Ramadan as a month is a reconfiguring, a detox from the world, a parallel time that exists alongside the rest of the world, but changing what we as Muslims prioritise, and why. In that sense, it is a decolonial time, writes Asim Qureshi. [GETTY]
My wife and I are the type of people who always prefer to be on time for things – as much as that is possible in the humdrum of London life. Sometimes, the anxiety to be on time can backfire, as we found out when attending a party for my cousin’s nuptials. On arriving at her family home, she asked us (semi-jokingly), what kind of shameless people turn up at the time of the invitation card? I think about that moment, because there is a running joke within some communities, that time keeping isn’t a specific time, it’s a cultural vibe that has to be understood within a specific cultural context.
I had further cause to think on this recently as I returned from a trip to Doha, where I was interviewing various witnesses for work. Colleagues I travel with from the US and UK are used to me setting up specific dates and times for interviews in advance of meetings I arrange in the West, but have slowly learnt that those rules don’t necessarily apply when travelling to the Muslim world.
In over twenty years of travelling to meet Muslim witnesses in the East, there has been a fairly consistent practice of offering timings for meetings that are connected to prayer times – often requesting that we meet at a specific mosque before we move elsewhere.
Timekeeping of meetings are so closely connected to the five daily prayers. I’m told, let’s meet at such and such mosque “b’ad Asr” or “b’ad Isha” (after the mid-afternoon prayer, or after the night prayer) – an alternate way of thinking about what it means to meet for sure.
As I walked towards the most recent meeting in Doha, I already had this article in mind. Here I was, ostensibly for work purposes, looking to meet with an important witness, but I’m invited to partake in congregational prayer as prelude to the meeting.
The idea of meeting first, for the purposes of fulfilling an obligatory prayer, to benefit from the extra reward of praying in congregation, to pray in a mosque in a foreign land, and to connect the meeting to a blessed act, was something I hadn’t really considered before. More than that, it struck me that the very notion of renegotiating such meetings around prayer times was something unique in itself, especially in a world where a twenty-four-hour clock so specifically dictates how our daily timekeeping is organised.
Day and night
As we enter the holy month of Ramadan, this idea of an alternate timekeeping takes on an entirely different meaning. Although the abstention is mostly associated with food and drink, it also relates to abstention in every other part of life – changing our behaviour in a month that is transformative in ways that are sometimes difficult to describe.
Often, we can only resort to the word barakah – blessings – as a way of describing this alternative time period that Muslims transition into for Ramadan.
Eating and drinking are relegated to the hours that one cannot see the sun – the most explicit time shift in the day. You wake from your sleep before the pre-sunrise prayer enters, ‘breakfast’ to initiate the fast – whereas it’s the sunset meal that becomes the breaking of the fast. No longer is the day’s consumption tied to cultural notions of morning, afternoon and evening meals, but rather tied to an act of worship – of abstaining to cleanse the soul (and hopefully the body too if you can stay away from all the ghee).
Most people think of the fasting day as being where the essence of Ramadan lies – in the chosen absence of things that are habitual. But it’s really nighttime where we enter into a parallel timekeeping – one in which prayer, both private and congregational, changes our relationship with the night. In the Qur’an, we are told by Allah that He created the night for rest and the day for living, but Ramadan has its own rules: nights are for seeking blessings and forgiveness from Allah.
After the sunset meal, one might relax for a short time, perhaps read some Qur’an, before congregating back at the mosque for nighttime prayer which may last anywhere between one and half to two hours. Well over a billion Muslims across the world gather across every single time zone through the twenty-four-hour day to come together to pray behind an imam who will take them through the Qur’an and it’s message of guidance to Muslims.
For many Muslims, this coming together will often turn into a more private relationship with Allah, as they wake in the third part of the night when Allah has informed us that He descends to the lowest heaven from His throne to listen to our pleas – whatever we need in our lives, He encourages us to find Him in those hours. A practice called tahajjud – one that exists outside of Ramadan, but somehow takes on entirely new meaning in the month.
We forgo our sleep to find Him, but really to find ourselves – the quiet early hours of the morning – when the conversation is private, the pleas sincere, and the response always promised.
There is one particular night, Laylat-ul-Qadr, the Night of Power – when the Qur’an was first revealed to the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). Although there are differences as to when this night takes place, it produces its own temporal shift, we come into an entirely different sense of time, where praying in the night becomes an alternate state of being.
Needs of the soul
Ramadan as a month is a reconfiguring, a detox from the world, a parallel time that exists alongside the rest of the world, but changing what we as Muslims prioritise, and why. In that sense, it is a decolonial time – because the month forces us to change our behaviours away from the exigencies of capitalism, and towards the needs of our own souls.
The Turkish author Ahmed Hamdi Tanpinar was concerned about the obsession of Ataturk with Western timekeeping in his remarkable dystopian sci-fi novel The Time Regulation Institute. He witnessed the erection of grand clocktowers across the new secular Turkey and worried about emphasis on using such time keeping to increase ‘efficiencies’ – compartmentalising time into units that served the purpose of capitalist production. He wrote:
‘A young girl dressed like an airline stewardess flashed me a syrupy smile and, like a spider, spun a web all around me. She adjusted my wristwatch before I could even take it off. Of course, the adjustment was incorrect, as she set it according to her own. And all the while she droned on about timepieces and their role in society, saying things a hundred tunes more idiotic than I had ever heard, always with the same saccharine smile plastered on her face; she even answered my questions and went on about the regulation of cosmic time, making a point of never allowing the conversation to move toward any topic that didn’t have to do with watches or time.’
I agree with Tanpinar’s concerns – that timekeeping in modernity has become so tied to the notion of production that finding contentment becomes something that one has to timetable into their day – apps and smart watches reminding us to breathe, to meditate, to reflect.
Ramadan offers an opportunity to decolonise our timekeeping as we change our habits to connect to the divine – to find blessings, forgiveness and sakinah (bliss) in a world that makes demands on us. As the month changes the way Muslims conceive of time, it becomes a moment to disinvest from ways of being that centre the world, away from consciousness of the Divine.
Dr Asim Qureshi is the Research Director of the advocacy group CAGE and has authored a number of books detailing the impact of the global War on Terror.
Follow him on Twitter: @AsimCP
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.
