With word reaching America today that the new moon has been
sighted in Saudi Arabia, for much of the world’s billion plus population of
Muslims, today marks the final day of Ramadan, the month long fast that is one
of the five pillars of the faith of Islam.
In the nearly forty 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.
What I learned as
I first began to explore the religion was that there is a twelve 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, with its delving
spiritually and scientifically into the wonders and mystery of the cosmos.
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
this month over fourteen millenniums 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 fourteen hundred 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, and over the next twenty-two 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, with
Ramadan occurring during the spring and then winter of the Bush I presidency,
the winter and then fall of the Clinton years, the fall of Bush II’s two terms,
and the summer of the Obama era.
I don’t recall exactly what was occurring with Reagan and
his administration in the seventh month of his presidency, a sizzling July summer
month that was my first Ramadan, as I was more focused on trying to adhere to the
requirements of the fast, studying for the bar exam, and becoming for the first
time a father. I do recall unmistakably,
though, this foreboding sense of almost imminent doom by black folks that
Reagan would roll back and reverse every single civil rights advance, law, and
policy achieved in the 60’s and 70’s that he could.
In the sixth
month of his presidency, Trump, a fomenter of Muslim fear and arguably the
preeminent ruler on the planet, finds himself in the ninth month of the lunar
calendar. On this apparently final day
of this holy month, fourteen hundred and thirty-eight 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.
Eric E. Vickers,
Attorney-at-Law & Civil Rights Activist.
Attorney-at-Law & Civil Rights Activist.
