Countdown

10 Ramadhan 1432

We're now a whole third of the way through the fasting! But who's counting? Well me, obviously, which is more than a bit childish and sort of sad really.

Fundamentally Flawed

9 Ramadhan 1432

That there is a huge problem underlying the arguments in The God Delusion is admitted by Dawkins in the preface to the paperback edition. He terms it, referring to criticisms he faced regarding the first edition, the great 'straw man' offensive and, sadly, he's right, though he tells us that those he is attempting to criticise are too dangerous to be straw men (chaps like the egregious Pat Robertson and the even more egregious Osama bin Laden and the Ayatollah Khomeini) and that the vast majority of believers around the world essentially think in such terms. How he knows what that vast majority believe and how they believe it is never made quite clear, but he's very good at sneering at them so presumably this gives him some rare form of scientific insight based on instinct rather than empirical data.

Now the problem is that even if one were to accept the prof's arguments in these terms, his many fans seem to think he has produced knock-down arguments regarding the very folk he clearly states he is not taking issue with. Just a quick example from one of the blurbs quoted on the inside page of my edition: The God Delusion is a good, strong argumentative challenge to any thoughtful believer with the courage to read it with care and try to dispute it. Well, no it isn't in its own terms because it simply doesn't address 'thoughtful believers'. The prof with admirable honesty tells us, regarding the theology of unexceptionable coves as Tillich and Bonhoeffer: If only such subtle, nuanced religion predominated, the world would surely be a better place, and I would have written a different book. Then he tells us this kind of religion is numerically negligible.

So I'm not reading a book that in any real sense deals with my understanding of religious belief or that of any 'thoughtful believer'. And the bigger problem is that I don't think that Dawkins's view of the key features of religious thought actually apply to most of the people of various faiths I've known in my life. He appears to look down on 'ordinary' believers with the scorn that only the truly clever and even more obtuse can muster. Yet I knew as a young teenager that the religious beliefs of, say, my Auntie Norah, a devout Catholic in the simplest sense, were actually a lot more complex and 'thoughtful' than the obvious dogmas of her faith (a truth that applied to every working class Catholic I knew, and there were a lot of them.)

Don't make the mistake of assuming that people who don't sound much like they can think aren't full of thought.

A Sense of Wonder

8 Ramadhan 1432

It's a funny thing but there's something about Prof Dawkins I find very likable, despite the fact that he's obviously a very irritating and irritable chap. I remember seeing one of his televised lectures and responding to his abundant enthusiasm for the biological marvels around us and his ability to convey a sense of just how marvellous those marvels are.

By far the best bits of The God Delusion deal with precisely those areas and they often shine. It's a pity they are just bits though.

Another Long Week

7 Maghrib 1432

Completed Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers yesterday. Ironically I'd been labouring over it for a month. There's some good writing - a wondeful description of the various fish to be found in the river early on the journey promised wonders to come - but quite a bit of tedious stuff - a section on friendship lost me completely and I wasn't overly keen to concentrate enough to find out what Henry David was chundering on about. Originally I thought I'd get the book finished before fasting month, but that was not to be. Then I thought of abandoning it for a while, but realised I'd not have the momentum to ever pick it up again if I did so. And, curiously, I'm still keen to move on to Walden next month - I'm guessing it'll be more fish than philosophy.

Also about to finish Dawkins's The God Delusion this evening. I cheated a bit here, having started it before fasting month. Much better than the Hitchens's offering on the same lines, but can't say it had a dramatic impact on me intellectually since I reckon I'd thought through most of the issues raised when I was in my teens. In fact, it struck me as an excellent book for inquiring teenagers, assuming they realise, as I'm pretty sure most would, that the strength of argument varies wildly in quality.

A Long Week

6 Maghrib 1432

Actually it's not been a full week since fasting began, but it's certainly felt like one. And that's a good thing. The sensation of time slowing is familiar, and welcome. I always seem to have a lot more minutes on my hands during Ramadhan. The hour leading to Maghrib is invariably snail-like in its progression (and I'm talking an elderly snail here, not the youthful variety brimming with the snail equivalent of vim) and then the period afterwards, when one is free to eat and drink as one pleases, takes on a life of its own, like a day within the day.

To some degree I've been dealing with a double whammy this week. Unusually fasting began on a Monday of a full week of work, which meant having to deal with its rigours in the workplace immediately. And then I had to deal with the wall I always hit following the conclusion of a production. The strangely manic energy one is blessed with in the final intense rehearsals dissipates, taking along with it all one's normal reserves But it's quite straightforward dealing with the sensation of running on empty: you just keep going, with the odd nap here and there to remind you there's precious little to keep going with.

Packed

5 Ramadhan 1432

Got to prayers at the mosque at Clementi today a good five minutes before the azan, and the place was already packed. The queue for taking the ablution was in itself pretty daunting and after negotiating that I was lucky enough to find a place on the concrete with a prayer mat in front of me.

It's an extraordinary restful feeling to find a spot amid the multitude and know that you can do the necessary without disturbance. Paradoxically I often feel genuinely alone and somehow accountable in the crowd at prayers. Yet there's a powerful sense of community when all respond as one, and move as one.

Slow Time

4 Ramadhan 1432

Useful advice for anyone fasting: keep yourself busy. As long as I'm teaching, meeting students or the like, the time passes effortlessly. As soon as I stop, the monkey mind kicks in thinking, Now's just the time for the cup that cheers, to wash away the strain of it all. Doh!

Such moments will pass though, as the body tunes itself to the reality of the fast, at least I'm hoping so based on past experience. But that was then and this is now. Times change, even when they stay the same.

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.

On The Way

2 Ramadhan 1432

On one level the fast is an exercise in defamiliarisation, and a powerful one at that. A day at work when you can't grab a snack or a quick cup of tea is a radically different, less comfortable beast than the one with which one is on such friendly terms. But it has subtle qualities that are worth encountering.

It's like being taken to a different place without switching location. Or seeing where you are through new eyes.

Just The Start

1 Ramadhan 1432

I'd forgotten how tough fasting can be. Remembering is jarring, refreshing, enlightening.

The mercy of being able to do it all again is cause for great celebration in our little corner of the Hall.