Charity In Ramadan Quotes

Islam has been built on five pillars: testifying that there is no god but God, and that Muhammad is the Messenger of God; saying prayers; paying the prescribed charity (zakat); making the pilgrimage to the House of God in Makkah and fasting in the month of Ramadan.

1. Have faith in the one God, Allah, and Muhammad, His Prophet; 2. Pray five times a day; 3. Fast during the day for the entire ninth month of Ramadan; 4. Provide charity; 5. Make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime, if possible.

Tomorrow is the start of Ramadan, a month of daily fasting, broken by an iftar, a special meal after sunset and a bite before sunrise. Han has told her that the idea behind the fast of Ramadan is to remind everyone of the poor and less fortunate, a time of charity, compassion, abstinence, and forgiveness. And even though Um-Nadia claims to have no religion and many of their customers are Christians, they all like to eat the traditional foods prepared throughout the Middle East to celebrate the nightly fast-breaking during Ramadan. There are dishes like sweet qatayif crepes and cookies and creamy drinks and thick apricot nectar.

We do not pray, fast, or give charity because Allah needs it, but because our spirits need to be in the presence of the Divine light to blossom. We are seeds, we are infinite potential hidden in the garden of a body, waiting to awaken through the mercy of Allah’s light.

He also told me of the five obligations Muslims have to fulfill in their lives: to believe in Allah as the one true God, to offer namaz or prayer five times every day, to fast during the month of Ramadan, to give in charity to the deprived, and to perform Hajji—the pilgrimage to Mecca—at least once in life.

A secularist but not an atheist, he used the example of the Prophet, who according to tradition did not fast in Ramadan during wartime, to argue against fasting during Ramadan any time the Tunisian people were engaged in the new collective jihad against economic stagnation, because fasting hindered performance. This led to one of the most extraordinary, but little-known, moments of Arab political theater. In a live television interview aired during the Ramadan fasting hours, Bourguiba paused, turned to the camera, and took a long, symbolic swig from a glass of orange juice. There was, however, nothing symbolic in his promotion of secular virtues. He replaced the sharia legal system with civil courts, abolished the independent system of Islamic charity called the waqf, brought the mosques and their imams under state control and had their doors locked outside of prayer times, outlawed proselytizing, and in 1981 officially banned the wearing of the veil (he famously called it an “odious rag”) in schools and in government institutions in an attempt to phase it out of Tunisian society completely.

Ramadan, the faithful are known to block streets, driveways, and fire-hydrants with their parked cars, and trample across neighborhood yards while approaching the mosque on foot. If, as apologists maintain, jihad really is the internal struggle to become a better person, one wonders why manners seem to degrade as Muslim numbers increase. But wait—if jihad is actually about struggling to implement sharia as the necessary precondition to Islamicizing a society, it all makes perfect sense. The overflow parking situation became intolerable in Falls Church, and to ease it somewhat, neighboring churches offered the use of their lots in an overture of Christian charity. Predictably, Abdul-Malik accepted the ecumenical gesture as a concession. “If Islam really catches on in the area,” he smirked to Sperry, “maybe the neighborhood churches will come over lock, stock, and barrel, and we can all share our parking lots.”8 Islamists are happy to expand Islam’s American enclaves one