Return to Ramadan

by Christopher Byram, co-opinion editor

By the time you read this, the Islamic month of Ramadan will have come to a close. With Ramadan’s end comes the end to my own personal celebration of this holy month of the Islamic calendar. I began Ramadan hoping to gain something spiritual, intellectual and emotional from the experience, and I’m not sure how well I fared. It’s been an experience of mixed results, but despite all of the things I did wrong, and all of the stupid things other people have done to me during this month, I think I came out with a more positive attitude in the end.

Ramadan is meant to be a month of ritual, piousness, and sacrifice for the 1.5 billion Muslims around the world -at least during the day. Muslims are expected to fast from the early morning to the early evening –from morning prayer (Fajr) to evening prayer (Maghrib). After evening prayer, Muslims are free to eat, smoke and have sexual relations with his or her spouse. The general atmosphere during Ramadan is one of celebration after Maghrib, especially for more “modern” practicing Muslims. I thought of it sort of like Mardis Gras happening every day, and I was more than happy to adjust my attitude accordingly.

Make no mistake, though. This is a holy month in Islam, and it is a month for reflection, introspection and an effort to separate oneself from the profane and grow closer to the profound and the sacred. Celebration is more than welcome, but for the right reasons.

In our culture, Mardis Gras-like celebrations really just mean getting incredibly drunk and falling down in the street, but all in good fun. Ramadan is a holiday for religious celebration. Partying for Allah, as it were. And I did my fair share of partying for Allah, which ended up going well in most cases. But I will admit that I strayed more than once from the path of the righteous. I think that’s an acceptable compromise, coming from a very un-righteous non-Muslim. I was wary to stray too far out of bounds and quick to get back in, if you get me, but that didn’t stop it from happening altogether.

Even now, I’m indulging in a glass or two of red wine to help get my creative juices flowing and get me ready for the evening. Yet, according to some Muslims, consumption of alcohol is a pretty serious no-no. When it comes to spirits of any sort –in the heavens or in a bottle- my views are pretty liberal. My theological views haven’t changed a whole lot, but I’m not going to lie: practicing Ramadan has certainly changed my perspectives on an incredible amount of religious ideas and beliefs that I had considered firmly settled. I’m not so stupid that I will put them down in print, but if one will allow me to borrow the words of the Doobie Brothers, let me just say that, “Jesus is all right with me.” Muhammad, Abraham, and Moses, too, for that matter. I won’t say any of them got it right, but I’m not going to say any of them had it completely wrong, either.

This month was an interesting month for a number of reasons, one being the fact that I was practicing an incredibly important aspect of a worldwide religion with billions of followers. But it was also strangely familiar. During Ramadan, Muslims are expected to be pretty pious and to try to get a better grasp of their religion by considering the Koran in its entirety and considering their own ideas and interpretations of their religion. I’m all about interpretation, and I’m all about considering ideas, no matter what month of what religion.

I think I have a pretty good balance between being able to consider the profound and indulge in the profane. I’m a thinker, so they say, but I’m not above being showered with lovely things. Besides, some of the greatest conversations I’ve ever had happened while under the influence of one drug or another. There’s always that one point that a person can reach while under one influence or another when one is capable of anything. I mean that more in the sense that they can change the world around them for the better and not attempt to flush a couch down the toilet or something.

But that’s not my point. What I mean is that I’m naturally inclined to considering the big issues of the world, as well as being able to cope with the small ones. During Ramadan, one is expected to “consider the big things,” as it were; to consider their religion, their world and their own individual place in that world and that religion, etc…   

That comes easy to some, and I’m no exception. Give me a good book, a good conversation while sharing a bottle wine, or a singular, profound moment over a loud, bright idiot box or a video game any day. I like to hope that most people would have those same preferences, but I’m not inclined toward optimism. Maybe Ramadan is Islam’s way of attempting to get Muslims to reconsider their own preferences for the better. I kind of like to think of it that way.

It wasn’t all wine and roses, though. I caught a lot of heat from a lot of people for practicing Ramadan for 1,000 different reasons, but most of them were just echoes of the familiar Islamophobic, anti-Muslim rhetoric that the ignorant like to bandy about while sitting atop their immoral, bigoted high-horses. This isn’t the best region for religious tolerance of any sort, and, unfortunately, I don’t see that changing in my lifetime. This region also isn’t the best for practicing one’s religion with good intentions, but I suppose that’s one of the problems with religion: it’s so easy to use it as a weapon.

More than a few Christians, Jews, Muslims and Hindus are guilty of using their religion as a weapon, and I think that’s an incredible misallocation of human passion. Every religion has a problem with conservative and liberal hard-liners, fanatics and extremists. These days, people seem to think that Muslims are the only religious group that’s killing each other, but that’s more of the same bigoted and ignorant rhetoric that people are so content to accept and repeat. Hatred and war are not the true aims of religion, but it’s funny how people are more than content to slaughter one another in the name of God –particularly people who are essentially worshipping the same one.

I think that extremism and violence come with anything that invokes even the hint of emotion or passion. Some people like beets, but I’m not one of them. It might be a stretch to say someone feels so passionately about beets that he or she would be willing to put his or her life on the line to get a point across, whatever that may be.

I think that’s probably one of the most important lessons I’ve learned from practicing Ramadan. There’s always going to be someone who doesn’t feel the same way that you do about something, and there’s always going to be the chance that they feel so passionately about it that it could even lead to violence.

But that’s passion for you, and religion is certainly a part of life that gives people passion. I would like that to be different, but anyone who knows me even a little knows that there’s an awful lot that I would like to be different. It’s just getting other people to recognize all the things going wrong in our world that seems to be the problem.