Scorching Heat, Ash, and Forty Days Fast
Ramadan, Lent, and Walking the Talk
Hunger isn’t something most of the people reading this will have really confronted. At least the involuntary kind. Over the decades we’ve become more like grizzlies storing up reserves for a hibernation that never came - to the point where, for some, injecting GLP-1s is the only way to break decades of a twisted relationship with food and food systems1.
There was another way I discovered that did work: working in a Gulf country during Ramadan. 2
Between sunrise and sunset, no food or drink (even water, technically3), no smoking, no caffeine, nada. I worked at a foundation and was living in the budget hotel on the fringe of its campus. It was a pretty international bunch, with vast majority of colleagues observing the fast - though curtained kitchenettes were made available to non-Muslims to take their lunch or drink water.
Much to my colleagues’ surprise (and concern of family back home) I opted to observe the fast too. They were at pains to let me know it really wasn’t expected. But practically I thought it’d be better to be in sync. Whenever everyone else’s blood sugar was low, mine was likely not to be far behind or ahead.
Usually about 3 o’clock people would start to fade. Many workplaces close early or these days offer remote working. But my job didn’t often make that possible, so the few of us that were left in the office stuck on a call with another continent made sympathetic faces at each other while someone in New York or London meandered around whatever point we were struggling to make sense of by five.
Abstaining from water for 12 hours was more of a challenge, even in privileged white collar mostly air-conditioned environments, even for a campus built around what was an oasis, coming from Atlantic climates to the desert is a bit of shock. Ramadan derives from Arabic words al-ramad meaning “scorching heat”. That year, Ramadan was most of May and early June. That month’s temperature data:
In 2026, the start of Ramadan and Ash Wednesday both fell on 18th February - a timing that happens just once every 33 years thanks to the maths governing interactions between a solar calendar (the Gregorian) and 1.5 lunar (Islamic and Western Christian Easter) calendar movable feasts.
Lent and Ramadan have a lot in common. Though some followers of either tradition get annoyed if you imply the two didn’t arise independently, it’s that much more striking that both month or month-ish periods stress themes of reflection, repentance, reconciliation, and alms-giving.
They used to have even more in common with regard to fasting. Growing up in stable working class/lower middle class relative comfort in the US in the 70s, Lent meant picking something to ‘give up’ like chocolate - or meatless Fridays (which in our house meant pizza night, and as a guaranteed popular meal for us wasn’t really in the spirit of things).
In the years since it’s still sort of observed but generally nodded to as a cultural relic, seen if anything as a do-over to try and maybe pick up on some New Years’ resolutions that never quite got off the ground.4
But the practice of fasting has varied in the West over the centuries. Earliest practices were a little laxer, with fasting between Good Friday and Easter the norm. Not until the Council of Nicea (325 CE) was it firmly set as a 40-day period, meant to recall the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness before his ministry, itself a callback to Moses’ 40-day fast on Mount Sinai.
For some, the “Black Fast” - was (and for some communities still is) the norm on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. Quite similar to Ramadan fasting, it requires abstaining from all food and drink, breaking the fast with a plant-based meal after sunset.5
This year I’m following the Black Fast but for all 40 days, Ramadan style. It also means pretty much cutting out meat the whole time, plus dairy, eggs, and booze. I’m writing at the end of Day Two, but it’s already brought back memories of that first Ramadan in the desert.
By the end of the first week the hunger starts to be a presence. And being invited to an Iftar or two made me appreciate the Irish saying my Nana used to use, “Is maith an t-anlann an t-ocras.” (Hunger makes a good sauce.)
But the hunger serves other purposes, social and spiritual. All very well and good voluntarily forgoing calories or particular foods, but a practice of hunger-as-empathy (and solidarity) might give just the slightest idea what real food insecurity feels like. In one human lifetime we’ve gone from obesity being a rarity to, by some estimates, it being responsible for 3 times the number of deaths globally than starvation.
Climate chaos looks certain to tip those numbers back in the other direction in coming years. Uncertain harvests leading to extreme price volatility in things like cocoa and coffee now may soon see that kind of volatility in staples like rice, maize, and wheat. Supply chains optimised for efficiency across commodity sectors have already shown their fragility under relatively minor stresses. For a place like the UK that imports 60% of its food, even government reluctantly acknowledges it’s an emergent threat exacerbated by climate.
Forty days of consciously choosing to remind myself what sufficiency feels like, and what it feels like below that, I hope open the door to other reflections. Money that I would have spent on food or drink I don’t need can go towards donations to CAFOD or to UNRWA or Islamic Relief or the soup kitchen at my local homeless shelter, where I can also volunteer.
Pope Francis urged Catholics a return to more frequent fasting. A 2022 study from researchers at Cambridge University found that were he to have reinstated ‘meatless Fridays’ globally as something stronger than mere suggestion, it could have significant benefits in reducing carbon emissions. I hope Pope Leo considers taking it from a different angle, with the same co-benefit. As I’m reminded this week and for the next five weeks, there is something irreplaceable in the embodied experience of choosing to have less — and as others have found over the centuries I’m hoping that it’s a change of perspective that isn’t temporary.
Clash of the Ash
Cardinal Blase Cupich in Chicago, hometown of Pope Leo and seen as a key US ally amongst US Catholic bishops, yesterday celebrated an extraordinary Mass outside of an ICE detention facility outside of Chicago. And his message, in English and Spanish, was to comfort a scared community of migrants - many who have been afraid to leave their homes for weeks:
Our new immigrant friends know what it means to live in secret. You know the anxiety of the shadows. You know the silent fear of a knock at the door or a traffic stop. You know the quiet pain of weeping for family members far away whom you cannot visit. Jesus is telling you this night, I am here with you in the secret places.
God does not need papers to know where you are or who you are. When you cry in secret, he sees you. When you work hard for your children, he sees you. When you sacrifice your own comfort to send money back home, when you sacrifice to give alms in secret, he sees you.
The English portion is only about six minutes and is worth your time:
The Mass was organised initially to be followed potentially by a march to confront federal officials to demand that detainees be allowed to receive ashes and Communion. Which had been denied for months, despite repeated orders from judges overwhelmingly appointed by politicians who said they believed freedom to worship was a human right.
On Ash Wednesday, the US government relented and two priests and a nun were allowed to enter. Only to find that detainees had been mostly quietly removed prior to their arrival.
Rebellion Against The Tyranny of Time
Back in 2023, the Muslim-American writer and editor Romaissaa Benzizoune published a great essay about Eid (and Ramadan) in the New York Times where she was then working as an editorial fellow. (She’s now an
I read it some years after my time in the Gulf. There, almost everyone around me was immersed in Ramadan and Eid and the ordinary schedules of work and government and school bent to accommodate a holiday whose timing isn’t precisely known until someone in authority sees the moon in a certain phase. Growing up in Astoria in New York, for Romaissaa it was the inverse:
When you are a Muslim in America, you have many opportunities to consider the difference between your beliefs and those of the people around you. Taking time off to celebrate Eid al-Adha (or its sister holiday, Eid al-Fitr, which ends Ramadan) is one such opportunity. So is the beginning of Ramadan itself, the holy month during which many Muslims try to juggle fasting days and praying nights with regular work. Managing these obligations and the sacrifices they compel is a challenge that registers on a bodily level.
There are no Muslim federal holidays in the United States. Yes, it’s nice for presidents to wax poetic about how Eid al-Fitr “marks a new beginning for each individual.” But for Muslims who can’t afford or aren’t allowed to miss a day of work, Eid is just the “new beginning” of another eight-hour shift.
She closes with a meditation on that disconnection, and the feeling of missing out.
Every year, Eid al-Adha catches me by surprise. Unlike my ancestors, I do not have a conscious connection with the moon. I could not tell you where we are in its cycle. I do not know how its light moves through space, where it goes. Except for the occasional Muslim holiday, my time is no longer organized by a community of people looking above.
I find out when Eid is because my parents shoot me a text. And then it’s an opportunity to look up from the daily hustle. It’s a reminder, if not a suggestion: Maybe the schedule I think about every day isn’t the most important one. Maybe I’m also on another calendar, on a different timeline. In a different year entirely. I have all day to think about it.
In these forty days I plan to think about it too. The hunger is a good reminder of it. And that the constant disconnection doesn’t have to be this way.
Back soon.
A confession: after a heart scare not long after 50 my GP prescribed statins for the cholesterol but the weight of decades just wasn’t budging. So I took extreme measures and (other than the obligatory information to GP) told no one but an anonymous online pharmacy doctor that yes indeed I have a BMI that would qualify and so I’d like some fat jabs please. I was on them for close to a year and lost more than a quarter of my body weight.
In the hours before the religious authorities decided they could see the moon and declare the beginning of the Holy Month, fellow Western expats jam the international hotel bars and government-run off-licenses, guest construction workers from South Asia or workers from the Philippines had their own spots and shebeens and, rumour had it about more than one worker camp, pot stills with homemade hooch. All of which pretty much shut down for the season, which begins after cannons are fired seven times in sequence around town.
Exceptions tend to be made for medical reasons.
My wife and I bonded early over the shared belief that a short week of overeating and over-drinking followed by a month of abstinence in the darkest weeks of the year at high latitudes is not a recipe for mental well-being.
You can find plenty of online argument about which is more hardcore - the Ramadan fasting of traditional Islam or that of high medieval Christian Lent. Lent