In the nearly 40 years since I decided to embrace the faith, each year within the Muslim world – known as the Uuma – both the end and the beginning of Ramadan have been sources of mild controversy and conflict because its time and length depend on the moon.
There is a 12-month calendar followed by Muslims and a great many in the world whose months are determined by the rotations of the moon around the earth – the lunar calendar – rather than the earth’s revolving around the sun – the solar calendar, which America and most of the world uses. I found fascinating the discussions about the planets, their orbits, and the entire cosmic universe contained in the Muslim Holy Book, the Qur’an.
Ramadan is the ninth month of the lunar calendar, with each year the months evolving according to the moon, rather than being the fixed calendar dates of the solar calendar, with the result that the months of the two twelve month calendars do not coincide. The ninth month of the lunar calendar this year happens to be the sixth month of the solar calendar, June, meaning that Ramadan this year fell in the longest days of our calendar year 2017.
Meaning that during this month of June, from the time of dawn to dusk – about 4:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. – Muslims could neither drink anything to quench their thirst nor eat anything to satisfy their hunger. Over a billion humans become for a month each year nocturnal creatures, as their normal bodily need for fluids and food can only be met during the night, mostly sleepless nights, occupied by prayer and scripture reading.
This physiological process that Ramadan puts the human being through rests on a spiritual underpinning. It was during June over 14 millennia ago that a new religion came into the world, Islam, which translated in Arabic means submission to God. Although the state of the world today is obviously vastly different than 1,400 years ago when the founder of the faith began his mission to teach to the Arabs and all mankind what all the prophets who had preceded him had taught – i.e. monotheism, one God – today in America, Muslims suffer near the same peril of public and authoritarian threat as the founder and his few followers faced then.
He confronted the rulers of his time with the idea that there was an all-powerful unseen creator and ruler over the universe whose power exceeded theirs. He warned that if they did not end their unjust and oppressive ways, God would take them to task. Some six centuries after the death of Jesus Christ, this mortal middle-aged man, uniquely named Muhammad, began speaking aloud, while alone in a cave during Ramadan, words that came to his tongue as a revelation.
Over the next 22 years that were the remainder of his life, he recited publicly words that were verses and stories – poetic, practical, inspirational and instructional – that came to him. These words, Muslims believe, were the Word of God that Muhammad was called upon by Allah – the Arabic word for God – to recite and have recorded in writing as an unchangeable and imperishable book, the Qur’an, which translated in Arabic means recitation.
Since my first Ramadan in 1981, and because of the nature of the lunar calendar to unfold in the opposite direction of the solar calendar, I have experienced the fast through all the seasons and their varying hours of daylight and darkness, and through all the rulers from Reagan to Trump.
In the sixth month of his presidency, Trump, a fomenter of Muslim fear, found himself in the ninth month of the lunar calendar. Now 1,438 years after Muhammad fled for his life from Mecca to Medina, Muslims in the millions in America in 2017 find themselves having endured fasting during the longest days of daylight and shortest days of darkness of the year – a reminder to them that power rests with God.
