WHEN THE moon is new and the sun has risen every Muslim on Earth will begin to starve.
During the month of Ramadan, which began September 1st, Muslims who are physically able cease to eat or drink (even water) during the daylight. For thirty days they fast, not only to taste extreme hunger and thirst, but to renew their spiritual ties, cleanse their bodies and cultivate their self-discipline. As one of the five pillars of the religion, fasting during Ramadan is the time when prayer is deep and thoughtful; it is when unhealthy habits are amended.
And like all religions which ask its believers to practice some form of asceticism, Ramadan too has a purpose that goes beyond the individual. In communities where neighbors are committed to the same struggle – where the poor and the rich, the educated and the illiterate remind themselves what it means to be hungry, a special type of solidarity is formed. During Ramadan, a new habit of acting generously forms and in Islamic communities, meals are expected to be provided to the poor. For Muslims and their communities, the homeless and the destitute are seen less as “unfortunate consequences of inequality” and more like “fellow sufferers.” In Cairo and Baghdad, Jerusalem and Beirut, the emotional gap between the haves and the have-nots is diminished during Ramadan. It is this type of solidarity that our country lacks.
More than unyielding thirst and a shrunken stomach, fasting for one month cultivates an empathy for the poor. In the mind of a starving Muslim, poverty is not an election issue or an inevitable phenomenon of capitalist society; it is an acute memory, a way of being for one month every year, an inner pain which Ramadan keeps keen.
But this type of empathy can never be taught by philosophy or human rights. To say that we should care for the poor because we are all essentially human is not nearly as persuasive as saying: “This woman starves as I do.” The type of empathy Ramadan inspires is less like the ethicist and the lawyer — who argue on behalf of “universal,” and “natural,” rights — and more like the poet and the prophet who speak about community and brotherhood. It is true that our legal rights protect us from harm, but it is our local and emotional bonds that allow solidarity to be formed.
Our former humanities Professor Richard Rorty, describes it this way: “If you were a Jew in the period when the trains were running to Auschwitz, your chances of being hidden by your gentile neighbors were greater if you lived in Denmark or Italy than if you lived in Belgium. A common way of describing this difference is by saying that many Danes and Italians showed a sense of human solidarity which many Belgians lacked.”
Where Danes and Italians saw their Jewish neighbors as “fellow Milanese,” or a fellow member of the same company, or a “fellow parent of small children,” Belgians were more inclined to describe their neighbors as “Jews” — and nothing more. Especially when things go bad, it is our interwoven, intricate relationships — not abstract human rights — that compel us to protect each other.
If this is true, if our sense of commonality is strongest with those to whom we are connected in some specific way, then we can learn from Muslims and their practice of voluntary starvation.
Although they constitute only a tiny percentage of the University — 1.2 percent, according to a survey shared with me by the Office of Institutional Research, there are now more Muslims in the world than there are Catholics, according to the Associated Press, the Vatican and the United Nations. And by the same data, there are now more Muslims in the world than any other religion (19.2 percent of global population) — if Catholics (17.4) and other Christians (15.6) are counted seperately.
If Ramadan or something like it were a Western practice, if one month out of the year every physically able and deeply curious American refused to eat or drink during the daylight, then Hunger and his persistent knock would not be exclusive to the poor. What we now accept, explicitly or otherwise as an unsolvable problem with Western liberal society, would then be an unacceptable cruelty to be alleviated by an extensive political agenda. And what we now call “the less fortunate” we would then call “those whose hunger we know, those who need not suffer.”
In this secularized Ramadan, each evening’s sunset comes with a renewed understanding of what it means to be poor. The month-long fast would cultivate an empathy that this country lacks. It would build a specific and vivid solidarity that no law or philosophy can teach. For those who remain skeptical, I encourage you to test my argument for a day — or the rest of September.
Hamza Shaban’s column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at h.shaban@cavalierdaily.com.
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