I can't say that hunger has ever been much of a problem for me in fasting from the time I began, around a decade and a half ago. But I do remember eating with great enthusiasm - okay, greed, to be honest - once it was time to break the fast. I still feel a measure of enthusiasm these days, but it's easy to restrain it, and I can't recall the last time I overdid it in the evening enough to feel some of the effects the next day. So fasting has never been that difficult for me in terms of the problem of hunger.
I'm apt to think of this in rather self-righteous terms, assuming a kind of superiority on these grounds. But it usefully occurred to me earlier today that actually I've got it the wrong way round. If I'd have had to fast as a child or a teenager, dealing with hunger would have been a big problem. In those days simply skipping dinner (the Manchester word for lunch) would have been a big event. And what dinners they were! When I was working at Rotunda aged seventeen the works canteen provided a huge plateful and it was hardly enough to satisfy.
So it doesn't take much imagination to appreciate the real difficulties Muslim youngsters must face in dealing with days of deep longing for those satisfying heaps of grub that provide the necessary fuel for young bodies. And they get on with this, in my experience at least, with nary a word of complaint.
The oddly counter-intuitive point in all this is that somehow the challenge the fast poses does ennoble as well as enable. Nobility, of course, is sadly out of fashion these days (a point Gai Eaton develops with depth and supreme vigour in Reflections on Islam) but it doesn't alter the fact that there's real nobility in the sacrifices these youngsters are making on a daily basis.
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