3 Ramadan 1431

Religious understanding strikes me as having various analogues in the study of logic. Bear with me, if you will, and I’ll try to explain the fasting of logic.
I start with my muddled reasoning, and am moved to repent. Allahhumma as’aluka [O God I ask you] by Your Knowledge, to clear up my troubled mind. This gives me hope. Maybe I can gain some clarity somehow, God willing. Then the love of precise thinking may manifest itself in my own mind!
How do we embark on a program to remedy this flaw? Well, I would recommend the study of logic! What is logic? Logic is the study of the consequence relation, or this seems to be the consensus of modern logicians, anyway. In order to get at something as abstract as the consequence relation, we need to take our ordinary thought and deprive it of its material content, to examine its form alone. Isn’t this a kind of fasting? Remove the food from food for thought! Once we do this, we can examine the structure of our reasoning without being swayed by its content. We can then sort the sturdy structures of reasoning from the fallacious ones, and finally pour whatever content we like back into the valid structures. In this way we are able to take control of our reasoning. We become logically empowered, gain freedom, by learning the language of logic. With the acquisition of a new language comes a rebirth. Every time you learn a new language you are born again with a personality attached to that language. The constraints of language give you the freedom to engage and converse with the cultural world of that language. It doesn’t matter whether the language is that of logic, math, Chinese, music, or the language of prayer. Whenever we want to learn a language we have to start with simple forms, abstracted from the content of whatever we really want to say.
We don’t fast because food is bad. We don’t study grammar because the content expressed in language is bad. We study grammar to gain mastery over the use of language. We study grammar to gain freedom to express ourselves. We fast in order to gain mastery over our inclinations. But the goal is not just to be able to skip meals at will. Fasting is symbolic. The goal is to break the habits of our inclinations. In Ramadan, we prove to ourselves that we can do it with food, but it would be a shame to let it drop there. We want to emerge from the month of fasting like butterflies from their cocoons. But to do that requires work, soul searching. One must ask how one’s inclinations or habits spoil one’s ability to act effectively.
Sometimes a husband and wife get into a bad emotional habit with one another. According to stereotypes, the husband is suspicious or the wife nags. How can these inclinations be conquered? Not by eliminating suspicion/requests, but by considering more abstractly the criteria under which suspicion/requests may be justified and when it is destructive. We need to become reflective about habit governed behavior until we can understand its structure with the content removed, so that we can later take control of the inclination to accord with chosen structures. The habits that are realized in personal relationships are very difficult to control.
In Ramadan we want to reconfigure our relationship to Allah.

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.*

So, a part of fasting is concerned with repenting and taking control of our intentions. Lady Fatima Zahra (‘a) Says: “Fasting in Ramzan is considered obligatory by God for fixing the genuineness of your intentions.”

*

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.”