The Muslim fasting month of Ramadhan begins on 21 July.
By Fadli Bin Fawzi
One of my earliest memories of fasting is ironically about food. I started fasting very early in my life, when I was in primary school. I would go home to Bussorah Street where outside the shophouses there would be a variety of food sold at the bazaar. The intoxicating smells proved to be good training for someone so young as I was then, even as it made the hunger pangs more acute. However to know temptation at a young age is to also know will and resistance. I am grateful for those lessons when I succeeded and of the weight of a guilty conscience when I failed.
Food still revolves around much of life during Ramadhan. The current bazaar at Bussorah Street is a pale shadow of what it was when I was younger, the food is not what I remember and the smells are not of nostalgia, but of loss. The bazaar at Geylang is larger, though its products have become more and more homogeneous. One suspects that the rising cost of rental has made the shop keepers more wary and hedge on the safe bet of tested products. Over the years, as a segment of the Malay community has become better off, they have tended to break their fast in fancy hotels and restaurants, away from the crowd of the night markets.
Into my teens, the night markets, festive as they were, began to lose their appeal. The worldly delights were beguiling and sated an appetite denied during the day but it made the act of fasting contradictory. It was a jarring contrast, the ascetic denial of day contrasted with the festive revelry of night. I can understand why many choose to spend the night in various acts of piety, going to the mosques to pray. There is a calmness in prayer and a space for reflection from the pressures of daily life. However I had no wish to fade away into the grey of night, whatever still quietude it promised. I quickly became impatient with rituals which seemed to focus only on my own concerns. Was Ramadhan merely to concern ourselves with our own salvation? Would we then dare damnation itself, in this life and the hereafter, to think of our fellow man?
It is not as if social concerns were alien to the month. There were of course social activities, one of the most prominent and consistent being the free porridge given out at mosques. However quiet contemplation during the night bred a detached cynicism as guests of honour lined up for the photo opportunity of doling this free porridge out. One can compare this to the quiet dedication of volunteers from non Muslim organizations such as TWC2 serving foreign workers every day. Our own deeds of social concern put into the shade by the NGO’s example to be a blessing to all mankind.
In facing these contradictions, Ramadhan defines itself most sharply as a reminder - a reminder that as humans we share the same vulnerabilities. When we are hungry, our hunger is that of the poor families who struggle to make ends meet. Our thirst is the thirst of the foreign workers toiling under the hot sun. When we are tired waking up early we experience the fatigue of foreign domestic workers who get up early to prepare the day for their families. While words speak of hunger, thirst and fatigue in the abstract, to experience this is to know their reality. And even though our fast ends at dusk and within a month, the suffering of others often carries long into the night, multiplied twelvefold. To grow up with Ramadhan is to be reminded of the social debt to be paid; to understand, empathise and change the circumstances of those who have yet to break their fast.