Ramadan Part 6: Isha’a

The final of the five formal daily prayers is the Night Prayer, Isha’a. It is now offically night and the day is over.

And so is my Ramadan experiment. It was both harder and easier than I thought it would be. I didn’t really get hungry, about six hours in my stomach would grumble but then the feeling just faded. I was thirsty, however. The cotton mouth and lack of liquid gave me a slight headache, and I can see long naps being part of my routine during the month if I had to do it every day.

I did learn a lot more about the holiday, and it kind of reminded me of when I was first really exposed to Islam in Damascus.

I can remember talking with Safwan, who read to me the 99 names of God. But then he had me look at my hands. If you look at your left hand the lines kind of make an upside-down “V” (٨) followed by a “1”. This is reversed on the right hand. In Arabic, the ٨ character represents the number 8. So your left hand reads 81 and your right 18. Add them together and you get 99.

Cool, huh?

I have new respect for people willing to fast for an entire month for their beliefs. I was happy that I don’t have a job that requires a lot of manual labor out in the heat for my single day of Ramadan, and I can imagine it represents a true test for many.

I would make a poor Muslim. Pork BBQ is a cultural tradition where I live, and I make cocktails as a hobby. I also share my house with dogs. But by some standards I make a poor Christian so there’s that.

I do think I’ll make my #onedayoframadan a yearly tradition, although I probably won’t be so verbose about the experience next year.

السلام عليكم‎‎

Ramadan Part 5: Maghrib and Iftar

The fourth daily prayer is the Maghrib (west, for sunset) prayer. It also coincides with Iftar which is Arabic for “eatin’ time” (well, breakfast).

Fast update: over and completed.

I was surprised I wasn’t overwhelmingly hungry, but I was very thirsty. I went to my friend Mohammad’s restaurant, and although he wasn’t there I did get my platter half price since I had fasted. I broke my fast with a salad, falafel, dolmata, hummus and tzatziki. I also had some dates that I brought with me, since that is what the Prophet ate to break his fast and I thought it was appropriate.

Ramadan Part 4: Asr

The third of the three daily prayers of Islam is Asr, or “afternoon”.

Fast update: Thirsty with a slight headache. Still not very hungry,

I like the fact that Islamic times seem to be tied to nature. The prayers are tied to the motion of the Sun and the Islamic calendar is lunar. This means is it about 10 to 11 days shorter than the solar year and thus the months move around. The cycle repeats itself every 33 years, which means that in about 16 years Ramadan will coincide with the winter solstice, which will make the whole fasting thing a piece of cake in the northern hemisphere.

It must be difficult to fast properly in the far north. I looked up Bergen, Norway, which is where my friend Alex lives, and Fajr occurs 85 minutes earlier than Pittsboro and Maghrib over two hours later, so add about 3.5 hours to your fast. Then I looked up Punta Arenas, Chile, and Fajr happens over three hours later than here and Maghrib five hours before, so that must make fasting a breeze.

Some places allow using the times for Mecca in place of local time when they are extreme, but I think I would be willing to suffer a bit now for an easy time of it in a decade or so.

I plan ahead.

I miss the seasons. I could be sitting in my office (which doesn’t really have a window) and whether it is high summer or the dead of winter I’m going to experience about the same amount of light and the same temperature. I’m not sure if that is healthy, as I think it is healthier for us to change with the seasons.

When I was a child there were four seasons. When it got cold there was turkey for Thanksgiving and Santa came from Christmas. In late Spring we waited for permission to go outside barefoot. Summers were lazy and hot. When I started to attend school, there were three seasons: Fall semestre, Spring semestre and Summer. I looked forward to each and marked the years by their passing.

Now it is just one long season with a slight change in wardrobe depending on the weather. Sure, there are holidays but they don’t represent the seasonal change that I used to experience. When we as a society were mainly agrarian, the seasons still existed as work followed the cycle of planting. Now it just seems we are driven to do more, faster. There is little time to reflect and recharge. I like to close the office the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day for mandatory “brain regrooving” but even that isn’t quite enough.

Again, no answers, just thinking about the questions.

Ramadan Part 3: Dhuhr

The afternoon prayer in Islam is called Dhuhr. It falls halfway between the first prayer at dawn, Fajr, and the last prayer at nightfall, Isha’a.

Fast update: no real hunger but I am getting thirsty. The “no water” rule kinda sucks.

I think it must be hard to be a Muslim in a non-Muslim country. For example, my app went off to tell me about Dhuhr while I was in the middle of a haircut. In a Muslim country everyone would be aware of the prayer times, but I can imagine a number of conflicts happening in countries outside of them.

My thought for this prayer time is that it is possible I wouldn’t be able to write this if not for Islam. Here is my argument.

After the fall of the Roman empire, European civilization fell into what is often called the Dark Ages. There was a sharp decline in the amount of scholarly work being published, and the original term “dark” was used to indicate a lack of written records of the time. Needless to say, since publication is a key part of the scientific method, not much science was advanced during that period in Europe.

However, in the Middle East there was an Islamic Golden Age where science was both preserved, encouraged and advanced. A lot of that information was fed back into Europe during the Renaissance, and since modern science arose out of that period my computer might not exist without the Mohammedans.

It seems quite the contrast with modern ideas of Muslims, mainly through the acts of radical Islamists. I am constantly filled with sadness when I read about the destruction of historic sites, especially those I haven’t visited. When I was in Syria I visited Saidnaya, a town where Aramaic (the language of Christ) is still spoken. I visited a church from the sixth century that still stands and rarely have I felt the palpable weight of history as when I entered the original sanctuary.

Where I live in the US we have nearly 400 years of history. When I was in Damascus I walked through streets that had been around for thousands of years and saw buildings nearly 1500 years old. It would be a shame to lose that.

I’m not sure how to stop further destruction, but I do know that it starts with understanding.

Ramadan Part 2: Fajr

According to my phone, dawn arrived at 04:37, so no food or drink until 20:37 tonight.

In Arabic Fajr means “dawn” and it is also the name of the first of five daily prayers practicing Muslims make.

For this post I thought I’d share some of my views on religion. Since this can be a sensitive topic I do want to stress that these are my views and I am not trying to force them on anyone or to suggest that your views are wrong.

I was raised in the Presbyterian Church where I was baptized and confirmed when I was old enough. My mother was raised Catholic and on my Father’s side the men were raised Presbyterian and the women Catholic, so I have some exposure to Catholicism. My middle name is “Paul” after Pope Paul VI, as my maternal grandmother wanted to make sure I had a good saint’s name after I was christened “Tarus”.

In my teens I went through the same period of questioning that a lot of kids go through. I think there was a time that I would have claimed to be an atheist, but that passed as I experienced more of the world.

For example, take a look at your hand. As I look at mine I see lines across my palm, a cut on my index finger that I got from swapping a hard drive in an old Mac Mini earlier this week, nails that need trimming with a small amount of dirt underneath them from loading hay in the barn yesterday. The human hand is an amazing thing, and I can’t help but think that there was something spiritual in its creation. It is so well designed.

At some point in my life I accepted Pascal’s Wager. Since the rewards of believing in God are infinite and there is a finite possibility God exists, one should believe in God since you have everything to gain and little to lose. But then the choice became: which God?

I actively explored a lot of religions, but organized religion seemed to have one main flaw: they all want to answer the questions for you that are the most worth asking.

For example, I bet I could take two twin women, religious spinsters together all of their lives, and find some point of religion on which they disagree. It isn’t cut and dried. The word of God, whether it comes from the Bible, the Qu’ran or the Torah, requires interpretation.

Now, if I take St. Thomas Aquinas’s argument of the existence of God through perfection, a perfect God would have given me an ability to reason my way to being the best person I could be. In other words, I should be able to determine, with study, right from wrong, and then take action because I believe it in my heart and not because some guy in dark clothes told me I had to or I would go to Hell.

So I spend a lot of time thinking about what are the right things to do and what are wrong.

One of my “holy” books is The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff. I keep a copy by my desk for those hard days. In it, he explains in simple terms concepts of the Tao, the idea that everything is connected and that there are certain harmonies to existence. When one is in sync with those harmonies, it is known as “happiness”. If you work against them, you will be unhappy. This is a gross oversimplification but I hope you get the gist. If I had to put a label on my religion, I would chose “lapsed Taoist”.

I also consider myself a Christian as in “a follower of the teachings of Christ” but most Christians would claim I wasn’t one since I think the point of whether or not he was the Son of God is moot. He said some pretty cool things that really fit into the idea of the Tao, such as “ask and it shall be given”, “knock and it shall be opened” and “turn the other cheek”.

I had a pen pal in an author named George Alec Effinger who died too young in 2002. He wrote a futuristic cyberpunk series set in a Middle Eastern world, which was one of my first exposures to the Islamic culture and Ramadan (in his books people just slept during the day for the month and worked at night). One quote he wrote that was supposed to be from the Qu’ran was “God delights in the infinite variety of his creation”. While I haven’t been able to confirm that is truly from that book (it doesn’t exist as written in any English translation I’ve found), I do like the sentiment.

I think if we spent more time “delighting” in our differences, we’d all be happier.

I still don’t see any light in the East, but I did my research and apparently it is okay to go back to bed after Fajr, so that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll be back this afternoon.

Ramadan Part 1: Suhūr

Muslims have three standard meals (breakfast, lunch and dinner) like most cultures around the world, but during Ramadan those are often reduced to two: Suhūr before fasting and Iftar to end the fast.

The fasting starts at dawn, not sunrise, or as most people call it “o’dark thirty”.

I usually eat fruit for breakfast so that is what I made for Suhūr. I added in some Greek yogurt and some pomegranate juice, as well as a large glass of water. I’ve been told you want to avoid salt as it can make you thirsty. No food or drink, including water, is allowed during the fast.

I found myself paranoid that I would oversleep, and I ended up waking at 03:58 – two minutes before my alarm. As I write this I keep looking out to the East to see if there is any light. Dawn isn’t supposed to be until 04:37, but you are supposed to stop eating ten or so minutes before just to be sure.

So with my sugar, my fiber and my water, I think I’m ready to make it through the day.

Ramadan Part 0: Niyyah

There are approximately 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, roughly 23% of the population of the planet. There are five main “pillars” of Islam, and these are:

  • Shahadah: sincerely reciting the Muslim profession of faith.
  • Salat: performing ritual prayers in the proper way five times each day.
  • Zakat: paying an alms (or charity) tax to benefit the poor and the needy.
  • Sawm: fasting during the month of Ramadan.
  • Hajj: pilgrimage to Mecca.

We are currently in the month of Ramadan, a holy month spent fasting and reflecting. The Islamic calendar is based on the moon, not the sun, and so holy days tend to move around a bit each year. Since this year Ramadan corresponds with the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere, the days are particularly long. Since fasting is done from dawn to sunset, this means the fast lasts a lot longer than if Ramadan had occurred in the winter.

I have friends who are Muslim, and one of them, Mohammad (not all Muslims are named Mohammad but this one is) mentioned to me that in Michigan, with its large Muslim population, they are starting a tradition of inviting their non-Muslim neighbors to join them in fasting for one day.

As someone who is always seeking out new experiences, I thought, hey, that sounds like something to try, so tomorrow I plan to spend one day in the shoes of a Muslim. I will wake up around 4am for Suhūr (a pre-fasting meal) and while I don’t pray I plan to stop for Salat and write a little reflective blog post for each of the five times a devout Muslim would pray. I also plan to keep Halal for the day (I don’t plan to break my fast with some North Carolina pork BBQ and a beer, for example).

I should point out that I’m doing this with no guidance outside of what I can find on the Internet, and the lovely little app called Muslim Pro which will help me keep track of times. In much the same way as I believe in a concept called “karma” but do not claim to understand that term as a formal Hindu religious concept, I want to apologize in advance if I get something wrong. I mean no offense and only seek understanding.

Oooh, and it turns out that part of the process of fasting is to announce one’s intention to fast. That is called “niyyah” and this is mine.