Ramadan Food Quotes

Humility is my table, respect is my garment, empathy is my food and curiosity is my drink. As for love, it has a thousand names and is by my side at every window.

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.

God takes note of His creatures’ true intentions. The Lord favors a man who intends to fast during Ramadan over a man who fasts because he can’t find food to eat anyway. Because one of them means it, while the other one doesn’t.

One day a Muslim friend and I were out for the day together. I had forgotten that the Fast of Ramadan had just begun and suggested that we step into a restaurant for a cup of coffee. “I will spend years in jail for that cup of coffee,” he said, so of course I apologized for the suggestion. Then in low tones he admitted that his fast was restricted to public view and that he did not practice it in private. “I cannot work ten hours a day without eating,” he said. There was an awkward silence, and he muttered these words: “I don’t think God is the enforcer of these rules.” As anyone knows who has asked any Muslim, they will admit with a smile upon their faces that during the month of the Fast of Ramadan more food is sold than during any other month of the year. But its consumption takes place from dusk to dawn rather than from dawn to dusk. Legalism always breeds compliance over purpose. In

Ramadan is not fasting. Ramadan is an Islamic feast where one stuffs oneself twice a day with food, and in between lets ones intestines dry out. To describe that process as 'fasting' seems rather ubiquitous to me. The amount of food transported into the body is probably exactly the same, but because of the dehydration the food is processed less effectively. As customs go, most customs are typically silly and Ramadan is no exception. I can accept such silliness when people keep it to themselves, but unfortunately one sees such a sharp rise in 'policing' others that even non Muslims are now experiencing violence because they are eating at daytime in the Ramadan period.

We will be making pancakes. Oh, not for now, of course. But for later, we have crêpes aux mille trous, and harira soup, with lemons and dates. At Ramadan, everyone fasts, but we think about food all the time; we buy food, we prepare food, we offer food to our neighbors, we even dream of food- that is, if this wind allows us to sleep. I will bring some Moroccan sweets; some macaroons, and gazelle's horns, and almond meringues, and chebakia.

Until the war had broken out, there had been some sort of order in the strange and complex mixture of the four disparate peoples crowded into the little valley, all calling themselves Bosnians. They celebrated separate holidays, ate different foods, feasted and fasted on different days, yet all depended on one another, but never admitted it. They had lived amidst an ever present, if dormant, mixture of hatred and love for each other. The Muslims with their Ramadan, the Jews with Passover, the Catholics with Christmas, and the Serbs with their Slavas- each of them tacitly tolerated and recognised the customs and existence of others. With suckling pigs turned on spits in Serbian houses, giving off a mouth-watering fragrance, kosher food would be eaten in Jewish homes, and in Muslim households, meals were cooked in suet. There was a certain harmony in all this, even if there was no actual mixing. The aromas had long ago adjusted to one another and had given the city its distinctive flavor. Everything was "as God willed it." But it was necessary to remove only one piece of that carefully balanced mosaic and that whole picture would fall into its component parts which would then, rejoined in an unthinkable manner, create hostile and incompatible entities. ‏Like a hammer, the war had knocked out one piece, disrupting the equilibrium.

For hundreds of years, the church would fast twice a week: Wednesdays and Fridays. That was just what you did if you were a Christian. In the fourth century, when the church developed the practice of Lent, it was originally a fast similar to Islam’s Ramadan. As a lead-up to Easter, followers of Jesus would wake and go without food until sunset. For forty days. Every year. Please note: go without food.

Islam calls for a daytime fast from food and drink for the entire month of Ramadan. Most Muslim women participate even while pregnant; it’s not a round-the-clock fast, after all. Still, as Almond and Mazumder found by analyzing years’ worth of natality data, babies that were in utero during Ramadan are more likely to exhibit developmental aftereffects. The magnitude of these effects depends on which month of gestation the baby is in when Ramadan falls. The effects are strongest when fasting coincides with the first month of pregnancy, but they can occur if the mother fasts at any time up to the eighth month.

The risk is magnified when Ramadan falls during summertime because there are more daylight hours—and, therefore, longer periods without food and drink.

Until the war had broken out, there had been some sort of order in the strange and complex mixture of the four disparate peoples crowded into the little valley, all calling themselves Bosnians. They celebrated separate holidays, ate different foods, feasted and fasted on different days, yet all depended on one another, but never admitted it. They had lived amidst an ever present, if dormant, mixture of hatred and love for each other. The Muslims with their Ramadan, the Jews with Passover, the Catholics with Christmas, and the Serbs with their Slavas- each of them tacitly tolerated and recognised the customs and existence of others. With suckling pigs turned on spits in Serbian houses, giving off a mouth-watering fragrance, kosher food would be eaten in Jewish homes, and in Muslim households, meals were cooked in suet. There was a certain harmony in all this, even if there was no actual mixing. The aromas had long ago adjusted to one another and had given the city its distinctive flavor. Everything was "as God willed it." But it was necessary to remove only one piece of that carefully balanced mosaic and that whole picture would fall into its component parts which would then, rejoined in an unthinkable manner, create hostile and incompatible entities. ‏Like a hammer, the war had knocked out one piece, disrupting the equilibrium. Wartime turned differences into outright hatred and instead of blaming the foreign enemy for all their hardships, people blamed their nearest neighbours, which, in turn, represented an invaluable favour to the true enemy of all.

Another great Sufi Master, Bayazid Bistami, deliberately picked up and ate a piece of food, breaking his fast, during Ramadan (the month of fasting), in order to scandalize his students, and cause the unworthy to leave him alone. Very many well-read students of Sufism are highly familiar with stories such as this, but when they come across a Master who acts in unexpected and surprising ways, they run away. This is precisely the opposite of what all their reading taught them is the correct course of action in such situations.

Almost all hard cultures have some ritual focused on voluntary self-denial, such as Ramadan, Lent, or the Fast of the Firstborn. The question is, why? Why do cultures that practice something that makes membership less pleasant historically outcompete cultures that encourage people to indulge in whatever they want? This question becomes more pointed when we look at how common it is for pop cultures to emotionally reward people for succumbing to their base desires, as is seen in pop culture outputs like the Intuitive Eating Movement, which entails telling people they are being healthy by eating whatever they want whenever they want in an age in which we’re surrounded with an abundance of foods that are designed to be highly addictive. Movements telling people to indulge in their immediate desires have been around since the ancient Greeks. These movements resurface during every civilization’s brief golden age and only seem to be successful in the short run. While the pop cultures that produce them consistently die, stodgy hard cultures persist. Why?

In 2015, Chicago police attacked a Muslim woman wearing a headscarf and a face veil, suspicious of the food she was carrying in her purse to break her fast during Ramadan. They ripped the hijab off her head and strip-searched her, on video, which they then later released to the public. This wasn’t just a random act of security. There is a feeling of entitlement to brown women’s bodies, and her strip search—already an exertion of power over women—was compounded not just as an act of sexual humiliation, but also a racial one because of her ostensible religious identity.

I remember having a conversation with a teacher who could not figure out why her relationship with her African American students felt strained. She was especially troubled that several African American girls in her class had refused to participate in a mask-making activity in which the kids placed plaster strips across their face all the way up to their hairline. One girl spoke up and told the teacher that her mother would be upset with her if she got water or the grainy plaster in her hair. The teacher causally dismissed their concerns and insisted they do the activity along with everyone else. The teacher was unfamiliar with the significance of hair in African American culture—how it’s cared for, its connection to self-esteem and self-expression. In turn, she missed an opportunity to affirm the students’ cultural needs by simply making scarves available in the classroom when doing activities with water, sand, or any other substance that might mess up their hair. Whether it’s being insensitive to Muslim students fasting during Ramadan by having a class party with food and drink or ignoring a low-income family’s ability to provide money for a field trip, these small actions chip away at trust and personal regard that are at the core of authentic relationships. This lack of care leads to mistrust, which, over time, can put students (and parents) on the defensive. This underlying mistrust is the reason some parents seem antagonistic. They become defensive and protective based on the perception that the teacher doesn’t care.

Religious believers build self-control by regularly forcing themselves to interrupt their daily routines in order to pray. Some religions, like Islam, require prayers at fixed times every day. Many religions prescribe periods of fasting, like the day of Yom Kippur, the month of Ramadan, and the forty days of Lent. Religions mandate specific patterns of eating, like kosher food or vegetarianism. Some services and meditations require the believer to adopt and hold specific poses (like kneeling, or sitting cross-legged in the lotus position) so long that they become uncomfortable and require discipline to maintain them.