Ramadan and abstinence: How fasting nurtures ethical living

Ramadan’s abstinence is more than fasting — it is a transformative system designed to cultivate taqwa, ethical clarity and a deeper relationship with God.

By ZAAHIED SALLIE

An existential threat facing us today is the desertification of Earth’s biomes. However, another and more aggressive erosion is afflicting our spirits.

Most of the year, we suffer from the parched deserts of our consumption. Thankfully, the annual life-giving force of Ramadan arrives, sweeping us into a spiritual oasis.

Allāh has set taqwā — God-consciousness — as the goal for the sā’im (the fasting observer) and provided the supreme system to attain it: Ramadan.

The Prophet Muhammad’s (peace be upon him) perennial tafakkur, or thoughts on inequality and injustice every Ramadan, sparked a revolution that forever changed the course of human history.

During one such meditation, Islam was born with its Book of Wisdom and the command to read its preeminent injunction. Its pages of pure Divine Speech direct us countlessly to reflect, contemplate and question. It is determined to make thinkers of us, men and women who profoundly deliberate and are not given to careless considerations.

If we want to become ethically astute, we must mingle taqwā with our flesh and blood. We do so by purging our passions and harnessing the energy towards the higher self. If we do not, the energy descends towards the lower self, animating our animality.

When we redirect and funnel the present energy towards God’s Will, the power becomes atomic. Over time, this practice carves a channel to the higher self. If we maintain the practice, it will cut ever deeper, making the energy flow almost automatically in that direction. So that, whenever energy is present, there exists a high probability that it will follow the ethical canyon.

We edify our lives when cultivating virtue and purging vice. Yearly, Ramadan provides fertile ground for a virtuous and ethical life. Fasting frees us up by shutting down all the base vices — food, vain talk and sex — allowing us to focus on our higher spiritual purpose. This dual system of purging vice and growing virtue, which Ramadan supplies, accelerates our spiritual transformation.

There exists an interconnection between the vices and the virtues. They are like keys. One opens the door to the next. It is not just doing one good thing, but the promise that one thing can grow into the next good thing and the next. It compounds, and over time, its potential grows even more. Every action drives behaviour, and one action will often trigger another. No behaviour happens in isolation. This natural momentum makes Ramadan highly effective at driving behavioural change by creating a super-cycle of positive triggers.

Vices operate similarly by triggering an avalanche of negative behaviours that drive our base desires. When this happens, and compulsion consumes us, we act, as Thomas Aquinas, the Christian theologian and philosopher, said, ‘as if reason is fast asleep at the helm.’

The spirit of abstinence nurtured by Ramadan extends far beyond the bounds of the rules, which, if broken, would nullify the fast. Two critical structures it sets up are thrift living and living with God.

Augustine of Hippo, whom Catholics revere as their saint, taught that we must only enjoy God and use everything else to pursue our end, which is God: ‘It is to God that you will all return, and He has power over everything’ (Sura Hud, 11:4).

His teaching emphasises that God should be the ultimate object of enjoyment, while everything else is only to support that divine relationship. It reflects his belief that true happiness and fulfilment come from a relationship with God rather than material possessions or earthly pleasures.

Hippo’s opinion is what it means to live with God, which īmān instantiates, taqwā maintains, and Ramadan enculturates.

Regarding living thriftily, Henry David Thoreau, the American philosopher best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, said, ‘A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.’

Thoreau wrote Walden while taking a two-year sabbatical practising unadorned living in a ten-by-fifteen-foot cabin: ‘I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life.’

One cannot help but get the sense from his deliberate lifestyle that wealth is not just what you own, but one’s contentment with the absence of life’s comforts and luxuries. The more one continues to disinvest from this world, the richer one becomes by connecting to utility and truth. This idea returns us to Ramadan and taqwā, which are about turning towards God and away from the things that distract us from that essential relationship.

Ramadan creates the Spartan-like environment necessary for becoming more. And through its rigours, it forges higher ethics within and breaks us open to the joy of living with God.