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| From Ramadan |
Hey, here Winebringer, circulate, offer the cup this way;
For love at first seemed easy, now problems come to stay.
Finally breeze sent muskpod's scent from that forehead:
Its twist Of musky hair makes blood clot our hearts today.
Can wayfarers stay happy and secure in Beloved's house,
When suddenly the bell clangs to: "Lift your load! Away!"
With wine dye your prayer-mat if the Master commands;
This experienced traveller has understanding of the way.
The dark night and terrifying wave and fierce whirlpool:
Do those light of burden on shore know where we stay?
By acting upon my own desires I ruined my reputation:
Can the secret stay that way when crowds tell it all day?
Hafiz, if you desire the Divine Presence, do not be absent:
When you visit your Beloved: "Farewell" to the world say.
Translator:
Smith, P. (1986). Divan of Hafiz. Melbourne: New Humanity Books.
For translations of Hafiz by Paul Smith contact the author.
Last night, I polished off two bottles
of pure water,
but my hands were scented,
with white ginger
from a lotion
that I picked up
years ago
at a hotel
in
It is hot, and water relieves the heat. One of the acts of worship recommended on various nights of Ramadan is ghusl. In practice under the circumstances, this means taking a shower and letting the water flow over one's head, right side and left side in sequence. Showers in Iran are tiled rooms. I like the water to be cool.
We fast, and Imam Reza (`a) tells us that by fasting we should feel the pain of those who are hungry and thirsty. As I dry off from the shower at night and sip more cold water, I recall how many people don't have access to clean water.
Here is a map of projected water scarcity for 2025.
As we drink water in the nights and bathe ourselves, let's remember the 700 million under water stress in our prayers.
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| From Ramadan |
In the Name of God, the All-merciful,
the All-compassionate
| 1 | My God, to Thee I complain of a soul commanding to evil,308 rushing to offenses, eager to disobey Thee, and exposing itself to Thy anger. It takes me on the roads of disasters, it makes me the easiest of perishers before Thee; many its pretexts, drawn out its expectations; when evil touches it, it is anxious, when good touches it, grudging;309 inclining to sport and diversion, full of heedlessness and inattention, it hurries me to misdeeds and makes me delay repentance. |
| 2 | My God, I complain to Thee of an enemy who misguides me and a satan who leads me astray. He has filled my breast with tempting thoughts, and his suggestions have encompassed my heart. He supports caprice against me, embellishes for me the love of this world, and separates me from obedience and proximity! |
| 3 | My God, to Thee I complain of a heart that is hard, turned this way and that by tempting thoughts, clothed in rust and the seal,310 and of an eye too indifferent to weep in fear of Thee and eagerly seeking that which gladdens it! |
| 4 | My God, there is no force and no strength except in Thy power, and no deliverance for me from the detested things of this world save through Thy preservation. So I ask Thee by Thy far-reaching wisdom and Thy penetrating will not to let me expose myself to other than Thy munificence and not to turn me into a target for trials! Be for me a helper against enemies, a coverer of shameful things and faults, a protector against afflictions, a preserver against acts of disobedience! By Thy clemency and mercy, O Most Merciful of the merciful! |
Fasting used to have a prominent place in Christian spirituality. In a book about the Desert Fathers, it is written:
An old man was asked, ‘‘How can I find God?’’ He said, ‘‘In
fasting, in watching, in labours, in devotion, and, above all,
in discernment. I tell you, many have injured their bodies
without discernment and have gone away from us having
achieved nothing. Our mouths smell bad through fasting, we
know the Scriptures by heart, we recite all the Psalms of David,
but we have not that which God seeks: charity and humility.’’
(Ward, B. (ed.), The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian
Monks. London/New York: Penguin Books, 2003., number 90)
Someone asked an old man, ‘‘What is humility?’’ He replied,
‘‘Humility is a great and divine work. The road leading to
humility is through bodily labours, and considering oneself a
sinner, inferior to all.’’ Then the brother said, ‘‘What does that
mean, ‘inferior to all’?’’ The old man said, ‘‘It is this: not paying
attention to others’ sins, but always to one’s own, praying to
God ceaselessly. (Ward, number 166)
Although Protestants are considered less ascetic than Catholics and Orthodox Christians, fasting played an important part in Pietist spirituality, which stemmed from the Lutheran tradition.
The fundamental framework for Wesleyan spirituality (expressed in a
tract called the Large Minutes) had five elements: prayer both
personal and collective, scriptural reading and meditation,
frequent Communion, fasting on Fridays, and spiritual conversation.
The Oxford or Tractarian Movement of Anglo-Catholicism also emphasized fasting.
Today, I personally know of a number of Mennonites who fast at least for a few days of Ramadan, and on other occasions, often in solidarity with those suffering from war and oppression.
May Allah let our fasting bring us humility, ceaseless remembrance of God, and compassion and solidarity with all those who suffer from the ravages of war, persecution, and other miseries.
The right of fasting is that you know it is a veil that Allah has set up over your tongue, your hearing, your sight, your stomach, and your private parts to protect you from the Fire. If you abandon the fast, you will have torn God's protective covering away from yourself.Coverings can be good or bad. The bad ones are barriers that prevent us from reaching our goals. The good ones are armor against Satan, barriers against the evils that surround us. The protective covering (hijab) can take many forms. It can be a retreat or seclusion. It can be a sanctuary. In the olden days criminals would seek sanctuary at shrines, and the police would leave them alone there until they came out. How is fasting supposed to protect us? How can it be a sanctuary? Is it because we keep our tongues, hearing, sight, stomach and privates from sin? But we are supposed to be doing that all the time, whether fasting or not. I think the fast is one in which we are to keep our tongues, hearing, etc., not only from what is prohibited, but from what is otherwise allowed. When we fast, we refrain from food, drink, and sex, which are otherwise allowed. But we should try to abstain even from what is otherwise allowed to see and hear and say, to try to make our fasting into a little hijab for us to crawl under and where we can concentrate on our relationship to Allah.
Fasting can be hypocritical. We can fast to show ourselves how pious we are. We can brag of how much weight we have lost in just twelve days. We can occupy ourselves with the outer rules of fasting but forget about what we are fasting for.
To make a show of prayer and fasting are condemned by Jesus (‘a) in the gospels. Jewish scholars also have made the point that fasting is worthless if it does not awaken one to repentance. Jews used to put ashes on their heads when they began to fast, and the eldest among them would admonish them: “Brethren, it is not written of the men of
All of the laws of the Torah, civil and penal as well as ritual, serve no other purpose than to clarify and facilitate our response to God. But they do so not by vanishing nor by subjuming or displacing that response but by sustaining and giving it its concrete sense and instantiated application.
Hilkhot Yesodei ha-Torah (of Maimonides) concerns sound opinions, the beliefs that convey the essential elements of the true understanding that philosophers pursue in regard to God and nature and our relations toward both. Regulations regarding fasts and repentance fall under this heading, since moral reformation and spiritual purgation are prerequisites of theological insight and of the alchemy that transmutes sound opinions into critically testable philosophical ideas.
-Lenn E. Goodman, God of Abraham, p. 162.
)وَاتَّقُوا اللٌّهَ وَيُعَلِّمُكُمُ اللٌّهُ وَاللٌّهُ بِكُلِّ شَيْءٍ عَلِيمٌ (
“Be God-wary and God shall teach you, and God has knowledge of all things.”[89]
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| From Ramadan |
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On Thursday afternoon we went to Khaveh to visit a friend. We walked a bit around the village. I was feeling somewhat faint and leaned on my son, Ali. When we got back to my friend’s house, he told me to sit down while he poured cool water over my feet and into a plastic tub. I remembered the narration about Jesus (‘a) washing the feet of his disciples to teach them humility.
Jesus the son of Mary ('a) said, “O assembly of Apostles! I have a request of you. Fulfill it for me.” They said, “Your request is fulfilled, O Spirit of Allah!” Then he stood up and washed their feet. They said, “It would have been more proper for us to have done this, O Spirit of Allah!” Then he said, “Verily, it is more fitting for one with knowledge to serve the people. Indeed, I humbled myself only so that you may humble yourselves among the people after me, even as I have humbled myself among you.” Then Jesus ('a) said, “Wisdom is developed by humility, not by pride, and likewise plants only grow in soft soil, not in stone.”(Kàfí, 1, 37, 6)
Humility is a difficult virtue. It was not considered a virtue at all by the Greeks. Farabi used the Aristotelian idea of virtue as a mean between extremes, and introduced humility as standing between arrogance and baseness, while Ibn Sina considered humility a part of wisdom that restrains the wise from arrogance. Ghazali considers it a principle virtue of those who possess taqwā.
On Friday morning we returned to
One week of fasting is finished, and where do we stand?
I feel a bit more light-headed during the days, and by iftār, somewhat weak. But do I realize how weak I am?
Sometimes it is said that through worship, including fasting, and other spiritual disciplines, the wayfarer seeks to take on the attributes of Allah. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that we try to take on attributes that reflect in a very limited way the attributes of Allah.
How are we to achieve that?
One place to start might be by recognizing our weaknesses. Since I am weak, I do better to trust my affairs to Him. Since I am weak, I do better to ask for His protection.
This is a kind of self-effacement. We should give up the illusion that we have sufficient strength that we can go our own way without His guidance. Only then can we begin to exhibit the reflections of His strength in ourselves.
How can we reflect the strength of God? Maybe by emulating His beneficence. By feeling weak we may commiserate with the weak, and so seek to aid them as we can.
Fayz writes:
Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq said: 'Allah made fasting obligatory in order that the wealthy and the poor [in the worldly sense] be made equal. That is because the rich do not taste the hunger that would cause them to be kind to the poor. Whenever the wealthy want something they can achieve it. So Allah desired to make equality within His creation, the wealthy tasting of hunger and pain so that they could have sympathy for the weak and compassion for the hungry.'
And it was said: It is enough that fasting is a means of elevating the lowest level of the human being to the highest level which is that of imitating the spiritual angels. Surely, that is enough of a virtue and a glorious deed.
Thanks to Saleem Saab and the Arc of London for the translation of Fayz’s remarks on fasting at:
http://sites.google.com/site/wwwthearcoflondon/thevirtuesoffasting
6 Ramadan 1431
It is reported that the Prophet (ṣ) said: “For everything there is a gate, and the gate of worship is fasting.”
In many religions fasting was performed by way of preparation. In some of the Greco-Roman cults one would fast in preparation for a revelatory dream, for food was considered a factor that would corrupt dreams and confuse them. Some Chinese religions required fasting prior to the performance of rituals, although Taoists argued that a “fast of the heart” (purification of one’s thoughts and intentions) was better than fasting from food. Some Native American tribes also held that fasting would prepare one for guidance from the Great Spirit. Fasting was also seen by the Egyptians as a preparation for delivering an oracle.
By turning away from corporeal needs, one opens oneself to the spiritual world. So, fasting is a kind of purification from the worldly that enables one to focus on the other-worldly. In worship, we seek communication with the divine. Fasting is the gate to worship, because fasting is the form of purification that prepares us for communication with the divine.
To fast is to gain freedom from the material aspects of life, freedom from the slavery of one’s appetites. It is only after one has gained this freedom that one is able to freely express oneself to God in the communication that is worship.
5 Ramadan 1431
We pray to God to remove the covers that we place between ourselves and Him. God is not hidden from us; but we hide Him from ourselves. We pretend He is not present by not paying attention to the ways in which His presence shines through everything there is. Why don't we pay attention? Because we are preoccupied with worldly inclinations. Hence, by fasting we try to overcome our inclinations. What is forbidden during the Ramadan fast are just instances. We can fast from any of the things to which we are inclined: TV, shopping, gossiping, complaining, being vindictive, being haughty. Surely we can go for some time without the object of some inclination, even if for an hour. Once we get control over ourselves, we can see things differently, and listen differently.
My father once gave up bread for Lent. It was hard for him, since he took sandwiches to work for lunch. He tried using lettuce leaves in place of bread to make his sandwiches. He finished the Lenten season with a firm resolve never never ever to give up eating bread for Lent again! But by doing it, he found out that he could conquer his need for bread, however unpleasant the conquest. He always told us: Never give up, never give up, never never ever give up! That's how we have to approach this problem of self-improvement.
Once we gain the confidence that we can reconfigure how we satisfy our inclinations to allign with the will of God, we will be wary about how we conduct ourselves, wary of God. William Chittick has suggested that the best way to think of taqwā is as “God-wariness”.
183. O you who believe! Fasting is prescribed to you As it was prescribed to those before you, that ye may (learn) taqwā,-
The broad distinction between the instinctive act and the intelligent and free act is that the latter is performed with an awareness of what is being done; when the content of the interest in which one is absorbed is drawn out of its immediate unity with oneself and becomes an independent object of one's thinking, then it is that spirit begins to be free, whereas when thinking is an instinctive activity, spirit is enmeshed in the bonds of its categories and is broken up into an infinitely varied material.*
Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, tr. A. V. Miller (Amherst: Humanity Books, 1998), 37: “Das instinktartige Tun unterscheidet sich von dem intelligenten und freien Tun dadurch überhaupt, daß dieses mit Bewußtsein geschieht; indem der Inhalt des Treibenden heraus aus der unmittelbaren Einheit mit dem Subjekte zur Gegenständlichkeit vor dieses gebracht ist, beginnt die Freiheit des Geistes, der in dem instinktweisen Wirken des Denkens, befangen in den Banden seiner Kategorien, in einen unendlich mannigfachen Stoff zersplittert ist.”
We ask God to forgive us for what we have made of ourselves, and seek improvement from Him. The program for change follows the series: fear, hope, love. Fear inspires action to escape from what is feared, and this brings with it the hope of success. Hope intensifies as yearning and blossoms as love. There are many examples of this pattern. Example 1. Fear of God is fear of being displeasing to Him. To escape what is feared we try to do what is pleasing to Him. Regardless of our failures, we have hope in His grace. Our hope in His grace intensifies as yearning for His graciousness, and blossoms as love of Him. Example 2. We fear our flaws. This prompts action to overcome them, such as fasting, in hope that by His will we may improve. The intensification of the hope is yearning for improvement. By His grace we then find blossoming in our hearts the love of the virtues.
Fasting is an old method for improvement. Forms of fasting are found in all the major religions. Fasting is often connected with alms giving. Both are ways of giving up the base aspects of one’s nature. One seeks to shift one’s affections from the base to the noble. The shift is one from base powers to noble powers. We find the ability to overcome the hold that hunger, thirst, and lust for sex or money or power have over our hearts. We weaken ourselves by fasting to empower ourselves. So, a kind of lust for power remains, but it is the paradoxical lust for power over our own inclinations, which power is freedom. Freedom is freedom from the abuse of power.
