Ramadan as a Ritual Return

Essay | Islam’s holy month is a remembrance of our origin story.

Artist: Kimio Muraoka

The Islamic holy month of Ramadan began this morning. I’m sitting at my desk in a modified fast, some water and some floral cigarettes as part of my writing ritual — but no food till sunset. It’s not an entirely unusual form of practice. I remember a conversation I had a while ago with a decorated Muslim man who admitted he had the occasional beer during fasting. I promise you he’s more sincere in his practice of Islam than some of the folks showing up at the masjid tonight. One of the people showing up at the masjid tonight will be a man who observes all of Ramadan’s fasting rules but his prayer performance is a spectacle of horror that shocks even his young peers. A veteran, he races through prayer as if the imprint of boot camp is still within him. In public, among the elders of the community, his prayer is paced in rhythmic keeping with the group. In private, he can’t get through it fast enough, as if he is exorcising something within himself.

Such is Islam — a mixed bag of beliefs. An Islamic scholar and sheikh I once studied theology and history with asked a group of us what we thought Islam was. There were ten people in the group and nine different answers. To our surprise, he shared this was common crop yield. While we have a structure of support within Islam (the five pillars of Islam), Islam is as simple as submission or surrender to the core belief that there is one God and Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) is a messenger.

I once jokingly shared that Muslims will drink, have pre-marital sex, and do hard drugs…but we won’t touch pork. Everyone laughed, but everyone also agreed. There’s something about the rule of “no pork” that brings us all together. No matter which rules we get creative with, that one is generally a shared practice. In an imaginary rearrangement of Islam, as it’s practiced today, the hierarchy of order would go: God, Muhammad, No Pork.

But then there’s Ramadan. Ramadan brings all of us otherwise hedonistic Muslims back into the fold. What is it about Ramadan, a ritual practice of fasting and worship that tethers us back to one story — the story of Prophet Muhammad in a cave devoted to the revelation of the Quran?

The answer is the story. In Ramadan, we have one powerful origin story that through ritual observation brings us back to a zero point: the birth of Islam on the terrestrial plane.

Anyone reading this who knows me as someone who had a tenuous relationship with faith in the past will think this is all bullshit. “She doesn’t even practice properly,” they might add. That’s probably true.  But there’s more here. There’s a question of Islam (and seeded within that, a question of human belonging) that I’ve had since my earliest childhood memory. But instead of sprinting through the mechanical performance of the faith, I chose to sit with this question, this story. And that, for better or worse, no one can disagree with. I dig deep. I always have.

More often than not, that digging will hit a nerve for people, a tender root long forgotten about our lost identity in faith. An identity we are invited back into during this holy month of Ramadan. So what better time to dig a little deeper into the dark earth of our foundational identity than now, during this holiest of holy months?

And that’s where the question begins: What makes this month of Ramadan so holy? What is the invitation to the sacred that we’re offered here?

Growing up, I hated everything about Ramadan. As a girl and later as a young woman, I hated how the communal aspect of breaking our fast together became this insipid gathering of people just going through the motions. Another dinner party, another performance — except unlike our veteran friend, there was no sprinting through it to exorcise me of this performative worship. I hated the uninspired decor as if sticking up a few lanterns meant anything. How could it mean anything if we were still in the dark about the light of spirituality? I’ve hated the hard eye of others surveilling your every move to make sure you didn’t eat or drink. The pressure to pray in group prayers after we break our fast.

Now in womanhood with the advent of influencer culture and Instagram your whole life, the spirituality of Ramadan is a series of cheap cookie-cutter decorations that turn ritual observation into another dumb American party. You know those party and holiday decor that started popping up a few years ago — ostentatious displays with balloon arcs, tiered food stands, and that God-awful crescent Christmas tree. Ritual became repetition and worse; it became mimicry.

A devoted navel-gazer following the whorl of our bodily cave back to the umbilical root tethering us to our spiritual womb, years and years of reflection brought me to another node in the story of Islam:

Could we better understand a bigger story like Islam through a smaller story? Could we arrive closer to the cave of revelation by going into the cavity of silence within, where our first story is nested?

In developing my third book in The Song of the Human Heart series (The Song of Childhood which I’m still working on), I came to realize that the first story we’re drawn to as children is often a map for our soul purpose in life. Before the story of Islam, there was another story that was sacred to me: The Little Match Girl.

The Little Match Girl is a Hans Christian Andersen story about a little girl who sells matches. In the bitter cold of winter, this girl goes from house to house where she sees visions of families at Christmas time, sitting down at the table before a great feast. At every interval, she strikes a match to keep warm, slowly burning through her supply. With the last match gone, she succumbs to the bitter cold of winter and returns to the arms of her grandmother whose spirit descends to bring the girl home.

I was maybe four years old with my Little Match Girl book, the one in the 80s that had an audio cassette of an Angela Lansbury-type matriarchal voice reading the story. A gentle magical chime would sound, nudging us to turn the page. Page after page, my focus wasn’t on the little girl (the girl who in every way I could become later in life). My focus was on the people in the house. Why couldn’t they see her? But at 4, you’re not thinking in these words. At 4, you’re looking at a picture and trying to make sense of it in a language you don’t have yet — and you won’t have for another 40 years.

It took me decades to find the words for this: The little match girl was looking through a window and not a one-way mirror, I later reasoned as an adult, and yet to the people inside the home that window was a one-way mirror. They could only see themselves.

Why can’t they see us, I asked later in life during my time in the preventing violent extremism sector. Through studying dispossessed people and fringe groups, it was clear that what was once a marginal population of the unwanted beyond the pale, has become a growing majority of people who don’t feel seen. After the events of October 7th and a world wailing in grief and horror, it feels as if our voices are beyond that window, on the other side of that one-way mirror in a world cold, bitter, and unseen world.

Before the story of Islam, there is the story of us — the human collective or the ummah as it is said in Islam. On the surface level, Ramadan is a ritual observation to bring us together in rhythm, back toward a shared story. Like the great hand of God sweeping all the strands of velvet in the same direction, we’re being smoothed into a godly orientation: there is a world beyond ourselves. Nested within that is another story, a story that is almost entirely lost and forgotten in the memory of Islam.

Ramadan is a spiritual technology protecting us from what we can’t see beyond the warmth and comfort of our lives. In a world that covets immediacy and materialism, Ramadan is a looking-glass for our dulled eyes.