Fasting is the first guest of my pen's new homeland. Just as happens every year, the time has come and the clock's miraculous alarm has sounded: we saw the non-aging, ever-fresh, ever-bright moon on the horizon as a fine, silver bow. We suddenly realized how much we missed this angel of love that has been a friend of our spirit since the beginning of time. Like a fine, silver reed, the moon made its debut, but we were already prepared for it anyway.
The auspicious sign of the sky, the moon appeared silently and humbly like a guest with the immortal nature of Khidir and it sowed the first seed of fasting in us and society. Then every evening when the sound of the cannon breaks the fast and the night takes its first grey breath in the West and the dinner table has become like a repast in the sky and opened its bank of abundance in front of us from unseen sources and after we have put the first olive in our mouth and brought to our mouths the first glass of water which has been illuminated as if it has been inoculated with zamzam, suddenly our eyes see that the moon has grown.
And throughout the month we will see every evening that the external moon and the moon in our breast have grown and that the internal moon in our heart, fasting, has grown.
On the first day of fasting there is a tiny white spot on our darkened hearts; it is a fine line like a new moon. It is a whiteness beginning in one corner of our heart. But just as the moon waxes in the sky each night, at first as big as a pomegranate seed, it becomes the size of a heart and then expanding with the cleansing of fasting as days pass by, all hearts become bright like a mirror and they reflect one another. Purified from the things that separate them externally, they will meet in the spirit of Islamic society and become one heart. Melting into one another and uniting, the hearts of Muslims become one heart as big as the full moon.
Separating the true from the false like a knife, the month of fasting brought by the Quran (one of its names is Furqan: that which separates good from evil) chooses and separates sharply and decisively the believer from the non-believer, the white from the black, the essence of the afterlife from the foam of this world. The Islamic personality will rise before mankind and on his horizon like the spiritual personality's unattainable and indestructible walls.
Fasting is a fortunate blessing and a trust bestowed upon this ummah which separates and makes different the living from the dead, the animate from the inanimate. It is a trust of fire that saves the spirit of a believing man from the oppression of dark spirits and lightens it up like a new moon, and burns doubt, suspicion, the heaviness of agitation that envelopes blessing, and strangling irritation. It is a trust that comes like fire. It is such a trust that as soon as it comes, it begins to make us take possession of our other trusts. It makes our house a home; it makes an alienated city our own city; it marks our limbs with the celestial stamp; and it frees our spirit from slavery.
It is news of the taste of death before dying. It is news not only of movement, but of the eyes that see the wisdom of movement. It is news of ears that go back and forth to hearts between closed walls, which hear the cries of the poor that do not filter out of the houses and records the ebb and flow of their pain.
At night when the lights of houses begin to come on for the meal before sunrise, it looks like preparation for celebration. The awakening of spirits that accompanies fasting is a celebration just like the lights coming on before dawn one by one; when one lights up it calls up the other. Fasting is a celebration of spirits.
Together with the hardly perceptible moon, fasting is an annual civilization, a gift that raises our consciousness, a gift of the Prophet, a miracle of renewal, pain and fear for those squirming in the darkness of denial, hope and glad tidings for those who are running towards and are thirsty for the light, a celestial vaccination to the world, a divine page whose time has come, a consolation and security for the heart, and a light and abundance that surrounds our daily sustenance.
Then, give abundance to our hearts, O Ramadan!
Fortunate Ramadan which comes like the "Holy Spirit" to our spirits!
O evening adhan for the propitious fast which comes like a disciple of the end of time during 20th century evenings!
Rise one more time from the galleries of minarets!
Rise one more time, o adhan of the end of time!
