Raindrops in my coffee cup. Full daylight. I have already been down-town and come back with fresh bread. Breakfast not suhour. I sit on the swing in my garden and read about the threat to all corals in the world through rising sea temperatures and increased acidity due to more carbon in the seas. Time, high time, to widen the perspective from my month of concentrating on a particular form of religiously inspired self-denial. But there must be something to take forward from my absorption in this fast. Did you start on the road to converting to Islam, Nicholas ?
No.
So what if anything did it teach you, this month ?
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There is something powerful, paradoxically empowering, in accepting an external discipline, a restraint or denial – it does encourage you to contemplate the Divine.
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What is remarkable about Ramadan is its observance by masses of people – by such a huge community, so many hundreds of millions. It’s not just for hermits and eccentrics. People in all walks of life. A leveller.
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It is a highly social thing – both the fasting and the iftar. How much extra hardship it would be to observe if on one’s own, a refugee perhaps or a student in a non-Muslim country.
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It shows that ingrained habits, to which the body has become wedded, can be broken.
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Ban the snack !!!
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Confidence in your ability to observe your own religion’s rites should not cause you to despise the rites and beliefs of others. Tolerance please !
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Subdue the ego, merge it with others – hardship is easier to endure if shared. So why not share the indulgences too, the good times and the triumphs ?
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However well you practice any religious rite, be careful not to use piety as a screen against the needs of others, or as a step-ladder so you can look down on them.
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Probably the month of Ramadan is a net gain for the environment: the day-time self-denial is amply off-set by night-time indulgences, of course. Huge amounts are consumed, and there is all that social pressure to throw out the old and put on the new. But my hunch is that, because both fast and feast are socially moderated (one big plus is that alcohol is not in the mix at all), there is an element of social restraint in the feasting. You don’t eat as much in company as you do on your own. This restraint is absent in a westernised, solo-ised, snacking culture: a couch potato can just go on and on and on eating bags of crisps and throwing out the packages. Someone needs to do a carbon-footprint study of a typical Jordan family (i.e. parents, aunts, uncles and seven or eight offspring) – (a) for a normal month and (b) for Ramadan. I’m just giving you my hunch as to what the conclusion would be.
Just back (third day of Eid) from a screening at a friend’s house of the film “The Age of Stupid”. As such strong images can do, it’s given me a new sense of urgency. And perhaps absolutism. No faffing around with academic studies like the one suggested in 9 above. Get on with living within our environmental means, from tonight. And, alas for someone as naturally reticent as me, it means shouting about what we are doing to get our life-style right, and being brave enough to protest when we witness environmental bad behaviour – even when, especially when, committed by otherwise “perfectly normal respectable” people. Which brings me to my last reflection so far on Ramadan:
It is possible to break ingrained habits of consumption – and to do so on a mass scale. People give up day-time smoking for Ramadan, the same people who are impervious to health promotion campaigns. People do the fast as an integral part of a religion which offers the believer salvation of his or her individual soul. So if we want to get people to change their environmental bad habits we should learn from how this mass social force enables people to make a counter-consumer choice. We cannot with certainty offer salvation of the soul, life after death. People are not persuaded by the offer of hope that their grandchildren will have a habitable planet. But most people like to be looked up to, to have an honoured place in a society they feel at home in. Ramadan teaches me that to campaign for changes in behaviour, don’t target individuals: go for changing the social norms we live by.
Oh dear. I think that means bring on the ad-men. And ad-women. Perhaps instead bring all preachers of all faiths to an environmental “Sunday School”. Get them to persuade their flocks.
Enough words for now.
