2021, 6:15 AM
From Woman's Day
Each year, Muslims around the world celebrate the holy month of Ramadan. Many people know that fasting is a common practice during Ramadan, but there are a number of other traditions associated with the holiday that are less well known.
Hina Khan-Mukhtar, a teacher and writer who is on the Board of Directors for the Muslim Community Center East Bay in northern California, says that Ramadan is a joyous time.
“The Islamic centers and mosques are very full of life and full of light during that time,” Khan-Mukhtar tells Woman's Day. “It’s as if you can imagine Christmas being celebrated every night for a month. The community comes together, people bring food to share, even children love going to the mosque at night. It's a time of community and gathering.”
Here’s what you should know about Ramadan, from its history to how it’s celebrated today.
What does Ramadan celebrate?
Ramadan is a holy month of fasting, worship, and prayer. It celebrates the creation of the Quran, which is the holy book for people who practice the Islamic faith. Muslims believe that the prophet Muhammad received revelations directly from God, which were documented and collected in what eventually became the holy book. A passage in the Quran explains, “The month of Ramadan is the one in which the Quran was revealed as guidance for mankind, and as clear signs that show the right way and distinguish between right and wrong.”
Khan-Mukhtar says that Ramadan is also celebrated as a time for a clean start.
“What I would love for people to know is that Ramadan is a time of hope and renewal and trying to have a fresh start,” she explains. “It’s really a time of rejuvenation, where it’s like ‘I'm going to go through this month and I'm really going to turn to God, and ask for forgiveness and ask for blessings,’ and then you come out of it with a lot of hope for starting all over again on a good foot.”
When is Ramadan celebrated?
The Islamic calendar is based on the lunar cycle, which means that the beginning of each new month starts on the new moon. Ramadan takes place in the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, but because of the lunar cycle, the specific dates for Ramadan vary year to year.
This year, Ramadan is expected to begin on Monday, April 12th, 2021 and conclude on Tuesday, May 11th.
Why do people fast during Ramadan?
During Ramadan, healthy adult Muslims fast during daylight hours. As part of the fast, they abstain from all food and drink, as well as sexual activity. Fasting during Ramadan is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, which are the core beliefs and practices that define the religion.
In an piece about Ramadan written for Vox, Muslim writer Jennifer Williams explained, “The practice of fasting serves several spiritual and social purposes: to remind you of your human frailty and your dependence on God for sustenance, to show you what it feels like to be hungry and thirsty so you feel compassion for (and a duty to help) the poor and needy, and to reduce the distractions in life so you can more clearly focus on your relationship with God.”
Khan-Mukhtar also explained that while there are lots of reasons for Muslims to abstain from food and drink during Ramadan, ultimately the main reason to fast is because they are commanded to do so in the Quran.
Do all Muslims during Ramadan?
According to an article written by community health sciences educator Sara Elnakib for Eat Right, certain groups are exempt from fasting during Ramadan. These groups include children who have not reached puberty, the elderly, those who are physically or mentally incapable of fasting, pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers, and people who are traveling.
Besides fasting, what are some of the other ways people celebrate Ramadan?
Khan-Mukhtar says that in addition to fasting, Ramadan is also a time for reflection. “It's a time for being really mindful about how we talk to people, what kind of language we use, what we're absorbing, even with our eyes — like what kinds of things we're looking at or watching. We're seeing how it affects our heart.”
Besides fasting and being mindful, there are some other special Ramadan traditions.
Kahn-Mukhtar explained that one special tradition is “moonsighting.” Since the timing of Ramadan is determined by when the new moon appears in the ninth lunar month, the spotting of that new moon is significant. “It's often a tradition that people go out to scenic vista points to try and look for the moon, and then when the new moon is sighted, it's super exciting," Kahn-Mukhtar says. "When it’s sighted, then you know that it is Ramadan and we get to start fasting tomorrow. It's a good way to connect with the heavens and with nature, it's a good way to get outside.”
In the evening, Muslims will break their fast with a date (the fruit) and water. Traditionally, people also gather at mosques and Islamic centers in the evenings for prayer and worship, though things are understandably different during the pandemic.
What should I do to be respectful of my Muslim friends and coworkers during Ramadan?
“A good way to support is just having a very positive mindset about Ramadan, being excited for people, and saying things like, ‘How is your Ramadan going?’” Kahn-Mukhtar explains.
Keeping a positive mindset can also mean questioning your own assumptions. She says that as a parent, a misunderstanding she encounters often is that people assume the children must dislike fasting — which she says isn’t really the case. “That idea is actually completely the opposite of the truth. Fasting is seen as a right of passage. A lot of kids are very, very eager to start fasting.”
Although it’s not expected that non-Muslims fast during Ramadan, Kahn-Mukhtar also says that she’s had experiences where someone decided to fast with her in solidarity. “It's really heartwarming to see someone is wanting to experience what you're experiencing.”
Lastly, if you’re at an event like a work party and you know you have Muslim coworkers who are fasting, it would be a thoughtful gesture to prepare a plate for them and cover it so that they can take it home and eat it when they break their fast that evening.
Has COVID-19 changed anything about how people are celebrating Ramadan?
Last year’s Ramadan took place from April to May 2020, during the early months of the pandemic. “This last Ramadan was very disorienting for a lot of us,” Kahn-Mukhtar says. “It is a very communal thing, to share food with the poor, to share food with our neighbors, to share food with our loved ones, relatives, friends, community members. That's a big part of Ramadan.”
She explained that like with many things during the pandemic, Ramadan worship was done via Zoom. Many mosques would open for the imam (worship leader), and that person would go in and pray by himself out loud, and it was live-streamed so people could watch and participate via Zoom.
“I know many who said it's actually kind of a beautiful experience, because Ramadan in the evenings used to be pretty hectic,” Khan-Mukhtar notes. “Usually, we would break our fast together at home and then eat dinner and then quickly rush to go to the local mosque or Islamic center to join the rest of the community. So there were a lot of moving parts, but now, it was all at home so it was a slower pace. Some of us actually enjoyed it in that it gave us time to slow down. We were able to focus on our prayers and our worship at home."
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/lifesty ... 00327.html
Islamic leaders battle misconception about vaccines, fasting
DAVID SHARP and MARIAM FAM
Associated Press Fri, April 9, 2021, 8:07 AM
Mosque member Asie Late's granddaughter Emma watches as a Northwell Health registered nurse inoculates her with the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine at a pop up vaccination site inside the Albanian Islamic Cultural Center, Thursday, April 8, 2021, in the Staten Island borough of New York.
Patients wait in the observation area after being inoculated with the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine at a pop up vaccination site inside the Albanian Islamic Cultural Center, Thursday, April 8, 2021, in the Staten Island borough of New York. Ahead of Ramadan, Islamic leaders are using social media, virtual town halls and face-to-face discussions to spread the word that it’s acceptable for Muslims to be vaccinated during daily fasting that happens during the holy month.
Social distance markers are seen Wednesday, April 7, 2021 in the prayer room of the Maine Muslim Community Center in Portland, Maine. Ahead of Ramadan, Islamic leaders are using social media, virtual town halls and face-to-face discussions to spread the word that it’s acceptable for Muslims to be vaccinated during daily fasting that happens during the holy month.
Abdiaziz Mohamed, who is in charge of coordinating vaccines for the Maine Muslim Community Center poses Wednesday, April 7, 2021 in the prayer room of the Maine Muslim Community Center in Portland, Maine. Ahead of Ramadan, Islamic leaders are using social media, virtual town halls and face-to-face discussions to spread the word that it’s acceptable for Muslims to be vaccinated during daily fasting that happens during the holy month.
A Northwell Health registered nurse inoculates mosque member Albert Capa with the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine at a pop up vaccinations site the Albanian Islamic Cultural Center, Thursday, April 8, 2021, in the Staten Island borough of New York. Ahead of Ramadan, Islamic leaders are using social media, virtual town halls and face-to-face discussions to spread the word that it’s acceptable for Muslims to be vaccinated during daily fasting that happens during the holy month.
Mosque member Albert Capa's, foreground, wife and children are seen in the background as he sits in the observation area after being inoculated with the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine at a pop up vaccinations site the Albanian Islamic Cultural Center, Thursday, April 8, 2021, in the Staten Island borough of New York. Ahead of Ramadan, Islamic leaders are using social media, virtual town halls and face-to-face discussions to spread the word that it’s acceptable for Muslims to be vaccinated during daily fasting that happens during the holy month.
A Northwell Health registered nurse goes over the paper work with mosque member Zejreme Rodoncic after inoculating her with the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine at a pop up vaccinations site the Albanian Islamic Cultural Center, Thursday, April 8, 2021, in the Staten Island borough of New York. Ahead of Ramadan, Islamic leaders are using social media, virtual town halls and face-to-face discussions to spread the word that it’s acceptable for Muslims to be vaccinated during daily fasting that happens during the holy month.
Mosque member Asie Late hugs her granddaughter Emma after a Northwell Health registered nurse inoculated her with the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine at a pop up vaccinations site the Albanian Islamic Cultural Center, Thursday, April 8, 2021, in the Staten Island borough of New York. Ahead of Ramadan, Islamic leaders are using social media, virtual town halls and face-to-face discussions to spread the word that it’s acceptable for Muslims to be vaccinated during daily fasting that happens during the holy month.
A Northwell Health registered nurse fills a syringe with the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine at a pop up vaccination site inside the Albanian Islamic Cultural Center, Thursday, April 8, 2021, in the Staten Island borough of New York. Ahead of Ramadan, Islamic leaders are using social media, virtual town halls and face-to-face discussions to spread the word that it’s acceptable for Muslims to be vaccinated during daily fasting that happens during the holy month.
The Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine is seen at a pop up vaccination site inside the Albanian Islamic Cultural Center, Thursday, April 8, 2021, in the Staten Island borough of New York. Ahead of Ramadan, Islamic leaders are using social media, virtual town halls and face-to-face discussions to spread the word that it’s acceptable for Muslims to be vaccinated during daily fasting that happens during the holy month.
Mosque member Asie Late's granddaughter Emma watches as a Northwell Health registered nurse inoculates her with the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine at a pop up vaccination site inside the Albanian Islamic Cultural Center, Thursday, April 8, 2021, in the Staten Island borough of New York.
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Islamic leaders are using social media, virtual town halls and face-to-face discussions to spread the word that it’s acceptable to be vaccinated for the coronavirus during daily fasting that happens during Ramadan, the most sacred month of the year for Muslims.
During the holy month which begins next week, Muslims across the world abstain from all food and drink from sunrise to sunset before typically congregating for evening prayers and iftar meals. The vaccine discussion centers on whether an inoculation amounts to the prohibited act of ingesting something while fasting.
It doesn't, said Mohamud Mohamed, imam of the Maine Muslim Community Center, who is working to assure Muslims at his Portland mosque that getting the vaccine is perfectly fine but finds that some people are clinging to misperceptions.
“There is a lot of bad information going around,” said Mohamed, who devoted his address during recent Friday prayers to promoting the vaccine. A vaccine clinic is being held at the mosque on Saturday.
He and others seeking to reassure the faithful have the theological backing of top Islamic authorities. Saudi Arabia’s highest cleric, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz Al Sheikh, and Sunni Islam’s top religious leader in Lebanon, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul-Latif Derian, have both said that getting the coronavirus vaccine does not constitute breaking one's fast.
Still, Safiya Khalid, a city council member in Lewiston, about 30 miles north of Portland, sparked a lively conversation among fellow Muslims when she raised the issue on social media. Others questioned whether the vaccine violated fasting — until an imam weighed in.
“We need more communication,” said Khalid, who has already had her first vaccine dose and will get her second shot during Ramadan. “You can do this and protect your community and your family.”
On New York's Staten Island, imam and NYPD chaplain Tahir Kukaj, whose mosque was administering 1,000 vaccines on Thursday and Friday, said he has heard all sorts of misconceptions about vaccines, and some "people tend to believe nonsense rather than facts.”
But protecting others is a core teaching of Islam, and Kukaj said Muslims are taught to do whatever they can to save lives. Getting vaccinated is a way to do that: “Of course, we have to save our own life first.”
Out west, the Utah Muslim Civic League has partnered with the Salt Lake County Health Department to put on two vaccination clinics including a drive-through one at a mosque that was held before Ramadan. The group also organized a virtual town hall Thursday night featuring imams and health professionals to discuss issues surrounding vaccination and fasting.
The goal is raising awareness and “myth-busting,” said the league's executive director, Luna Banuri, who found that many community members had wanted to avoid getting vaccinated during Ramadan.
“When you are starting the month of fasting, there’s a sense of resolve. ... So a lot of folks are trying to make sure that there are no disruptions during that period,” she said. “Even if they believe that they can take the vaccine and it doesn’t affect their fast ... (what) they’re not wanting to do is to get sick.”
Medicine and fasting is nothing new. Muslims may forgo fasting if they fall ill and make up for “missed” days at a later time, after Ramadan.
“If you miss a day because of the effects of the vaccine, then that is not a sinful act,” said Ahmed Abdirahman, a respiratory therapist at a Portland hospital and community service coordinator at the Maine Muslim Community Center. “Protecting lives is the ultimate goal in Islam.”
Dr. Hasan Shanawani, president of the American Muslim Health Association, said he’s encouraging everyone to be vaccinated even if that means getting the jab during Ramadan.
A lung specialist, he said he has treated dozens if not hundreds of people with COVID-19 and seen firsthand the horrific toll the disease can take.
“This is not just a decision that weighs on you,” Shanawani said from his office in Michigan. “It weighs on everybody.”
Similar conversations have played out in other countries.
The British Islamic Medical Association circulated a WhatsApp message reassuring people that “taking the Covid-19 vaccines currently licensed in UK does not invalidate the fast during Ramadan as per the opinion of the majority of Islamic scholars.”
Association vice president Dr. Wajid Akhter said there is a growing understanding among Muslims in his community of the importance of not delaying vaccinations due to Ramadan. But for any who may be wavering, he emphasized that COVID-19 represents a threat that cannot be ignored.
“How many fasts are you going to miss if you catch COVID? How many fasts are you going to lose if you get long COVID? And how many fasts will you lose if you die from COVID?” Akhter said. “You’re never going to fast again.”
___
Fam reported from Cairo.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/is ... 48030.html
DAVID SHARP and MARIAM FAM
Associated Press Fri, April 9, 2021, 8:07 AM
Mosque member Asie Late's granddaughter Emma watches as a Northwell Health registered nurse inoculates her with the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine at a pop up vaccination site inside the Albanian Islamic Cultural Center, Thursday, April 8, 2021, in the Staten Island borough of New York.
Patients wait in the observation area after being inoculated with the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine at a pop up vaccination site inside the Albanian Islamic Cultural Center, Thursday, April 8, 2021, in the Staten Island borough of New York. Ahead of Ramadan, Islamic leaders are using social media, virtual town halls and face-to-face discussions to spread the word that it’s acceptable for Muslims to be vaccinated during daily fasting that happens during the holy month.
Social distance markers are seen Wednesday, April 7, 2021 in the prayer room of the Maine Muslim Community Center in Portland, Maine. Ahead of Ramadan, Islamic leaders are using social media, virtual town halls and face-to-face discussions to spread the word that it’s acceptable for Muslims to be vaccinated during daily fasting that happens during the holy month.
Abdiaziz Mohamed, who is in charge of coordinating vaccines for the Maine Muslim Community Center poses Wednesday, April 7, 2021 in the prayer room of the Maine Muslim Community Center in Portland, Maine. Ahead of Ramadan, Islamic leaders are using social media, virtual town halls and face-to-face discussions to spread the word that it’s acceptable for Muslims to be vaccinated during daily fasting that happens during the holy month.
A Northwell Health registered nurse inoculates mosque member Albert Capa with the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine at a pop up vaccinations site the Albanian Islamic Cultural Center, Thursday, April 8, 2021, in the Staten Island borough of New York. Ahead of Ramadan, Islamic leaders are using social media, virtual town halls and face-to-face discussions to spread the word that it’s acceptable for Muslims to be vaccinated during daily fasting that happens during the holy month.
Mosque member Albert Capa's, foreground, wife and children are seen in the background as he sits in the observation area after being inoculated with the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine at a pop up vaccinations site the Albanian Islamic Cultural Center, Thursday, April 8, 2021, in the Staten Island borough of New York. Ahead of Ramadan, Islamic leaders are using social media, virtual town halls and face-to-face discussions to spread the word that it’s acceptable for Muslims to be vaccinated during daily fasting that happens during the holy month.
A Northwell Health registered nurse goes over the paper work with mosque member Zejreme Rodoncic after inoculating her with the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine at a pop up vaccinations site the Albanian Islamic Cultural Center, Thursday, April 8, 2021, in the Staten Island borough of New York. Ahead of Ramadan, Islamic leaders are using social media, virtual town halls and face-to-face discussions to spread the word that it’s acceptable for Muslims to be vaccinated during daily fasting that happens during the holy month.
Mosque member Asie Late hugs her granddaughter Emma after a Northwell Health registered nurse inoculated her with the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine at a pop up vaccinations site the Albanian Islamic Cultural Center, Thursday, April 8, 2021, in the Staten Island borough of New York. Ahead of Ramadan, Islamic leaders are using social media, virtual town halls and face-to-face discussions to spread the word that it’s acceptable for Muslims to be vaccinated during daily fasting that happens during the holy month.
A Northwell Health registered nurse fills a syringe with the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine at a pop up vaccination site inside the Albanian Islamic Cultural Center, Thursday, April 8, 2021, in the Staten Island borough of New York. Ahead of Ramadan, Islamic leaders are using social media, virtual town halls and face-to-face discussions to spread the word that it’s acceptable for Muslims to be vaccinated during daily fasting that happens during the holy month.
The Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine is seen at a pop up vaccination site inside the Albanian Islamic Cultural Center, Thursday, April 8, 2021, in the Staten Island borough of New York. Ahead of Ramadan, Islamic leaders are using social media, virtual town halls and face-to-face discussions to spread the word that it’s acceptable for Muslims to be vaccinated during daily fasting that happens during the holy month.
Mosque member Asie Late's granddaughter Emma watches as a Northwell Health registered nurse inoculates her with the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine at a pop up vaccination site inside the Albanian Islamic Cultural Center, Thursday, April 8, 2021, in the Staten Island borough of New York.
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Islamic leaders are using social media, virtual town halls and face-to-face discussions to spread the word that it’s acceptable to be vaccinated for the coronavirus during daily fasting that happens during Ramadan, the most sacred month of the year for Muslims.
During the holy month which begins next week, Muslims across the world abstain from all food and drink from sunrise to sunset before typically congregating for evening prayers and iftar meals. The vaccine discussion centers on whether an inoculation amounts to the prohibited act of ingesting something while fasting.
It doesn't, said Mohamud Mohamed, imam of the Maine Muslim Community Center, who is working to assure Muslims at his Portland mosque that getting the vaccine is perfectly fine but finds that some people are clinging to misperceptions.
“There is a lot of bad information going around,” said Mohamed, who devoted his address during recent Friday prayers to promoting the vaccine. A vaccine clinic is being held at the mosque on Saturday.
He and others seeking to reassure the faithful have the theological backing of top Islamic authorities. Saudi Arabia’s highest cleric, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz Al Sheikh, and Sunni Islam’s top religious leader in Lebanon, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul-Latif Derian, have both said that getting the coronavirus vaccine does not constitute breaking one's fast.
Still, Safiya Khalid, a city council member in Lewiston, about 30 miles north of Portland, sparked a lively conversation among fellow Muslims when she raised the issue on social media. Others questioned whether the vaccine violated fasting — until an imam weighed in.
“We need more communication,” said Khalid, who has already had her first vaccine dose and will get her second shot during Ramadan. “You can do this and protect your community and your family.”
On New York's Staten Island, imam and NYPD chaplain Tahir Kukaj, whose mosque was administering 1,000 vaccines on Thursday and Friday, said he has heard all sorts of misconceptions about vaccines, and some "people tend to believe nonsense rather than facts.”
But protecting others is a core teaching of Islam, and Kukaj said Muslims are taught to do whatever they can to save lives. Getting vaccinated is a way to do that: “Of course, we have to save our own life first.”
Out west, the Utah Muslim Civic League has partnered with the Salt Lake County Health Department to put on two vaccination clinics including a drive-through one at a mosque that was held before Ramadan. The group also organized a virtual town hall Thursday night featuring imams and health professionals to discuss issues surrounding vaccination and fasting.
The goal is raising awareness and “myth-busting,” said the league's executive director, Luna Banuri, who found that many community members had wanted to avoid getting vaccinated during Ramadan.
“When you are starting the month of fasting, there’s a sense of resolve. ... So a lot of folks are trying to make sure that there are no disruptions during that period,” she said. “Even if they believe that they can take the vaccine and it doesn’t affect their fast ... (what) they’re not wanting to do is to get sick.”
Medicine and fasting is nothing new. Muslims may forgo fasting if they fall ill and make up for “missed” days at a later time, after Ramadan.
“If you miss a day because of the effects of the vaccine, then that is not a sinful act,” said Ahmed Abdirahman, a respiratory therapist at a Portland hospital and community service coordinator at the Maine Muslim Community Center. “Protecting lives is the ultimate goal in Islam.”
Dr. Hasan Shanawani, president of the American Muslim Health Association, said he’s encouraging everyone to be vaccinated even if that means getting the jab during Ramadan.
A lung specialist, he said he has treated dozens if not hundreds of people with COVID-19 and seen firsthand the horrific toll the disease can take.
“This is not just a decision that weighs on you,” Shanawani said from his office in Michigan. “It weighs on everybody.”
Similar conversations have played out in other countries.
The British Islamic Medical Association circulated a WhatsApp message reassuring people that “taking the Covid-19 vaccines currently licensed in UK does not invalidate the fast during Ramadan as per the opinion of the majority of Islamic scholars.”
Association vice president Dr. Wajid Akhter said there is a growing understanding among Muslims in his community of the importance of not delaying vaccinations due to Ramadan. But for any who may be wavering, he emphasized that COVID-19 represents a threat that cannot be ignored.
“How many fasts are you going to miss if you catch COVID? How many fasts are you going to lose if you get long COVID? And how many fasts will you lose if you die from COVID?” Akhter said. “You’re never going to fast again.”
___
Fam reported from Cairo.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/is ... 48030.html
PIA forbids captains, crew from fasting during flights
KARACHI: Keeping the safety of passengers in view, Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) has forbidden its captains and cabin crew from fasting during flights, ARY News reported on Friday.
According to the safety alert issued by the PIA administration for captains and cabin crew in connection with the commencement of the holy month of Ramadan, the pilots and cabin crew have been prohibited from fasting during flights.
“Majority of the Muslim countries’ airlines captains and crew members are not allowed to fast during flight”, the alert read. The ban on fasting has been put in place to ensure the safety of travellers.
The PIA spokesperson further said a mechanism is being evolved to ensure no flight operations during Sehri and Iftari timings.
Read more: PIA announces directs flights to Bahrain
Pakistan International Airlines has termed the decision best for its passengers, captains and cabin crew in line with the international rules.
On the other hand, the national flag carrier has granted promotions to the pilots.
The Chief of Flight Operations Capt Arshad Khan notified the promotions of aviation from ATR to A-320, whereas, the process for promotions from A-320 aircraft to B-777 aircraft is underway in the national airlines.
https://arynews.tv/en/pia-forbids-pilot ... ng-flight/
KARACHI: Keeping the safety of passengers in view, Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) has forbidden its captains and cabin crew from fasting during flights, ARY News reported on Friday.
According to the safety alert issued by the PIA administration for captains and cabin crew in connection with the commencement of the holy month of Ramadan, the pilots and cabin crew have been prohibited from fasting during flights.
“Majority of the Muslim countries’ airlines captains and crew members are not allowed to fast during flight”, the alert read. The ban on fasting has been put in place to ensure the safety of travellers.
The PIA spokesperson further said a mechanism is being evolved to ensure no flight operations during Sehri and Iftari timings.
Read more: PIA announces directs flights to Bahrain
Pakistan International Airlines has termed the decision best for its passengers, captains and cabin crew in line with the international rules.
On the other hand, the national flag carrier has granted promotions to the pilots.
The Chief of Flight Operations Capt Arshad Khan notified the promotions of aviation from ATR to A-320, whereas, the process for promotions from A-320 aircraft to B-777 aircraft is underway in the national airlines.
https://arynews.tv/en/pia-forbids-pilot ... ng-flight/
HEALTH
Ramadan 2021: Nutrition plan for Muslim diabetic patients if they intend to fast
By Zarafshan Shiraz
UPDATED ON APR 11, 2021 05:42 PM IST
Ramadan 2021: To ensure a safe and healthy fast, International Diabetes Federation and the Diabetes and Ramadan (DAR) International Alliance have designed a nutrition plan with 10 health pointers to guide Muslims with diabetes if they will be observing Ramadan fasting this year
The Holy month of Ramadan is just at our doorstep and while Muslims across the world gear up to sight the crescent moon which will mark the onset of one month of fasting from dawn to dusk, it is essential that those with diabetes have a structured nutrition plan if they are going to observe 29 or 30 days of fast. International Diabetes Federation and the Diabetes and Ramadan (DAR) International Alliance have issued guidelines and designed a nutrition plan for Muslims with diabetes who are observing Ramadan fasting this year, to ensure a safe and healthy fast.
This can be a useful resource as it helps diabetic patients to maintain optimal glycaemic control beyond the month of Ramadan too. It might improve fasting blood glucose levels, triglycerides and the rate of self-monitoring blood glucose (SMBG) pre-dawn and pre-bed when compared to standard care in people with type 2 diabetes.
Eating iftar after prolonged fasting, skipping of workouts during the day to save up energy while in a state of fasting, dramatic changes in dietary patterns in comparison to the other months of the year and improper eating habits lead to health issues during Ramadan. To avoid the same, people with diabetes should check out these pointers of Ramadan nutrition plan by IDF and DAR for a healthier lifestyle
1. The consumption of an adequate amount of daily calories. Calories should be divided between Suhoor and Iftar and 1-2 healthy snacks can also be consumed if necessary.
2. Meals should be well balanced, with total carbohydrates comprising around 40–50% and preferably of a low GI source; the protein content (legumes, pulses, fish, poultry, or lean meat) should comprise 20–30%; and fat should comprise 30-35% (with mono and polyunsaturated fats preferred). Saturated fat should be limited to < 10% of the total daily caloric intake.
3. The “Ramadan plate” method should be used for designing meals.
4. Sugar-heavy desserts should be avoided after Iftar and between meals. A moderate amount of healthy dessert is permitted — for example a piece of fruit.
5. Carbohydrates that are low on the GI should be selected, particularly those high in fibre (preferably whole grains). The consumption of carbohydrates from vegetables (cooked and raw), whole fruits, yogurt, milk and dairy products are encouraged. The consumption of carbohydrates from sugar and highly processed grains (wheat flour and starches like corn, white rice, and potatoes) should be avoided or minimised.
6. Maintaining an adequate level of hydration by drinking enough water and non-sweetened beverages at, or between, the two main meals is essential and should be encouraged (diet beverages may be consumed). Sugary drinks, syrups, canned juices, or fresh juices with added sugar should be avoided. The consumption of caffeinated drinks (coffee, tea as well as cola drinks) should be minimised as they act as diuretics which can lead to dehydration.
7. Take Suhoor as late as possible, especially when fasting for longer than 10 hours.
8. Consume an adequate amount of protein and fat at Suhoor as foods with higher levels of these macronutrients and lower levels of carbohydrates usually have a lower GI value than carbohydrate-rich foods. Foods such as these do not have an immediate effect on postprandial blood glucose. Foods rich in protein and good quality fat can better induce satiety than foods rich in carbohydrates.
9. Iftar should begin with plenty of water to overcome dehydration from fasting, and 1-3 small dried or fresh dates to raise blood glucose levels.
10. If needed, a healthier snack such as one piece of fruit, a handful of nuts, or vegetables may be consumed between meals. Generally, each snack should be 100–200 calories, but this may be higher depending on an individual’s caloric requirements. Some individuals may have a snack (Iftar snack) to break their fast, followed by the Maghrib prayer and then eat the Iftar meal later in the evening.
Those chronically ill, pregnant, breastfeeding, diabetic, old and sick with health restrictions are exempted from observing a fast during Ramadan. They should compensate for it by performing Fidiya which is done by feeding a poor person on every day of Ramadan or every day of missing one’s fast.
However, a majority of people living with diabetes choose to fast contrary to medical advice which is why a comprehensive set of guidelines to meet this need is required. These guidelines support people with diabetes to safely and successfully participate in Ramadan and enjoy the personal and spiritual benefits of the sacred month.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/lifestyl ... 77695.html
Ramadan 2021: Nutrition plan for Muslim diabetic patients if they intend to fast
By Zarafshan Shiraz
UPDATED ON APR 11, 2021 05:42 PM IST
Ramadan 2021: To ensure a safe and healthy fast, International Diabetes Federation and the Diabetes and Ramadan (DAR) International Alliance have designed a nutrition plan with 10 health pointers to guide Muslims with diabetes if they will be observing Ramadan fasting this year
The Holy month of Ramadan is just at our doorstep and while Muslims across the world gear up to sight the crescent moon which will mark the onset of one month of fasting from dawn to dusk, it is essential that those with diabetes have a structured nutrition plan if they are going to observe 29 or 30 days of fast. International Diabetes Federation and the Diabetes and Ramadan (DAR) International Alliance have issued guidelines and designed a nutrition plan for Muslims with diabetes who are observing Ramadan fasting this year, to ensure a safe and healthy fast.
This can be a useful resource as it helps diabetic patients to maintain optimal glycaemic control beyond the month of Ramadan too. It might improve fasting blood glucose levels, triglycerides and the rate of self-monitoring blood glucose (SMBG) pre-dawn and pre-bed when compared to standard care in people with type 2 diabetes.
Eating iftar after prolonged fasting, skipping of workouts during the day to save up energy while in a state of fasting, dramatic changes in dietary patterns in comparison to the other months of the year and improper eating habits lead to health issues during Ramadan. To avoid the same, people with diabetes should check out these pointers of Ramadan nutrition plan by IDF and DAR for a healthier lifestyle
1. The consumption of an adequate amount of daily calories. Calories should be divided between Suhoor and Iftar and 1-2 healthy snacks can also be consumed if necessary.
2. Meals should be well balanced, with total carbohydrates comprising around 40–50% and preferably of a low GI source; the protein content (legumes, pulses, fish, poultry, or lean meat) should comprise 20–30%; and fat should comprise 30-35% (with mono and polyunsaturated fats preferred). Saturated fat should be limited to < 10% of the total daily caloric intake.
3. The “Ramadan plate” method should be used for designing meals.
4. Sugar-heavy desserts should be avoided after Iftar and between meals. A moderate amount of healthy dessert is permitted — for example a piece of fruit.
5. Carbohydrates that are low on the GI should be selected, particularly those high in fibre (preferably whole grains). The consumption of carbohydrates from vegetables (cooked and raw), whole fruits, yogurt, milk and dairy products are encouraged. The consumption of carbohydrates from sugar and highly processed grains (wheat flour and starches like corn, white rice, and potatoes) should be avoided or minimised.
6. Maintaining an adequate level of hydration by drinking enough water and non-sweetened beverages at, or between, the two main meals is essential and should be encouraged (diet beverages may be consumed). Sugary drinks, syrups, canned juices, or fresh juices with added sugar should be avoided. The consumption of caffeinated drinks (coffee, tea as well as cola drinks) should be minimised as they act as diuretics which can lead to dehydration.
7. Take Suhoor as late as possible, especially when fasting for longer than 10 hours.
8. Consume an adequate amount of protein and fat at Suhoor as foods with higher levels of these macronutrients and lower levels of carbohydrates usually have a lower GI value than carbohydrate-rich foods. Foods such as these do not have an immediate effect on postprandial blood glucose. Foods rich in protein and good quality fat can better induce satiety than foods rich in carbohydrates.
9. Iftar should begin with plenty of water to overcome dehydration from fasting, and 1-3 small dried or fresh dates to raise blood glucose levels.
10. If needed, a healthier snack such as one piece of fruit, a handful of nuts, or vegetables may be consumed between meals. Generally, each snack should be 100–200 calories, but this may be higher depending on an individual’s caloric requirements. Some individuals may have a snack (Iftar snack) to break their fast, followed by the Maghrib prayer and then eat the Iftar meal later in the evening.
Those chronically ill, pregnant, breastfeeding, diabetic, old and sick with health restrictions are exempted from observing a fast during Ramadan. They should compensate for it by performing Fidiya which is done by feeding a poor person on every day of Ramadan or every day of missing one’s fast.
However, a majority of people living with diabetes choose to fast contrary to medical advice which is why a comprehensive set of guidelines to meet this need is required. These guidelines support people with diabetes to safely and successfully participate in Ramadan and enjoy the personal and spiritual benefits of the sacred month.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/lifestyl ... 77695.html
Muslims mark Ramadan amid virus surge and new restrictions
AMR NABIL and NINIEK KARMINI
Associated Press Mon, April 12, 2021, 10:37 PM
Muslims pray during the first dawn prayers of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, around the Kaaba, the cubic building at the Grand Mosque, as they keep social distancing to help curb the spread of the coronavirus, in the Muslim holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, Tuesday, April 13, 2021. During Ramadan, the holiest month in Islamic calendar, Muslims refrain from eating, drinking, smoking and sex from dawn to dusk. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil)
Indonesian Muslims pray spaced apart as they practice social distancing to curb the spread of the new coronavirus during an evening prayer called "tarawih" marking the first eve of the holy fasting month of Ramadan at Istiqlal Mosque in Jakarta, Indonesia. Monday, April 12, 2021. During Ramadan, the holiest month in Islamic calendar, Muslims refrain from eating, drinking, smoking and sex from dawn to dusk. (AP Photo/ Achmad Ibrahim)
Muslim women perform an evening prayer called 'tarawih' during the first evening of the holy fasting month of Ramadan, at Al Mashun Great Mosque in Medan, North Sumatra, Indonesia, Monday, April 12, 2021. During Ramadan, the holiest month in Islamic calendar, Muslims refrain from eating, drinking, smoking and sex from dawn to dusk.
Footwear are left outside as people perform perform an evening prayer called 'tarawih' during the first evening of the holy fasting month of Ramadan, at a mosque in Jakarta, Indonesia, Monday, April 12, 2021.
Hagia Sophia dominates Istanbul's skyline , with the Golden Horn in the foreground, Monday, April 12, 2021. Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was forced to announce renewed restrictions following a spike on COVID-19 cases, such as weekend lockdowns and the closure of cafes and restaurants during Ramadan, the holy Muslim month, starting on April 13.
Muslims exit Chicago's Muslim Community Center after an evening prayer called "tarawih" as others pass by during the first evening of the holy fasting month of Ramadan at Chicago's Muslim Community Center on Monday, April 12, 2021. (AP Photo/Shafkat Anowar)
Muslims pray as they practice social distancing during an evening prayer called "tarawih" marking the first eve of the holy fasting month of Ramadan at Chicago's Muslim Community Center on Monday, April 12, 2021.
People pray at the Eyup Sultan Mosque, in Istanbul, Monday, April 12, 2021, a day before Ramadan. Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was forced to announce renewed restrictions following a spike on COVID-19 cases, such as weekend lockdowns and the closure of cafes and restaurants during Ramadan, the holy Muslim month, starting on April 13.
People pray at the Eyup Sultan Mosque, in Istanbul, Monday, April 12, 2021, a day before Ramadan. Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was forced to announce renewed restrictions following a spike on COVID-19 cases, such as weekend lockdowns and the closure of cafes and restaurants during Ramadan, the holy Muslim month, starting on April 13.
MECCA, Saudi Arabia (AP) — Muslims in many parts of the world marked the start of Ramadan on Tuesday, but a spike in coronavirus cases in several countries has once again put curbs on the holy month's signature feasts and lengthy prayers in mosques.
Still, there were glimmers that Ramadan 2021 could feel less restricted than last year, when Islam’s holiest period coincided with the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Mosques have since reopened and limits on movement have eased as vaccine rollouts continue in Muslim-majority nations. Clerics in such places as Indonesia have issued assurances the vaccine does not break one’s daytime fast.
Ramadan is marked by longer prayers, dawn-to-dusk fasting and nightly feasts with family and friends, though crowded shoulder-to-shoulder gatherings in mosques and large gatherings for meals remain prohibited due to the continued spread of coronavirus globally.
Throughout Ramadan, Muslims abstain from any food or drink — including water — from morning to night. The monthlong practice is aimed at heightening remembrance of God, curbing unhealthy habits and deepening gratitude.
In Mecca, home to the Kaaba — Islam's most sacred site — Muslims performed socially distanced “taraweeh” prayers, marking the start of Ramadan. Observant Muslims around the world pray toward the Kaaba five times a day.
Only limited numbers of worshippers were being allowed inside the Grand Mosque that houses the Kaaba to prevent the spread of the virus. Saudi authorities were only allowing individuals who've been vaccinated or recently recovered from the virus to perform taraweeh prayers at the Kaaba.
In Lebanon, most Muslims began Ramadan on Tuesday amid soaring inflation. The small country is in the grips of the worst economic and financial crisis in its modern history, with the Lebanese currency losing some 80% of its value against the U.S. dollar in past months.
The crisis — a result of decades of endemic corruption and mismanagement — has been compounded by the coronavirus pandemic. Many people were having to scale back their Ramadan preparations.
“We cannot buy anything. We ask how much the lettuce is, the cucumber and the tomato,” said Samiyeh al-Turk at a busy open air market in Beirut Monday. "How we are going to get through the month of Ramadan? I don’t know,” she added.
Israel was allowing 10,000 fully vaccinated Palestinian residents of the West Bank to pray in the al-Aqsa mosque on the first Friday of Ramadan. The sacred mosque in Jerusalem is open for prayers during Ramadan amid Israel’s rapid vaccination rollout.
“We hope that it will be a good month after the great setback that the whole world was exposed to,” Jerusalem shop owner Reyad Hallaq said.
In the densely populated Gaza Strip, a nighttime curfew is aimed at restricting family gatherings as the virus continues to spread there.
The restrictions mean that Bessan Mabhouh may not see her parents and gather for iftar as they often would do several times during Ramadan.
“During the day, I’m also struggling with helping my children with their remote learning so I do not think this Ramadan will be nice away from my family," she said.
In Iraq, a curfew will remain in place from 7 p.m. to 5 a.m. throughout Ramadan, with total lockdown on weekends. The Health Ministry warned that non-compliance with these measures could lead to three-day continuous lockdowns. Citing economic concerns for business owners, restaurants and pastry shops will be able to operate but solely through home deliveries.
Meanwhile, a 10-day lockdown due to increased infections went into effect on Tuesday in northeastern areas of Syria controlled by U.S.-backed fighters. The region, which borders Iraq and Turkey, is home to 5 million people.
In Indonesia, COVID-19 cases are also spiking. Mosques are being allowed to open for Ramadan prayers with strict protocols in place.
The government will allow people to hold “iftar” gatherings during Ramadan in restaurants, malls and cafes, which can open at 50% capacity. Iftar is the sought-after moment when Muslims traditionally break their daylong fast by eating dates and taking a sip of water before feasting with friends and family.
“Easing restrictions is like a breath of fresh air for us who are tired by this COVID-19 outbreak,” said Anna Mardyastuti, a resident in Indonesia's capital of Jakarta. “Yes, they should act to stop the virus, but not block the door to worship or change our tradition of Ramadan entirely."
In neighboring Muslim-majority Malaysia, Wan Noradriana Balqis, 21, welcomed the return of community prayers in mosques but said she will avoid busy Ramadan bazaars. Coronavirus cases in Malaysia have more than tripled since January.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to reopen the bazaars. The rules are there but many people don’t follow them,” the database administrative officer said.
Vaccinations pose a challenge for Muslim nations administering shots throughout Ramadan. Officials were working to ease concerns over the Islamic teaching that Muslims should refrain “from anything entering the body” between sunrise and sunset.
Indonesia’s top clerical council went so far as to say Muslims eligible for vaccinations are “required” to take the shots during Ramadan.
In India, where infections have peaked in recent days, scholars are appealing to the country's 200 million Muslims to follow anti-virus protocols and refrain from large gatherings. Many Indian cities dealing with virus surges have imposed nighttime curfews, and it remains unclear whether the faithful will be allowed to perform taraweeh prayers in mosques.
In Pakistan and Iran, fasting is expected to begin Wednesday.
The government of Prime Minister Imran Khan has refused to close mosques in Pakistan, even as new infections reach levels similar to the start of the pandemic. Mosque leaders are entrusted with ensuring no one over 50 years-old enters and that social distancing is maintained, but rarely do adherents follow these restrictions.
Muslims in Indian-controlled Kashmir continue to suffer from two back-to-back lockdowns that left tens of thousands without any means to earn their livelihoods. The disputed region, the only part of Hindu-dominated India that is majority Muslim, was under an unprecedented military lockdown in 2019 before coronavirus lockdowns were imposed last year. Local charities plan to distribute Ramadan ration kits for families in need.
And in Egypt, the government prevented mosques from serving free meals during Ramadan and banned traditional charitable iftars that would bring together strangers at long tables.
____
Karmini reported from Jakarta, Indonesia. Associated Press writers Eileen Ng in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Aijaz Hussain in Srinagar, India; Kathy Gannon in Islamabad; Zeina Karam and Fadi Tawil in Beirut; Barry Hatton in Lisbon, Portugal; Samy Magdy in Cairo and Fares Akram in Gaza City, Gaza Strip contributed to this report.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/mu ... 732685.htm
AMR NABIL and NINIEK KARMINI
Associated Press Mon, April 12, 2021, 10:37 PM
Muslims pray during the first dawn prayers of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, around the Kaaba, the cubic building at the Grand Mosque, as they keep social distancing to help curb the spread of the coronavirus, in the Muslim holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, Tuesday, April 13, 2021. During Ramadan, the holiest month in Islamic calendar, Muslims refrain from eating, drinking, smoking and sex from dawn to dusk. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil)
Indonesian Muslims pray spaced apart as they practice social distancing to curb the spread of the new coronavirus during an evening prayer called "tarawih" marking the first eve of the holy fasting month of Ramadan at Istiqlal Mosque in Jakarta, Indonesia. Monday, April 12, 2021. During Ramadan, the holiest month in Islamic calendar, Muslims refrain from eating, drinking, smoking and sex from dawn to dusk. (AP Photo/ Achmad Ibrahim)
Muslim women perform an evening prayer called 'tarawih' during the first evening of the holy fasting month of Ramadan, at Al Mashun Great Mosque in Medan, North Sumatra, Indonesia, Monday, April 12, 2021. During Ramadan, the holiest month in Islamic calendar, Muslims refrain from eating, drinking, smoking and sex from dawn to dusk.
Footwear are left outside as people perform perform an evening prayer called 'tarawih' during the first evening of the holy fasting month of Ramadan, at a mosque in Jakarta, Indonesia, Monday, April 12, 2021.
Hagia Sophia dominates Istanbul's skyline , with the Golden Horn in the foreground, Monday, April 12, 2021. Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was forced to announce renewed restrictions following a spike on COVID-19 cases, such as weekend lockdowns and the closure of cafes and restaurants during Ramadan, the holy Muslim month, starting on April 13.
Muslims exit Chicago's Muslim Community Center after an evening prayer called "tarawih" as others pass by during the first evening of the holy fasting month of Ramadan at Chicago's Muslim Community Center on Monday, April 12, 2021. (AP Photo/Shafkat Anowar)
Muslims pray as they practice social distancing during an evening prayer called "tarawih" marking the first eve of the holy fasting month of Ramadan at Chicago's Muslim Community Center on Monday, April 12, 2021.
People pray at the Eyup Sultan Mosque, in Istanbul, Monday, April 12, 2021, a day before Ramadan. Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was forced to announce renewed restrictions following a spike on COVID-19 cases, such as weekend lockdowns and the closure of cafes and restaurants during Ramadan, the holy Muslim month, starting on April 13.
People pray at the Eyup Sultan Mosque, in Istanbul, Monday, April 12, 2021, a day before Ramadan. Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was forced to announce renewed restrictions following a spike on COVID-19 cases, such as weekend lockdowns and the closure of cafes and restaurants during Ramadan, the holy Muslim month, starting on April 13.
MECCA, Saudi Arabia (AP) — Muslims in many parts of the world marked the start of Ramadan on Tuesday, but a spike in coronavirus cases in several countries has once again put curbs on the holy month's signature feasts and lengthy prayers in mosques.
Still, there were glimmers that Ramadan 2021 could feel less restricted than last year, when Islam’s holiest period coincided with the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Mosques have since reopened and limits on movement have eased as vaccine rollouts continue in Muslim-majority nations. Clerics in such places as Indonesia have issued assurances the vaccine does not break one’s daytime fast.
Ramadan is marked by longer prayers, dawn-to-dusk fasting and nightly feasts with family and friends, though crowded shoulder-to-shoulder gatherings in mosques and large gatherings for meals remain prohibited due to the continued spread of coronavirus globally.
Throughout Ramadan, Muslims abstain from any food or drink — including water — from morning to night. The monthlong practice is aimed at heightening remembrance of God, curbing unhealthy habits and deepening gratitude.
In Mecca, home to the Kaaba — Islam's most sacred site — Muslims performed socially distanced “taraweeh” prayers, marking the start of Ramadan. Observant Muslims around the world pray toward the Kaaba five times a day.
Only limited numbers of worshippers were being allowed inside the Grand Mosque that houses the Kaaba to prevent the spread of the virus. Saudi authorities were only allowing individuals who've been vaccinated or recently recovered from the virus to perform taraweeh prayers at the Kaaba.
In Lebanon, most Muslims began Ramadan on Tuesday amid soaring inflation. The small country is in the grips of the worst economic and financial crisis in its modern history, with the Lebanese currency losing some 80% of its value against the U.S. dollar in past months.
The crisis — a result of decades of endemic corruption and mismanagement — has been compounded by the coronavirus pandemic. Many people were having to scale back their Ramadan preparations.
“We cannot buy anything. We ask how much the lettuce is, the cucumber and the tomato,” said Samiyeh al-Turk at a busy open air market in Beirut Monday. "How we are going to get through the month of Ramadan? I don’t know,” she added.
Israel was allowing 10,000 fully vaccinated Palestinian residents of the West Bank to pray in the al-Aqsa mosque on the first Friday of Ramadan. The sacred mosque in Jerusalem is open for prayers during Ramadan amid Israel’s rapid vaccination rollout.
“We hope that it will be a good month after the great setback that the whole world was exposed to,” Jerusalem shop owner Reyad Hallaq said.
In the densely populated Gaza Strip, a nighttime curfew is aimed at restricting family gatherings as the virus continues to spread there.
The restrictions mean that Bessan Mabhouh may not see her parents and gather for iftar as they often would do several times during Ramadan.
“During the day, I’m also struggling with helping my children with their remote learning so I do not think this Ramadan will be nice away from my family," she said.
In Iraq, a curfew will remain in place from 7 p.m. to 5 a.m. throughout Ramadan, with total lockdown on weekends. The Health Ministry warned that non-compliance with these measures could lead to three-day continuous lockdowns. Citing economic concerns for business owners, restaurants and pastry shops will be able to operate but solely through home deliveries.
Meanwhile, a 10-day lockdown due to increased infections went into effect on Tuesday in northeastern areas of Syria controlled by U.S.-backed fighters. The region, which borders Iraq and Turkey, is home to 5 million people.
In Indonesia, COVID-19 cases are also spiking. Mosques are being allowed to open for Ramadan prayers with strict protocols in place.
The government will allow people to hold “iftar” gatherings during Ramadan in restaurants, malls and cafes, which can open at 50% capacity. Iftar is the sought-after moment when Muslims traditionally break their daylong fast by eating dates and taking a sip of water before feasting with friends and family.
“Easing restrictions is like a breath of fresh air for us who are tired by this COVID-19 outbreak,” said Anna Mardyastuti, a resident in Indonesia's capital of Jakarta. “Yes, they should act to stop the virus, but not block the door to worship or change our tradition of Ramadan entirely."
In neighboring Muslim-majority Malaysia, Wan Noradriana Balqis, 21, welcomed the return of community prayers in mosques but said she will avoid busy Ramadan bazaars. Coronavirus cases in Malaysia have more than tripled since January.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to reopen the bazaars. The rules are there but many people don’t follow them,” the database administrative officer said.
Vaccinations pose a challenge for Muslim nations administering shots throughout Ramadan. Officials were working to ease concerns over the Islamic teaching that Muslims should refrain “from anything entering the body” between sunrise and sunset.
Indonesia’s top clerical council went so far as to say Muslims eligible for vaccinations are “required” to take the shots during Ramadan.
In India, where infections have peaked in recent days, scholars are appealing to the country's 200 million Muslims to follow anti-virus protocols and refrain from large gatherings. Many Indian cities dealing with virus surges have imposed nighttime curfews, and it remains unclear whether the faithful will be allowed to perform taraweeh prayers in mosques.
In Pakistan and Iran, fasting is expected to begin Wednesday.
The government of Prime Minister Imran Khan has refused to close mosques in Pakistan, even as new infections reach levels similar to the start of the pandemic. Mosque leaders are entrusted with ensuring no one over 50 years-old enters and that social distancing is maintained, but rarely do adherents follow these restrictions.
Muslims in Indian-controlled Kashmir continue to suffer from two back-to-back lockdowns that left tens of thousands without any means to earn their livelihoods. The disputed region, the only part of Hindu-dominated India that is majority Muslim, was under an unprecedented military lockdown in 2019 before coronavirus lockdowns were imposed last year. Local charities plan to distribute Ramadan ration kits for families in need.
And in Egypt, the government prevented mosques from serving free meals during Ramadan and banned traditional charitable iftars that would bring together strangers at long tables.
____
Karmini reported from Jakarta, Indonesia. Associated Press writers Eileen Ng in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Aijaz Hussain in Srinagar, India; Kathy Gannon in Islamabad; Zeina Karam and Fadi Tawil in Beirut; Barry Hatton in Lisbon, Portugal; Samy Magdy in Cairo and Fares Akram in Gaza City, Gaza Strip contributed to this report.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/mu ... 732685.htm
In Muslim tradition, Ramadan is a time of heightened commitment to piety and purification through special observances such as fasting, the performance of good deeds – including charitable giving and voluntary service – and through personal sacrifices of material comforts. These observances can lead to spiritual fulfilment and a sense of renewal.
Ramadan is the holy month in which Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him and his family) received the first revelation of the Holy Qur'an. Together with other Muslims, Ismailis celebrate Ramadan as a month of special felicity “in which the Holy Qur'an was sent down as a guide to humankind…” (Qur'an 2:185).
The fast of Ramadan is among the pillars of the faith: “O believers, fasting has been prescribed for you as it was for those who preceded you that you may be God-fearing” (Qur'an 2:183). Thus, the fast continues a practice which pre-dates Islam, and has been rendered more humane since religion is not intended to be a cause of hardship. Muslims are urged to fast during Ramadan unless one is suffering from any physical ailment or is on a journey, in which case the prescribed period should be made up later in the year (Qur'an 2:184 – 185).
According to general Muslim belief shared by Shia and Sunni alike, the deeper purpose of fasting is understood as that of cultivating and reinforcing the spiritual and moral character of the faithful, who thus live a life of piety and balance, without forsaking the good things of this world bestowed by Allah's grace (Qur'an 7:31-32). Muslims are expected to practice self-restraint for the sake of Allah's pleasure, remaining ever conscious of His presence. Such are the truly God-fearing.
The emphasis on human character is especially underlined. A tradition of the Prophet's beloved daughter, Hazrat Bibi Fatima Zahra asks what benefit accrues to one who fasts if one does not safeguard one's tongue, ears and limbs. This ethic of self-restraint echoes strictures of the Qur'an: “the hearing, the sight, the heart – all of those shall be questioned.” (Qur'an 17:36). Only when the senses are reined in, does conscience make itself heard, and the soul experience tranquillity, well pleased with itself and well pleasing to its Lord. Quran 89-28
https://the.ismaili/ramadan
Ramadan is the holy month in which Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him and his family) received the first revelation of the Holy Qur'an. Together with other Muslims, Ismailis celebrate Ramadan as a month of special felicity “in which the Holy Qur'an was sent down as a guide to humankind…” (Qur'an 2:185).
The fast of Ramadan is among the pillars of the faith: “O believers, fasting has been prescribed for you as it was for those who preceded you that you may be God-fearing” (Qur'an 2:183). Thus, the fast continues a practice which pre-dates Islam, and has been rendered more humane since religion is not intended to be a cause of hardship. Muslims are urged to fast during Ramadan unless one is suffering from any physical ailment or is on a journey, in which case the prescribed period should be made up later in the year (Qur'an 2:184 – 185).
According to general Muslim belief shared by Shia and Sunni alike, the deeper purpose of fasting is understood as that of cultivating and reinforcing the spiritual and moral character of the faithful, who thus live a life of piety and balance, without forsaking the good things of this world bestowed by Allah's grace (Qur'an 7:31-32). Muslims are expected to practice self-restraint for the sake of Allah's pleasure, remaining ever conscious of His presence. Such are the truly God-fearing.
The emphasis on human character is especially underlined. A tradition of the Prophet's beloved daughter, Hazrat Bibi Fatima Zahra asks what benefit accrues to one who fasts if one does not safeguard one's tongue, ears and limbs. This ethic of self-restraint echoes strictures of the Qur'an: “the hearing, the sight, the heart – all of those shall be questioned.” (Qur'an 17:36). Only when the senses are reined in, does conscience make itself heard, and the soul experience tranquillity, well pleased with itself and well pleasing to its Lord. Quran 89-28
https://the.ismaili/ramadan
Jews fast on several days. The most well known Jewish fast day is YOM Kippur, which is ten days after the New Year's holiday, Rosh Hashana. Jews are supposed to spend ten days making up with people they have hurt during the past year and trying to get it together to be a better person during the next year. The fast of Yom Kippur is spent in synagogue, praying all day and asking God to forgive sins. The fast is only for Jews over 13 years of age. The fast starts the night before the day of Yom Kippur and lasts until sundown on Yom Kippur. No water or food of any kind is eaten during this fast. This is not the only fast day in Jewish calendar, but it is by far the most important.
In addition to Yom Kippur, The Talmud discusses four fast days (based on Zechariah 8:19) that commemorate the destruction of the First and Second Temples and the exile of the Jewish People from their homeland. In addition, two other fast days are mentioned in the Rabbinical literature, yielding a total of six tzomot (seven if Yom Kippur is included). The following list shows the seven fast days of the Jewish year, from the first fast of the year to the last.
Ta'anit Bechorim - The Fast of the Firstborn is a fast observed only by firstborn males, commemorating the fact that they were saved from the plague of the firstborn in Egypt. It is observed on the day before Pesach (Nisan 14).
Tzom Tammuz - Fast of the 17th of Tammuz. In Jewish tradition, Moses smashed the tablets on the seventeenth day of the fourth month (Tammuz), after he came down from Sinai and found the people worshiping the Golden Calf. This tragedy was seen as prophetic, since it was on this same date that the walls of Jerusalem were smashed by the invading armies of Nebuchadnezzar (see 2 Kings 25:2-7), an event which led to the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the people three weeks later, that is, on the ninth of Av. In the Bible, this is referred to as the Fast of the 4th month.
Tishah B'Av - The Ninth of Av, a fast day remembering the tragedies of the Jewish people (July/Aug). In the Bible, this is referred to as the Fast of the 5th month. Note that many people also fast on the first of Av, since this is the yahrzeit of Aaron the High Priest. The Fast of Tishah B'Av is the second most important fast in Judaism (next to Yom Kippur, which is the most important fast day). On the eve of the Tishah B'Av fast, it is customary to eat a boiled egg sprinkled with ashes...
Tzom Gedaliah - The fast right after Rosh Hashanah (on Tishri 3) commemorating the murder of the Judean governor Gedaliah by misguided zealots (Sept/Oct). In the Bible, this is referred to as the Fast of the 7th month.
Yom Kippur - The Day of Atonement (Tishri 10) is the most holy day of the Jewish year. This a fast day where no work of any kind is permitted. Note that Yom Kippur is the only fast day mentioned in the Scriptures for the purpose of teshuvah (repentance). So important is this fast that it is permitted even when it falls on a Shabbat (unlike other fast days that are postponed if they fall on the Sabbath).
Asarah B'Tevet - The 10th of Tevet, a fast day commemorating the fall of the Jerusalem. In the State of Israel, Kaddish (the Jewish prayer for the deceased) is recited on this day for people whose date or place of death is unknown (Dec/Jan). In the Bible, this is referred to as the Fast of the 10th month.
Ta'anit Esther - The Fast of Eshter is observed on the day before Purim, on Adar 13 (in Feb/Mar).
Other Fast Days
Besides the seven traditional fast days that are universally recognized within the observant Jewish community worldwide, there are some additional fast days within Jewish tradition that should be noted. These include:
Ta'anit Tzaddikim - "Fast of the Righteous ones." These are fasts in memory of an outstanding person who demonstrated the life of faithfulness to God (i.e., yahrzeit fasts). Some of these fasts include:
The Fast of Miriam - 10th Nisan
The Fast of Aaron - 1st of Av
The Fast of Moses - 7th of Adar
The Fast of Joshua - 26th of Nisan
Fast of Samuel - 28th of Iyyar
Ta'anit Tzibur - These are fasts instituted by a particular community in memory of a special deliverance (purim) or the death of a revered community leader.
Ta'anit Yachid - "Personal fast" or "unique fast." This is a fast performed in private for the sake of a personal need or request (bakashah).
In addition to Yom Kippur, The Talmud discusses four fast days (based on Zechariah 8:19) that commemorate the destruction of the First and Second Temples and the exile of the Jewish People from their homeland. In addition, two other fast days are mentioned in the Rabbinical literature, yielding a total of six tzomot (seven if Yom Kippur is included). The following list shows the seven fast days of the Jewish year, from the first fast of the year to the last.
Ta'anit Bechorim - The Fast of the Firstborn is a fast observed only by firstborn males, commemorating the fact that they were saved from the plague of the firstborn in Egypt. It is observed on the day before Pesach (Nisan 14).
Tzom Tammuz - Fast of the 17th of Tammuz. In Jewish tradition, Moses smashed the tablets on the seventeenth day of the fourth month (Tammuz), after he came down from Sinai and found the people worshiping the Golden Calf. This tragedy was seen as prophetic, since it was on this same date that the walls of Jerusalem were smashed by the invading armies of Nebuchadnezzar (see 2 Kings 25:2-7), an event which led to the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the people three weeks later, that is, on the ninth of Av. In the Bible, this is referred to as the Fast of the 4th month.
Tishah B'Av - The Ninth of Av, a fast day remembering the tragedies of the Jewish people (July/Aug). In the Bible, this is referred to as the Fast of the 5th month. Note that many people also fast on the first of Av, since this is the yahrzeit of Aaron the High Priest. The Fast of Tishah B'Av is the second most important fast in Judaism (next to Yom Kippur, which is the most important fast day). On the eve of the Tishah B'Av fast, it is customary to eat a boiled egg sprinkled with ashes...
Tzom Gedaliah - The fast right after Rosh Hashanah (on Tishri 3) commemorating the murder of the Judean governor Gedaliah by misguided zealots (Sept/Oct). In the Bible, this is referred to as the Fast of the 7th month.
Yom Kippur - The Day of Atonement (Tishri 10) is the most holy day of the Jewish year. This a fast day where no work of any kind is permitted. Note that Yom Kippur is the only fast day mentioned in the Scriptures for the purpose of teshuvah (repentance). So important is this fast that it is permitted even when it falls on a Shabbat (unlike other fast days that are postponed if they fall on the Sabbath).
Asarah B'Tevet - The 10th of Tevet, a fast day commemorating the fall of the Jerusalem. In the State of Israel, Kaddish (the Jewish prayer for the deceased) is recited on this day for people whose date or place of death is unknown (Dec/Jan). In the Bible, this is referred to as the Fast of the 10th month.
Ta'anit Esther - The Fast of Eshter is observed on the day before Purim, on Adar 13 (in Feb/Mar).
Other Fast Days
Besides the seven traditional fast days that are universally recognized within the observant Jewish community worldwide, there are some additional fast days within Jewish tradition that should be noted. These include:
Ta'anit Tzaddikim - "Fast of the Righteous ones." These are fasts in memory of an outstanding person who demonstrated the life of faithfulness to God (i.e., yahrzeit fasts). Some of these fasts include:
The Fast of Miriam - 10th Nisan
The Fast of Aaron - 1st of Av
The Fast of Moses - 7th of Adar
The Fast of Joshua - 26th of Nisan
Fast of Samuel - 28th of Iyyar
Ta'anit Tzibur - These are fasts instituted by a particular community in memory of a special deliverance (purim) or the death of a revered community leader.
Ta'anit Yachid - "Personal fast" or "unique fast." This is a fast performed in private for the sake of a personal need or request (bakashah).
Man Samjaañi Moti - Couplet 314 (Baatuni Roza) - Farida Karmali
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjv12d7HcjQ
*Das roja batuni kahiye -* with taawil of Imam Mustansir Billah II (s a.s). – in (Pandiyāt-i Jawānmardī, transl. Ivanow, 37 - (whatever I could find🤲🏽)
*Awal roja seer ka kahiye* - _fasting of the head -_ The fast of the head means to treat one’s own head with the same humility as the feet of other people, casting out from one’s head the lust for superiority, greatness and pride, because greatness and superiority are only suitable to the all-great substance of the Truth (Ḥaqq), who is eternal, and the King of the Authority _& ablution of the head is to accept Imam’s farman;_
*Duja roja chasam daari -* _2nd fast is of the eyes -_ The fasting of the eye is that he must not cast covetous looks at women who are not lawful to him & _Ablution of the eye is to see the didar of the Imam"_
*Trija roja naak no vaari -* _3rd fast is of the nose_
*Chotha roja mukh ku dije* - _4th fast is of the mouth_ Fasting of the mouth means to only consume from that of which _maal-e-waajbaat (dasond)_ has been given
*Paanchma roja jabaan ka kije* - _5th fast is that of the tongue_ - The fasting of the tongue is to avoid is to avoid uttering abuse or slander & the tongue must be kept from uttering lies. There is no greater lie than the denial of (the existence of) the Imam, saying that he has disappeared. - _Ablution of the tongue is to keep it always in the remembrance of the Imam;_ must be kept from uttering lies. And there is no greater lie than the denial of (the existence of) the Imam, saying that he has disappeared.
*Chataa roja kaan na kahiye* - _6th fast is of the ears -_ The fasting of the ear is that he should abstain from listening to slander - _Ablution of the ear is to hear the words of the Imam;_
*Saatma roja dilna kahiye-* _7th fast is of the heart -_ The fasting of the heart is to keep it free from doubt
*Aathma roja nafas ka jaano* - _know that the 8th fast is of the soul_
*Nomaa roja haath pichhaano* - _recognize the 9th fast is that of the hands -_ The fasting of the hand is to _keep all one’s limbs away from treachery_ so that they may not do evil - Ablution of the hand is to give bay’ah (oath of allegiance) to the Imam of the time;
*Dasma roja paaun ka dharie* - _the 10th fast is that of the feet_ - The fasting of his feet is to hold back from wrong steps - _Ablution of the foot is to walk on the path of the Imam and according to the farman;_
Thus, a mu’min (believer) should keep all his body parts in a state of fasting, so that he may not be a wrong-doer (zalim)”
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjv12d7HcjQ
*Das roja batuni kahiye -* with taawil of Imam Mustansir Billah II (s a.s). – in (Pandiyāt-i Jawānmardī, transl. Ivanow, 37 - (whatever I could find🤲🏽)
*Awal roja seer ka kahiye* - _fasting of the head -_ The fast of the head means to treat one’s own head with the same humility as the feet of other people, casting out from one’s head the lust for superiority, greatness and pride, because greatness and superiority are only suitable to the all-great substance of the Truth (Ḥaqq), who is eternal, and the King of the Authority _& ablution of the head is to accept Imam’s farman;_
*Duja roja chasam daari -* _2nd fast is of the eyes -_ The fasting of the eye is that he must not cast covetous looks at women who are not lawful to him & _Ablution of the eye is to see the didar of the Imam"_
*Trija roja naak no vaari -* _3rd fast is of the nose_
*Chotha roja mukh ku dije* - _4th fast is of the mouth_ Fasting of the mouth means to only consume from that of which _maal-e-waajbaat (dasond)_ has been given
*Paanchma roja jabaan ka kije* - _5th fast is that of the tongue_ - The fasting of the tongue is to avoid is to avoid uttering abuse or slander & the tongue must be kept from uttering lies. There is no greater lie than the denial of (the existence of) the Imam, saying that he has disappeared. - _Ablution of the tongue is to keep it always in the remembrance of the Imam;_ must be kept from uttering lies. And there is no greater lie than the denial of (the existence of) the Imam, saying that he has disappeared.
*Chataa roja kaan na kahiye* - _6th fast is of the ears -_ The fasting of the ear is that he should abstain from listening to slander - _Ablution of the ear is to hear the words of the Imam;_
*Saatma roja dilna kahiye-* _7th fast is of the heart -_ The fasting of the heart is to keep it free from doubt
*Aathma roja nafas ka jaano* - _know that the 8th fast is of the soul_
*Nomaa roja haath pichhaano* - _recognize the 9th fast is that of the hands -_ The fasting of the hand is to _keep all one’s limbs away from treachery_ so that they may not do evil - Ablution of the hand is to give bay’ah (oath of allegiance) to the Imam of the time;
*Dasma roja paaun ka dharie* - _the 10th fast is that of the feet_ - The fasting of his feet is to hold back from wrong steps - _Ablution of the foot is to walk on the path of the Imam and according to the farman;_
Thus, a mu’min (believer) should keep all his body parts in a state of fasting, so that he may not be a wrong-doer (zalim)”
10 Biblical Purposes for Fasting
Throughout the Bible we most often find God’s people turn to fasting as the natural, inevitable response to a grievous sacred moment in life, such as death, sin and tragedy. But other times a fast is not a spontaneous reaction and we have time to prepare to respond both physically and spiritually.
Fasting is not an end unto itself, but a means of focusing our minds and bodies for a spiritual reason. Whenever you fast, do so for a reason that is mentioned or modeled in the Bible. Here are ten primary purposes for fasting mentioned in Scripture:
1. To strengthen prayer (e.g., see Ezra 8:23)
Numerous incidents in the Old Testament connect fasting to prayer, especially intercessory prayer. Fasting does not change whether God hears our prayers, but it can change our praying. As Arthur Wallis says, “Fasting is calculated to bring a note of urgency and importunity into our praying, and to give force to our pleading in the court of heaven.”
2. To seek God’s guidance (e.g., see Judges 20:26)
As with prayer, fasting to seek God’s guidance isn’t done to change God but to make us more receptive to his guidance.
3. To express grief (e.g., see 1 Samuel 31:13)
Expressing grief is one of the primary reasons for fasting. Ever notice that when you’re moved to tears by grief you lose the urge to eat? When we grieve, our family and friends often have to plead with us to eat because our body’s appropriate response to grief is to fast. A prime example occurs in 2 Samuel 1:12, where David and his men are described as having “mourned and wept and fasted till evening” for their friends, their enemies and their nation.
4. To seek deliverance or protection (e.g., see 2 Chronicles 20:3 – 4)
Another common reason for fasting in the Old Testament was to seek deliverance from enemies or circumstances. In Scripture, this type of fast is generally carried out with other believers.
5. To express repentance and a return to God (e.g., see 1 Samuel 7:6)
This type of fasting helps us to express grief over our sins and shows our seriousness about returning to the path of godly obedience.
6. To humble oneself before God (e.g., see 1 Kings 21:27 – 29)
“Remember that fasting itself is not humility before God,” reminds Donald Whitney, “but should be an expression of humility.”
7. To express concern for the work of God (e.g., see Nehemiah 1:3 – 4)
As with Nehemiah, fasting can be a tangible sign of our concern over a particular work God is doing.
8. To minister to the needs of others (e.g., see Isaiah 58:3 – 7)
We can use time we’d normally spend eating to fast and minister to others.
9. To overcome temptation and dedicate yourself to God (e.g., see Matthew 4:1 – 11)
Fasting can help us focus when we are struggling with particular temptations.
10. To express love and worship for God (e.g., see Luke 2:37)
Fasting can show, as John Piper says, that “what we hunger for most, we worship.”
How should we equip ourselves when God calls us to “declare a holy fast”? Here are some things to consider as you prepare for fasting:
Pray and confess your sins
A necessary step before fasting is to humble yourself before God (see Psalm 35:13) and confess your sins (see 1 Samuel 7:6). Prayer should be our sustenance throughout the fast, but it is imperative we begin the fast with a contrite heart.
Turn to Scripture
Spend additional time meditating on God’s Word, before and during the fast.
Keep it secret
Fasting is unbiblical and even spiritually harmful when we do it to show off our spirituality (see Matthew 6:16 – 18) or when we focus more on our own fasting than on the clear needs of others (see Isaiah 58:1 – 11).
Throughout the Bible we most often find God’s people turn to fasting as the natural, inevitable response to a grievous sacred moment in life, such as death, sin and tragedy. But other times a fast is not a spontaneous reaction and we have time to prepare to respond both physically and spiritually.
Fasting is not an end unto itself, but a means of focusing our minds and bodies for a spiritual reason. Whenever you fast, do so for a reason that is mentioned or modeled in the Bible. Here are ten primary purposes for fasting mentioned in Scripture:
1. To strengthen prayer (e.g., see Ezra 8:23)
Numerous incidents in the Old Testament connect fasting to prayer, especially intercessory prayer. Fasting does not change whether God hears our prayers, but it can change our praying. As Arthur Wallis says, “Fasting is calculated to bring a note of urgency and importunity into our praying, and to give force to our pleading in the court of heaven.”
2. To seek God’s guidance (e.g., see Judges 20:26)
As with prayer, fasting to seek God’s guidance isn’t done to change God but to make us more receptive to his guidance.
3. To express grief (e.g., see 1 Samuel 31:13)
Expressing grief is one of the primary reasons for fasting. Ever notice that when you’re moved to tears by grief you lose the urge to eat? When we grieve, our family and friends often have to plead with us to eat because our body’s appropriate response to grief is to fast. A prime example occurs in 2 Samuel 1:12, where David and his men are described as having “mourned and wept and fasted till evening” for their friends, their enemies and their nation.
4. To seek deliverance or protection (e.g., see 2 Chronicles 20:3 – 4)
Another common reason for fasting in the Old Testament was to seek deliverance from enemies or circumstances. In Scripture, this type of fast is generally carried out with other believers.
5. To express repentance and a return to God (e.g., see 1 Samuel 7:6)
This type of fasting helps us to express grief over our sins and shows our seriousness about returning to the path of godly obedience.
6. To humble oneself before God (e.g., see 1 Kings 21:27 – 29)
“Remember that fasting itself is not humility before God,” reminds Donald Whitney, “but should be an expression of humility.”
7. To express concern for the work of God (e.g., see Nehemiah 1:3 – 4)
As with Nehemiah, fasting can be a tangible sign of our concern over a particular work God is doing.
8. To minister to the needs of others (e.g., see Isaiah 58:3 – 7)
We can use time we’d normally spend eating to fast and minister to others.
9. To overcome temptation and dedicate yourself to God (e.g., see Matthew 4:1 – 11)
Fasting can help us focus when we are struggling with particular temptations.
10. To express love and worship for God (e.g., see Luke 2:37)
Fasting can show, as John Piper says, that “what we hunger for most, we worship.”
How should we equip ourselves when God calls us to “declare a holy fast”? Here are some things to consider as you prepare for fasting:
Pray and confess your sins
A necessary step before fasting is to humble yourself before God (see Psalm 35:13) and confess your sins (see 1 Samuel 7:6). Prayer should be our sustenance throughout the fast, but it is imperative we begin the fast with a contrite heart.
Turn to Scripture
Spend additional time meditating on God’s Word, before and during the fast.
Keep it secret
Fasting is unbiblical and even spiritually harmful when we do it to show off our spirituality (see Matthew 6:16 – 18) or when we focus more on our own fasting than on the clear needs of others (see Isaiah 58:1 – 11).
Fasting may have become a health fad, but religious communities have been doing it for millennia
Iqbal Akhtar, Associate Professor, Florida International University
Fri, July 30, 2021, 7:21 AM
The practice of fasting has entered popular culture in recent years as a way to lose extra pounds. Featured in the bestselling book “The Fast Diet,” it advocates eating normally on select days of the week while drastically reducing calories on the remaining days.
Fasting has been shown to improve metabolism, prevent or slow disease and possibly increase life span.
But the practice is far from new. Around the world the pious have been fasting for millennia. As a scholar of religion, I argue that there is much to be learned from religious fasting, an embodied practice, meaning that it connects the body and soul.
Fasting in Islam and Jainism
Fasting is intrinsic to the two traditions that I study – Islam and Jainism. Jainism is an ancient religion from India that espouses, among other things, nonviolence, nonpossessiveness and pluralism.
In Islam, fasting is one of the five pillars that constitute the main belief and actions of a practicing Muslim. As part of this practice, Muslims abstain from food, water, smoking, sex and all sensory pleasures from dawn to dusk during Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar. This is a divine commandment in the Quran and exemplified in the life of the Prophet Muhammad.
At its core, fasting is about conquering human pride to connect with God. Indeed, the term Islam itself means submission to God in Arabic. Muslims believe that fasting develops submission to God, empathy with the poor and repentance and gives time for spiritual introspection. According to the 12th-century theologian al-Ghazali, fasting can allow the believer to better perceive the ultimate reality of God as it involves all five senses – touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste.
The Jain tradition provides a different perspective on fasting from the one in Islam. Fasting falls under tapas or asceticism, which also varies by degree between the laity and monastics.
Jain fasting includes complete avoidance of food or eating only a partial meal, eliminating rare or expensive foods and avoiding sexual temptations. The holiday of Paryushan, observed annually around August to September, is the time when Jains connect communally on the core tenets of the faith through fasting and studying.
For eight to 10 days, Jains focus on the values of forgiveness, humility, straightforwardness, truth, contentment, self-restraint, penance, renunciation, nonattachment and celibacy. Fasting is also possible throughout the year by individuals, but this celebration is the common communal embracing of fasting across sects.
Fasting as faith
Religious fasting is meant to shock the body from its routines. The individual physically enters sacred time. According to the 20th-century Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade, sacred time lies outside of ordinary time and fasting is one way to step into it. During this time, normal activities are disrupted, so an indivdual’s thoughts become more attuned to the metaphysical. The physical needs and desires give way to spiritual reflection and contemplation on the world to come.
In most religions, fasting is associated with an introspection of one’s life – the past, present and future. This reflection can make one more conscious of one’s own actions internally and externally, the impact on oneself and on society.
Traditionally, fasting is coupled with prayer and meditation to further develop these goals. The annual cycles of fasting in most faith traditions are meant also to be cumulative over a lifetime; the hope is that each year, one’s character becomes a little better and wiser than the year before.
This refining of an individual’s characters over a lifetime is most easily visualized through the Chinese religious traditions, which include Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism. The spiritual benefits of fasting are said to accrue over time, leading to a type of wisdom that the Confucians call ren, loosely translating as humanity, humaneness, goodness, benevolence or love.
Daoism also adds another dimension to the understanding of fasting in the Jain and Islamic traditions through the the idea of “fasting of the heart-mind.” This means it’s not just the body that goes through the detoxing, but it also detoxes the soul, as people learn to control their five senses during fasting.
As religions show, fasting is much more than denying the body. Physical deprivation of food – up to a healthy point – can allow the mind to enter new states of awareness and understanding. By acknowledging this, secular fasters, I argue, can tap into its joy, uncover new ways of being and sustain this physical discipline over a lifetime as their religious brethren have for millennia.
It was written by: Iqbal Akhtar, Florida International University.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/fa ... 29935.html
Iqbal Akhtar, Associate Professor, Florida International University
Fri, July 30, 2021, 7:21 AM
The practice of fasting has entered popular culture in recent years as a way to lose extra pounds. Featured in the bestselling book “The Fast Diet,” it advocates eating normally on select days of the week while drastically reducing calories on the remaining days.
Fasting has been shown to improve metabolism, prevent or slow disease and possibly increase life span.
But the practice is far from new. Around the world the pious have been fasting for millennia. As a scholar of religion, I argue that there is much to be learned from religious fasting, an embodied practice, meaning that it connects the body and soul.
Fasting in Islam and Jainism
Fasting is intrinsic to the two traditions that I study – Islam and Jainism. Jainism is an ancient religion from India that espouses, among other things, nonviolence, nonpossessiveness and pluralism.
In Islam, fasting is one of the five pillars that constitute the main belief and actions of a practicing Muslim. As part of this practice, Muslims abstain from food, water, smoking, sex and all sensory pleasures from dawn to dusk during Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar. This is a divine commandment in the Quran and exemplified in the life of the Prophet Muhammad.
At its core, fasting is about conquering human pride to connect with God. Indeed, the term Islam itself means submission to God in Arabic. Muslims believe that fasting develops submission to God, empathy with the poor and repentance and gives time for spiritual introspection. According to the 12th-century theologian al-Ghazali, fasting can allow the believer to better perceive the ultimate reality of God as it involves all five senses – touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste.
The Jain tradition provides a different perspective on fasting from the one in Islam. Fasting falls under tapas or asceticism, which also varies by degree between the laity and monastics.
Jain fasting includes complete avoidance of food or eating only a partial meal, eliminating rare or expensive foods and avoiding sexual temptations. The holiday of Paryushan, observed annually around August to September, is the time when Jains connect communally on the core tenets of the faith through fasting and studying.
For eight to 10 days, Jains focus on the values of forgiveness, humility, straightforwardness, truth, contentment, self-restraint, penance, renunciation, nonattachment and celibacy. Fasting is also possible throughout the year by individuals, but this celebration is the common communal embracing of fasting across sects.
Fasting as faith
Religious fasting is meant to shock the body from its routines. The individual physically enters sacred time. According to the 20th-century Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade, sacred time lies outside of ordinary time and fasting is one way to step into it. During this time, normal activities are disrupted, so an indivdual’s thoughts become more attuned to the metaphysical. The physical needs and desires give way to spiritual reflection and contemplation on the world to come.
In most religions, fasting is associated with an introspection of one’s life – the past, present and future. This reflection can make one more conscious of one’s own actions internally and externally, the impact on oneself and on society.
Traditionally, fasting is coupled with prayer and meditation to further develop these goals. The annual cycles of fasting in most faith traditions are meant also to be cumulative over a lifetime; the hope is that each year, one’s character becomes a little better and wiser than the year before.
This refining of an individual’s characters over a lifetime is most easily visualized through the Chinese religious traditions, which include Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism. The spiritual benefits of fasting are said to accrue over time, leading to a type of wisdom that the Confucians call ren, loosely translating as humanity, humaneness, goodness, benevolence or love.
Daoism also adds another dimension to the understanding of fasting in the Jain and Islamic traditions through the the idea of “fasting of the heart-mind.” This means it’s not just the body that goes through the detoxing, but it also detoxes the soul, as people learn to control their five senses during fasting.
As religions show, fasting is much more than denying the body. Physical deprivation of food – up to a healthy point – can allow the mind to enter new states of awareness and understanding. By acknowledging this, secular fasters, I argue, can tap into its joy, uncover new ways of being and sustain this physical discipline over a lifetime as their religious brethren have for millennia.
It was written by: Iqbal Akhtar, Florida International University.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/fa ... 29935.html