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Ramadhan fasting as a religious duty for Muslims

Already in the Coran’s second chapter Al Baqara (the Cow, verse 185) it is stated that the Coran was revealed to Prophet Muhammad during Ramadhan, which makes of course the importance of the month absolutely distinct. To follow the text: ’Ramadhan is the month in which the Qur’an was sent down, as a guide to mankind; also clear for guidance and judgment. So every one of you who stays home during that month should spend it in fasting’. More particularly, the Coran started being revealed on the Night of Destiny or Night of Power that is the 27th night of the month. This is stated in another part of the Coran (chapter 97, v. 1 - 3): ’Indeed, We have indeed revealed this (i.e. the Coran) in the Night of Power. And what will explain to thee what the night of power is? The Night of Power is better than a thousand months’.

Ramadhan fasting is not confined to abstention from food; it involves also refraining from drinking, smoking, sexual intercourse, plus purifying one’s behavior, doing good deeds, and avoiding all sorts of bad thoughts and acts. It becomes clear from the very beginning that it has nothing to do with simple physical abstention from nutrition almost from dawn to sunset; it is an elaborate principle that aims not at the physical but mainly at the intellectual and the spiritual level of a human being’s acts, attitudes, behavior and development. Ramadhan fasting with personal commitment in courage, generosity, compassion, honesty, steadfastness, exploration of the Truth is utterly useless.

This makes us ask as preamble the following question.

Is Ramadhan fasting simply commemorative?

We deduce that it is not. On the occasion of the commemoration of Coran’s revelation, Ramadhan fasting aims at the achievement of the outmost goal of a human life: Contemplation of God, and Meditation. This is called in Arabic ’Taqwa’, and consists in the ’utmost spiritual health’ that Ibn Rushd described analytically in his Tahafut al-Tahafut, stating that it determines the spiritual level of existence. Attaining Taqwa is the foremost perfection of a Human Being, and corresponds to what Ibn Sina called ’an-nafs al-falakiyya’. It is the highest level of spiritual existence that Christianity calls Union with God. When a person’s soul unites with an-nafs al-falakiyya, the person acquires supreme consciousness at a universal level.

Taqwa / Contemplation of God: the Ultimate Aim of Ramadhan fasting

That Taqwa is the main goal of Ramadhan fasting is also explicitly said in the Coran (2:183): ’O you who believe! Fasting is prescribed to you as it was prescribed to those before you, so that you may attain taqwa’.

Primordial Islamic principle and value, Taqwa is at the same time an attitude and a process. As an attitude, it encompasses Metaphysics, Esthetics, Logic. Moral and Gnosiology, leading the person to absolute devoutness. As a process, it implies that, because of the human life’s absolute dependence of Principles, religious practices reduced to a set of blind rituals, and religiously ordained procedures that are performed at the level of physical movement only, are without the slightest value.

This approach is explicitly stated within the Coran (2:177): ’It is not righteousness that you turn your faces towards East or West: But it is righteousness to believe in God and the Last day, and the Angels, the Book, and the Messengers; to give out of the things you hold dear to your kin, the orphans, the needy, the wayfarer, the one who asks, and to free the slave. And to be steadfast in prayer and to give for charity. To fulfill the covenants you have made, and to be firm and patient in times of pain, adversity, and panic. Such are the people of truth, and such are the God-conscious’.

Imitational religious practices: Useless

Religious practices in Islam, like praying and fasting, ultimately aim at bringing about moral and spiritual uplifting; otherwise they are useless. This is widely found in Islamic Philosophy and in the Hadith (Sermons of Prophet Muhammad). The Prophet has been quoted saying: ’It may be that a fasting person attains nothing from his fast except hunger. And it may be that one who stands (for night prayer) attains nothing from his standing excepted staying up late’. (by An-Nasai, Ibn Maajah, and Al Haqim - on the conditions of the basic Hadith collector Al-Bukhari)

Mohyieldin Ibn al-Arabi specified: ’A person will not get a reward for his siyam (fasting). This means that the reward of siyam will not be given for false speech and whatever is mentioned with it’.

All this means that any practice, Ramadhan fasting, prayer, etc. is advisable, if it does obviously contribute to attaining taqwa; in the Coran (49:13) it is stated that ’the most honored of you in the sight of God is the most devout (mutaqi)’, a word derived from ’taqwa’, and this shows the importance of meditation in Islam. Ramadhan fasting without intellectual delineation has no value.

The fake Ramadhan practice of besotted, fanaticized and hysteric masses

It will be with breathtaking astonishment that a Western reader, inexperienced in the daily social and behavioral realities of the Middle Eastern societies, will follow the rest. A fast inspection of the practices followed by today’s Muslims brings to surface a behavioral setup that has absolutely nothing to do with all the aforementioned!

Of course, it would be a methodic mistake to consider the entire Middle East from Morocco to Pakistan and from the confines of Central Asia to Eastern Africa as one social unit. Certainly the technological development and the globalization effect are being felt to large extent, but undeveloped countries with reduced means of communications, secluded societies without electricity and telecommunications in the mountains of Yemen, Eritrea and Abyssinia, and in the deserts of Sudan, as well as faraway villages of Algeria, Iran, Egypt and Pakistan have preserved a life rhythm and a social system that are devoid of tensions attested in towns, cities and capitals.

Western specialists in Sociology should rather focus on, analyze and draw a conclusion from the fact that Islamic extremism, fanatic masses, anti-Western hatred, anti-Israel and anti-US hysteria are rather a matter of urban centers, not remote hamlets and rural communities.

For the needs of the present article, we will concentrate our analysis and description on major urban centers of the Middle East. We will focalize on several points.

1. Ramadhan: month of labor paralysis

If people go to the office usually around 9 a.m., in Ramadhan they usually arrive between 10:15 and 11 a.m. Instead of leaving around 5 p.m., they leave hastily around 2 p.m. heading home. Why? Because they ’fast’! Reducing the day’s working hours from 8 to just 3 is not the major problem for the Middle Eastern tyrants, who are simple puppets of the extremist sheikhs, while keeping a smiley pro-Western face. Productivity, progress and labor conscience are not issues in the world of ’rahat’, relaxation that reaches the level of apathy.

What is even worse is that a significant number of employees are absent several times, and when they come to the office the reason of their presence is just to sleep. They look awful, as if they worked for months in the last Russian tsar’s factories. What did they do?

Something that is more valuable than working honestly and producing as during all the other months! Something that prohibits any manager from severing for improper behavior and adjusting a penalty! They contributed to the ’rise of Islam’! The assumption is of course laughable, and we will analyze their reason of appearing exhausted at 11 a.m. later on.

What we have to stress here is that the practice of Ramadhan fasting in the Golden Age of Islamic Philosophy, Science and Arts was completely different: people were working as properly as they did allover the year, and in addition they fasted. If fasting happened to reduce their capability of working properly, they would interrupt fast and do their best to perform. Performance and responsibility have nothing to do with the Universe of the so-called Muslims of today.

2. Ramadhan: month of total irrelevance of the educational system

Since the aforementioned concerns the function of the society with regard to labor, it is easily surmised that the Education, as national activity ceases to exist. Schoolchildren have to go to the schools as early as 8a.m. and usually the classes are over at 2 p.m., but in Ramadhan - when whoever likes can be absent without risk of remark - schoolchildren are omnipresent in the streets and the roads at 11 a.m.! After spoiling three (3) hours at the most, they return home to sleep!

3. Ramadhan: month of traffic inaptness

Whereas during the rest of the year, employees leave the offices to go back home over a span going from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., in Ramadhan all people rush in the streets between 1:30 p.m. and 3 p.m. The pretext is that they want to be at home for the ’iftar’, the first meal after breaking the fast at the sunset (this year between 5:30 and 5:15 p.m.). A seemingly logical question would be why they do not leave their offices at 4 p.m., if they need half an hour of forty five minutes to reach home just in time! The hypocritical response would be that they are afraid they might be late, but simply they are not apt to concentrate since their mind is in the food! There is also another reason, the real fact of their exhaustion that, although characteristically ostensible on their faces, they deny! It is not the first lie said by a ’Muslim’ today; and certainly not the last!

As one can imagine, the rush hour in mega-cities during Ramadhan is awful, cars crash very often, because starving people, already exhausted since the previous evening, simply cannot drive, and a distance that would take twenty minutes to drive under normal circumstances needs more than one hour and half during Ramadhan.

4. Ramadhan: month of food concern and apotheosis

If for today’s Muslims Allah is the Only God, he is so certainly for 11 months. In Ramadhan the real god is Food! Discussions turn around the food under preparation, the average thought focuses on nothing else except food, and when the sunset comes, all the people try to eat at nauseam. The immediate effect is that they queue for the toilet agonizing, as soon as they end up the meal. After relaxing for some time, they visit relatives and friends where they are treated various sweets that they please to consider traditional and therefore eat! This is ’culture’. Then, before going to bed around 3:30 to 4 a.m., they have ’sohour’, which is a second meal for those fasting. What a sohour must consist of is by definition the most discussed topic by the Food worshipers (who dares call them Muslims?) during Ramadhan, because the conclusions affect determinedly the stomach, with different foods creating thirst or making the effort easier. The entire situation has turned from Ramadhan - a month of discipline during the height of the Islamic Philosophy to Ramadhan - a month of absolute self-indulgence and nutritional hedonism.

5. Ramadhan: month of consummate hypocrisy

The worst qualification for a human being within the Coran is ’hypocrite’ (munafiq), but one may attest a paroxysm of hypocrisy during Ramadhan throughout the corrupt societies of bogus-Muslims. We do not limit the case to those, who pompously pretend to fast and yet find consolation in secret moments spent in the kitchen or in the toilets of an office. There are plenty who smoke in a friend’s room, sure that he will not reveal their ’crime’, ’weakness’ or ’betrayal’! And then, with audacity they attend an iftar, sparing no words of contempt in case someone reports of someone who does not fast.

Consummate hypocrisy is to read the Coran in the bus, the metro, and in the office, and at the same time contravene most of what is fixed about Ramadhan fasting and its real purpose. Yet, there is vast space in the hearts and the minds of the outright majority for self-indulgence, cowardice, greediness, avariciousness, miserliness, meanness, malice, aloofness, dishonesty, treachery, untrustworthiness, and indifference for anything going beyond the limits of a material egocentrism of the lowest level. This to be said is little.

I do not know how many Libyans or Egyptians, Algerians or Palestinians cared truly as much as many Americans and Europeans about the destiny of the thousands of people affected by the recent earthquake in Kashmir. If someone raised the subject, the interlocutor’s answer would rather concern the time left for ’iftar’, the first meal.

6. Ramadhan: month of hysterical and prejudiced Hatred

Of course, there is a vast space left in their hearts and minds for hatred, malignant and poisonous hatred, of the Israelis, the Americans, the Europeans. Even the announcement of the NATO expedition to help Pakistanis was accepted with due odium. To use an Islamic term, a real Satanic negativism emanates from the self-afflicted anti-Islamic intoxication (by mistakenly adopted Western theories of nationalism and socialism), and the thoughtlessly accepted bogus-Islamic theological systems of Hanbal, Ibn Taimiya, Abdel Wahhab and other fornicators who over many centuries managed to reduce Islam from an extro-spective leading Civilization to a misery of introspective decadence, rottenness, extremism and barbarism. Of course, the barbaric misery of a life spent among tons of disintegrated rubbish (that stinks open in the air permanently since beggars passed before the cats, the dogs and the rats to collect, eat and survive) adds to the aforementioned an incommensurable complex of inferiority that would need entire libraries to be adequately described, narrated and analyzed. This situation is beyond any Islamic tolerance, beyond redemption and beyond salvation.

The only Islamic advice to these bestialized masses would be that the only to be hated by them is their own deviate self. But there is no sheikh or imam decently and thoroughly educated and cultured enough to dare say it openly to the filthy barefoot who spend hours ’praying’ in mosques, before going to demonstrate anti-Christian or anti-Western paranoiac madness. Yet, a proper Muslim scholar would have told them that prayer is not an act that can be repeated by apes too!

7. Ramadhan: month of religious perversion / Vulgar Khutbahs and Satanic Taraweeh Curses

The epitome of Hatred-promotion through tarnishing Islam’s nature and image is what happens during Ramadan Friday prayers, and the long Taraweeh overnight prayers. The latter are the main reason many people look so unusually exhausted next morning when they surface in their offices. In the Friday prayers, a Khutbah (sermon) was originally delivered by a community member who was serving as ’leader’ of the prayers. One must bear in mind that clergy is totally prohibited in Islam, in striking contradiction to what happens in Christianity. The fact that in Islam there have been sheikhs and imams institutionalized is a total deviation, and much of barbarism and extremism divulged within Islam is due to this fact. One should rather call this tragic development ’Christianization of Islam’, but the nuance proves to be too difficult for the uncultured pseudo-Muslims of the 21st century.

Whereas a Khutbah was mostly of philosophical and theological contents at the times of Islamic Civilization, today the preaching sheikhs proved to be the real Ersatz, a substitute for the missing political discourse in the treacherous Middle Eastern tyrannies. They flatter and extol the audients’ weak points, while misrepresenting and misinterpreting events and data, and exhorting the uneducated and passive masses to all sorts of disreputable (for a Muslim) acts and deeds. All this happens in flagrant violation of what is at the same time islamically correct and humanly pertinent. Giving no perspective of a betterment in this world (again in total opposition to Islam’s principles), they engulf the illiterate, ignorant, and bodily / mentally filthy audience into an ocean of erroneous misperception of the world affairs (that they first cannot possibly understand), thus locking them permanently into the Hell of the lowest of the low feelings and reactions.

There is no need for a foreigner to speak Arabic to understand the bestial character of these false, Satanic Sheikhs’ murderous preaching. Suffice it that one passes by a ’mosque’ (we cannot afford to accept these un-Islamic conglomerates as proper mosques)! The hysterical screaming of a psychologically unbalanced person, who deserves medical treatment of severe derangement, cannot correspond to religious, spiritual and intellectual discourse. Of course, not all the ’sheikhs’ are screaming, but again the more appeased ones come up with vulgar and hideous homilies of the type "if someone fornicates, he is a donkey". Their level would have be considered as execrable and abominable by all the Islamic Ages’ Philosophers, had they come back to life for furtive moment.

Yet, there is worse than the revolting Friday counterfeit Khutbahs. The Taraweeh overnight prayers during Ramadhan have turned out to be the most unpardonable case of collective public curse ever attested in the Human History, the most disreputable case of communal Black Magic ever registered since times immemorial. Under the pretext of Coranic recitation, a certain number of wishes may be expressed in parallel, encompassing passionate wishes for Sharon to be assassinated, for Bush to be slaughtered to pieces, for local tyrants to be protected by their satanic false god, for American troops in Iraq to be murdered, and for all sorts of ominous natural disasters to be fallen upon Israel, Europe, Russia, India and America. The most authentic spectrum of Satanism is covered by those who usurp the recitation of the Coran.

Under such circumstances the best way for Muslims to rediscover the totally lost meaning of the Ramadhan fasting would be not to fast at all, and to abolish once forever this practice that tarnishes Islam more than anything else in the world. The West should focus carefully on the issue, realizing in the name of Academic Truth that today’s Muslims do not represent Islam anymore, and they cannot be allowed to pretend anything of the sort. Absolute pressure must be exercised over the Middle East inhuman tyrannies in order to eliminate most of these criminal sheikhs, who have been left to carry out their Satanic War against the Human Civilization for too long.

Abolish this useless Ramadhan of yours right now!

By Prof. Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis