“God intends for you ease and does not intend for you hardship.” These words, appearing in the Quran (Q 2:185) in connection with the fasting of Ramadan, pass through my mind frequently each year during the holy Muslim month. At the time of this writing, we are about a third of the way through the month of Ramadan—thirty days in which observant Muslims of sound health abstain from food and drink (including water) during the daylight hours or, if medically unable, feed the poor in place of fasting. Many observe special prayers at night. Alongside this daytime abstention and nighttime devotion, Muslim try to cure the ailments of character—greed, egotism, anger, and so forth—that all humanity is heir to. There are many here at Brown dutifully and silently who observe the month.
On its face, such an act of physical self-denial would appear to be the definition of hardship. What, then, is the meaning of stating that God in fact intends for us ease?
I asked myself the same question when hiking up and down the hilly terrain of Istanbul seven years ago, wiping the sweat off my sun-beaten brow. The Islamic calendar follows a lunar reckoning—shifting backward each year about ten days on the Gregorian—so that year Ramadan fell in the dead of summer. Istanbul summers are as hot and muggy as in New York or Chicago. The days were at their longest, so the eating hours were limited. This meant late nights and early mornings with some eighteen hours of fasting in between. I was in Istanbul that summer for a Turkish intensive as part of my grad studies, so I also had six hours each weekday of classroom learning. If I was lucky, I could snatch a nap here or there.
And then there was the hour’s commute to campus from my apartment on the Asian side of Istanbul. Somehow I would peel myself out of bed at 7 am and get presentable, stumble groggily out of doors and walk briskly down the hill to the pier. On the way I’d pass by the man selling simit—which is basically a sesame seed bagel only ten times better (crispy and oven-kissed on the outside, pillowy soft on the inside)—and look forward to picking up a few on the way home for fast-breaking. At the pier I boarded a ferry for the soothing ten-minute ride across the Bosphorus to the European side. Outside of Ramadan I would buy a tea on the boat and sip it while taking in the salty air, but not so this month. On the other side I grabbed a bus, usually packed with the rush hour crowd, which would trundle up the steadily rising hill to campus. If it was an older bus, the air conditioning didn’t work, so the hot air with the heat of fifty bodies made the ride punishing. Then, after class, I’d do the same thing, often taking the coastal route for a change of scenery. By the time I marched up the hill and arrived home, especially in the early days of Ramadan, I was a noodle. I cherished those wholesome meals at sunset more than anything.
None of this is a complaint. I did all of it—the fasting, the studying, the living an hour from campus—by choice. Looking back now, I wouldn’t have changed any of the arrangement. But at the time I did wonder how the ultimate point was the bring ease into life. About halfway through Ramadan, however, I developed a clarity that grew sharper as the month wore on. Each day I proved to myself, through willing and temporary self-deprivation, that I could do things that seemed far beyond my capacities, that I didn’t always need the things I thought I did. I saw the results on my body—I felt spry and agile, and I daresay my skin was glowing—and in the sharpness of my mind during class. For a moment I felt the effects on my soul: an ineffable sweetness that Muslims are taught one can experience when they privilege the spiritual over the corporeal.
The ease of Ramadan, as I briefly experienced, lies in liberating ourselves from the bonds of our appetitive selves. We cannot cut our appetites loose; to have them is to be human. But too often those appetites are the prime mover of our decisions in life. In the short term, an appetitive disposition ironically makes the ultimate satisfaction of our appetites less enjoyable. The simit after a day’s hunger tasted so much better than it would have on a full stomach after breakfast. In the long term, and more damagingly, such a disposition makes us unable to bear the unavoidable hardships of life when they come—and that incapacity is the greatest hardship of all.
For more than a year we have been asked—indeed compelled by forces both unseen and seen—to endure immense deprivations. Some of us have certainly suffered more than others. As we slowly emerge from and look back on this chapter of the human experience, we should take stock not only of the chinks in our social and political armature but also of weaknesses within our own selves. What did we do—or what did we not do—to cultivate the inner discipline to deal with this adversity? What can we do to better prepare ourselves for future adversity? Fasting, a spiritual practice observed by Muslims and countless other traditions, is one way to find ease through hardship. What is yours?
