Religion: The Long Fast

In Cairo, taxi drivers stopped their cabs to join the kneeling crowds outside the packed mosques. At Dhahran on the Persian Gulf, the Arabian-American Oil Co. eased its daily work schedules for its fasting, prayerful employees. The Arab cafes of Algiers were empty. In Beirut and Karachi, Western-educated university students put aside their examination papers to meditate on the Koran. Five times a day, from the holy shrines of Mecca to the blackened bamboo mosques of the southern Philippines, muezzins spoke the Arabic words calling the faithful to prayer in a special time of self-denial and self-examination.

Judgment of God. Since May 25, when the first crescent moon of the month of Ramadan showed itself in the sky, some 300 million believers of the Moslem world had devoted themselves to their annual spiritual stocktaking. For 29 days, to commemorate the month when they believe the Prophet Mohammed received God’s most sacred book, the Koran, Moslems fasted, prayed and meditated. Their uncompromising fast made similar Christian regulations seem lax by comparison. It required a rigid total abstinence from food and drink each day, between dawn and sunset, mostly in climates where the tropical sun is especially unkind to such self-denial.*

In the stricter Moslem lands, the few public backsliders were punished by official decree, and in others they were denounced by public opinion. The state of Bahawalpur in Pakistan ordered three days’ imprisonment for anyone found eating, drinking or smoking in public. When a rickety Cairo drinking place collapsed last week on its 15 patrons, pious onlookers called it the judgment of God.

Pull Up Your Socks. The strictness of the fast was an impressive profession of faith in Islam, the world’s great third-force religion, a monotheist faith akin to Christianity and Judaism,* dedicated to stamping out polytheist religions, e.g., Buddhism and Hinduism, as pagan and “immoral.”

The rigidity of such customs as the fast of Ramadan has hindered the Islamic nations in adjusting themselves to a changing modern world. But the stern faith that goes with them keeps the Moslems among the world’s most spiritually secure people. As a Beirut professor explained: “Ramadan is a time of reexamination. Americans might say it is a time to ‘pull up your socks’ and learn to stand up to difficulty … It is the time a Moslem faces up to himself and his God.”

This week the month of Ramadan ended. Weak and often irritable from their long fasting, the world’s Moslems once more began to eat, smoke and drink, much like the rest of their fellow men. (The Koran’s traditional prohibition of alcohol is not strictly observed outside of the month of Ramadan.) The world of Islam, after defiantly exhibiting its separateness, once more let its identity superficially merge with an outer world of machines, nightclubs and psychiatrists, of Christianity and Communism.

* The Arabic word Ramadan means literally, “The Scorcher.”

* Moslems regard Christ and Abraham as prophets second only to Mohammed. Christians and Jews are referred to as “peoples of the Book,” who have received divine revelation, although Moslems hold that, in each case, they ultimately grew unworthy of it.