Ramadan Travelogue No. 2 ... By Abdal-Hakim Murad

First one enters the world, then one understands it, then one transcends it. And herein lies the problem of modern man. Although he is a materialist, he hasn't yet entered the world – his technology ensures that. Instead, he drifts through life in a comfortable centrally-heated dream. 

As Max Frisch wrote: "Technology is the art of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it" ...

In such a culture of diminished consciousness, pain and loss are always experienced as negatives. The moderns can never find a divine name in a groan. For them, privation, of which fasting is a primordial example, contains nothing.

Khosh dar dam is an ancient axiom of our spirituality. Attentiveness in every breath. That is why the Afterlife is Quranically described as 'al-hayawan' – the abode of real life. 

"Today We have removed your covering, so that your vision today is sharp' (50:22) 

In dunya, however, we love to tune out, to drop out, to space out. 
For us naughty children, paying attention is such an effort.

The fast enables a tunnel vision. Distractions and temptations on either side are blanked out, and we gain a focussed sense that we are moving to a destination. The body, with its blind craving, intuits that this is the time when the fast is to be broken. The spirit within is helped to remember that death and the land beyond are even more certain.

When we fast from the trivia of dunya, death becomes our iftar.