Wednesday, August 3, 2011

A Question Of Will

3 Ramadhan 1432

Last year someone, a non-Muslim friend, said to me, apropos of the fasting I was undergoing, You have great will power. I understood why they said this, but was also aware that it wasn't really true, not in this situation anyway.

The experience of fasting doesn't seem to be about individual will. After all, there's nothing the individual actually does. Fasting entails becoming part of something else that goes beyond volition. You're part of something a lot bigger than yourself - on a simple level a body of millions of sisters and brothers, some mere children, engaged in the same exercise. It's true that you must have intention - without the niat the fasting is invalid anyway - but it curiously doesn't seem to be personal intention in the usual sense.

I remember the first time I ever fasted thinking, I've never done, never experienced anything remotely like this before. What was true then remains so in quite a different fashion.

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