Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, has just begun. Although it is celebrated by Muslims across the globe as a month of fasting, its significance goes beyond the 30-day obligatory abnegation of food and drink (sawm). This is because the Koranic instructions concerning Ramadan that form part of a discussion in a cluster of six verses (2: 183-188) are both ritualistic and metaphorical in meaning.
The word Ramadan is derived from ramaz, or “intense heat”, and sawm refers to the act of stopping or, abstaining from an activity. Hence, when the Koran talks of its guidance being revealed in Ramadan and asks people to perform sawm during this month it is, apart from an instruction to fast, an invitation to Muslims to emulate the Prophet by studying how he overcame the social conditions that prevailed in Arabia when he started his reform movement.
It was the time when the barbarism of the pre-Islamic Arabs, in the form of murder, mayhem, fratricidal wars and female infanticide, was at its peak. But the Prophet countered it with the Koranic message of peace and justice and a kind of sawm through which he restrained himself and his followers from all forms of physical retaliation against the Makkans.
It was this non-violent response of tolerance, self-restraint, and perseverance against all odds, that endeared Islam to the people of Arabia. If, in the present circumstances, Muslims are to attain the highest stage of spiritual development which characterises the people of taqwa (self-restraint), they must follow the example of the Prophet and undertake, along with regular fasting, a similar form of sawm wherein they pledge to abstain from extravagance, ostentation and self-indulgence in non-obligatory religious tours so as to save their community from the “intense heat” of all round backwardness. Indeed, the institution of fasting in the month of Ramadan is meant to remind Muslims of their commitment to society.
Published - June 29, 2014 11:27 pm IST