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Ramadan is more than fasting. It is a return to the Quran as a guide to justice, liberation and decolonising the Muslim public mind in pursuit of truth.
By IQBAL SULEIMAN
‘Oh, you who have committed to Allah. Fasting is ordained for you as it has been ordained for those before you so that you might remain conscious of Allah and His power to implement justice.’ (Sura Al Baqarah, 2:183)
The Creator of human beings knows what is best for human beings, and it is out of His love and care for His creation that He has allocated the auspicious month of Ramadan every year. The human soul has a natural inclination to gravitate to its Creator and to develop spiritually. Human beings, by their very nature, are also prone to spiritually slip and slide, become alienated from their souls and their Creator. And so Ramadan is a time of return and reset, for the soul to reflect, see clearly and gain proximity to its Creator.
The Creator has, throughout history, sent emissaries to guide people on earth to live truthfully and justly. Prophets before Muhammad ﷺ used to fast with their God-conscious followers. Fasting is therefore universal to all faiths. Each year, committed Muslims fast an entire month of Ramadan, which spans approximately 30 days. From sunrise to sunset (daylight hours), a person has to refrain from eating food, drinking liquids and engaging in sexual conduct. This is obligatory on each adult person.
What is the real purpose of Ramadan? Are we meant to be God-conscious, listening to the melodious recitation of the Quran and being charitable and righteous for 30 days only? Surely a thinking mind must delve beyond the recitation and into the meanings of the divine writ.
‘It was the month of Ramadan in which the Quran was first made accessible from on high as a guidance for people and self-evident proof of that guidance, and as a standard to discern the true from the false. Hence whoever of you lives to see this month shall fast throughout it, but he that is on a journey shall fast instead for the same number of other days.’ (Sura Al Baqarah, 2:185)
The Quran, then, is not for mere melodious recitation; it is the primary source of guidance to determine the truth and to act in pursuit of justice. It was in the holy month of Ramadan that the first verses of the Quran were revealed to Prophet Muhammad ﷺ while he was in the Cave of Hira at the age of 40.
‘Read in the name of your Sustainer, who has created. Created the human being out of an adhesion, physical and emotional. Read, for your Sustainer is the Most Benevolent One, who has taught the intelligent social human the use of the writing instrument (pen).’ (Sura Al ‘Alaq, 96:1–4)
It is revealing that in these first verses of revelation, God calls upon the human being to recognise his origin, his Creator and his most distinctive human trait, which is his intellect and his capacity to read and write. This intellectual responsibility is coupled with the duty to be an activist in pursuit of justice.
Today, however, colonialism has dislocated the public Muslim mind from history and alienated him from his primary source of liberation, which is the Quran accompanied by the practice and lived experience of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ.
It follows, therefore, that the first step in decolonising the Muslim mind is to gravitate to the Quran, read it, understand it, soak the mind in its words and use it as the primary source for inspiration and guidance for life on planet earth.
Ayesha (RA) is reported to have said that the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, in his being and conduct, had actualised and lived the Quran. The Prophet ﷺ, in his conduct, was the human expression of the Quran. From the time that he was the leader of the Islamic resistance movement in Makkah to the time that he ascended to become the leader of the Islamic government in Madinah, the Quran and the Prophet ﷺ were consistently in tandem.
It is this alienation from the Quran and the Prophet ﷺ that has allowed the Muslim public mind to become fertile ground for colonisation. A colonised public mind translates into an ‘impotent public’ that does not have the psychology to resist oppression.
The Palestinians are probably the most God-conscious and God-committed people on planet earth who are deeply devoted to the Quran and Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. This is why the Palestinian public mind is decolonised and persistently refuses to bow down and be subjugated by their Israeli colonisers, despite all the physical odds against them. They have sacrificed everything that is dear to them – their children, spouses, fathers, mothers, grandfathers, homes, schools, mosques and universities. Gaza has virtually been reduced to rubble and dead bodies beneath the rubble – a mass graveyard of rubble. And in all of this genocidal suffering, horror and loss, they remain firm in their commitment to God and dignified in their resistance to the Israeli occupation. They fervently resist and refuse to surrender because they are as defiant as their Prophet ﷺ in pursuit of truth and justice.
The Quran calls upon all the people of the world to stand in solidarity with the oppressed and occupied people of Palestine in words that are as clear as the light of day.
‘And how could you refuse to fight in the cause of Allah and of the utterly helpless men and women and children who are crying: “O our Sustainer! Lead us forth to freedom out of this imperial civic society whose people are oppressors, and raise for us, out of Your grace, a protector, and raise for us, out of Your grace, one who will bring us support.”’ (Sura An Nisa, 4:75)
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Who on earth today are more utterly helpless than the men, women and children of Gaza who are fighting for freedom? Why is there a seemingly obvious disconnect between the Muslim powers and God’s words in the Quran? If the Muslim public mind and Muslim powers were synchronised with the Quran, then all the Muslim powers would have taken action to uphold the Genocide Convention and support the people of Gaza – but this has not happened.
Which Muslim governments and movements have complied with God’s words in the Quran and supported the Palestinian people during the more than two years of genocide? Only the Axis of Resistance. From October 8 till his martyrdom, Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah entered into the armed conflict with the Israeli occupation in solidarity with Gaza. The poorest Muslims on planet earth in Yemen, led by Abdul Malik al Houthi, bravely rose up in defence of Gaza and to uphold the Genocide Convention. And the leader of the Axis of Resistance, Islamic Iran, under the leadership of Seyyed Ali Khamenei, has been in a war with Israel and the United States and is now facing an imminent existential war with the US and Israel because Iran is the country that supports the Palestinian struggle for self-determination.
This Ramadan, Iran is surrounded by the army of the world’s only superpower, America. An imminent war of annihilation to root out Islamic Iran looms during this Ramadan because of the Islamic government’s support for Palestinian national liberation. And no fasting Muslim will be blind to the historical comparison when the enemies, during the month of Ramadan, went to war at Badr in an effort to wipe out the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ and the Islamic government he led in Madinah.
These Ramadan verses of the Quran expose those who are responsible for the miserable state of the world and the suffering in Gaza. They also demonstrate to us the freedom fighters who follow the line of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ and refuse to bow down to oppressors. The rulers within ‘Muslim ranks’ are exposed, as they had the power to intervene and help the utterly helpless men, women and children of Gaza who were being bombed and starved to death, but they sat back and watched the genocide from the comfort of their palatial villas. They may wear suits or don the mantle and the robe, but these Quranic verses strip them of their ‘pious garb’ and reveal them to be political hypocrites and an extension of imperialism’s political apparatus and the enablers of the genocide in Gaza who collude with the Zionist state. They have no mandate from the Quran, the Prophet and the people to collude with Zionism and imperialism.
Ramadan should be a month of liberation of every Muslim mind that reads the Quran and understands it. It should transform every fasting person into a Gazan who feels the pain and suffering of Gaza within every fibre of his own being and emerges on the day of Eid with a resistance psychology that will not buckle or bend.
A Quranic Muslim in Ramadan will clearly see that an attack on Islamic Iran is an attack on all Muslims of the world and a continuation of Islamophobic wars at the behests of Israeli Zionists who revel in killing innocent Muslims.
This heightened and developed Ramadan consciousness of the individual must fuse with the organised collective consciousness of all the peoples of the world and engage in international solidarity activity and civil disobedience, resisting Zionism and imperialism, building a strong Palestinian international solidarity movement and anti-war movement along the lines of the international anti-apartheid movement.
Iqbal Suleiman is a social justice lawyer and former head of the law clinic for Lawyers for Human Rights in Pretoria and Research Associate: Media Review Network.
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