26 March 2024

Empathetic Fasting: What I learned from my Islamic friends

by Carl McRoy | 26 March 2024 |

He was running everywhere. He was running from home to school, running from school to his afterschool job, from his job back home. Running while wearing extra clothes, a sweatsuit under a sauna suit. Or was the sweatsuit over the sauna suit? Either way, Louden Swain was running for more than just fitness, for more than mere endurance. He was a wrestler running to cut weight, running to drop weight, to make weight, to be the best by beating the best.

Of course, this weight loss regimen involved fasting, according to the crudest connotation of the word. That’s the kind of fasting I practiced after watching Vision Quest with the rest of the wrestling team gathered at the coach’s house. I wasn’t big enough or fast enough to make it on the high school football team. I wasn’t coordinated enough to make the basketball team. However, I had been personally recruited by the wrestling coach to join his team. If the cost of success was extra running, extra sweating, and even fasting, then I was ready to pay.

There wasn’t any spiritual, ethical, or empathetic purpose to my fasting. It was pretty much the opposite of all that. I wanted to be a lean, mean wrestling machine, so I could have my hand raised by the ref after pinning the other guy’s shoulders to the mat.

I had some fun and moderate success, but far from movie material.

Christian fasting

I later practiced versions of fasting I learned from different religious traditions, but we’ll just stick with a couple of the Abrahamic ones here.

Closest to home was Christianity, American Christianity, where fasting seemed to be individualized and commodified. It was about having a closer personal connection with God and adding intensity to prayers when looking for specific answers. If nothing else, it increased focus on prayer by eliminating the distractions from preparing meals and cleaning up afterward. My growling belly was a reminder to pray some more.

There’s a danger with an unbalanced focus on fasting as a key to our vertical connection with God. As Dr. Otis Moss III points out, if our Christianity only pursues a vertical relationship with God while neglecting horizontal relationships with God’s image bearers, we don’t have a cross – we have a stick. A stick that’s only good for beating people. I noticed this in others when it came to fasting. I began to notice it in myself as well. Contrary to the teachings of Jesus, I prided myself on fasting. It didn’t start that way, but fasting became as competitive as wrestling. There had to be something more, something better.

Islamic fasting

It was the ’90s—the 1990s:

Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” video prominently featuring Malcolm X posters
Public Enemy’s sampling of Malcolm X in “Can’t Truss It”
And Spike Lee’s Malcolm X movie

All sparked renewed interest in Islam.

What intrigued me even more was Hakeem Olajuwon. The rather soft-spoken and oft-smiling, 7-foot center for the Houston Rockets won back-to-back NBA championships. With his success came lucrative endorsement offers, some of which he declined based on his faith. Olajuwon refused deals that would have kids clamoring for overpriced shoes they couldn’t afford just because they had his name.

The other thing that grabbed my attention was the recurring concern about his energy and endurance during Ramadan. What’s Ramadan? Why would a religious holiday affect his game performance?

My oversimplified explanation* is that Ramadan is a month-long Muslim observance of the revelation of the Quran to Muhammad. It is a time for worship, prayer, study, introspection, and fasting.

A whole month of fasting? Yes, with some exceptions. The fasting is from food and drink during the day, from dawn until dusk. Eating is allowed before dawn and after dusk, with accompanying rituals to keep Muslims mindful of the season they’re in.

Empathetic fasting

I didn’t become a Muslim. I was an outsider, learning from Muslim friends and studying recommended books. I practiced the dawn-to-dusk fasting for prolonged periods (not always during Ramadan).

I learned that one of the primary character traits Ramadan is supposed to develop is empathy with society’s most vulnerable. The hunger I feel by choice is to put me in touch with those who are hungry by circumstance. That’s probably why I felt it in my belly when a cook at a charity I volunteer for said, “Our job is to feed them, not fatten them up.”

Does this mean that people living in Muslim societies have more equitable practices and outcomes than non-Muslims? That’s not mine to answer and it misses the point.

What’s important is that I began experiencing a higher level of fasting. My wrestling background empowers me to apply strong discipline to my spiritual fasting. Following Jesus has confirmed to me that fasting can indeed open the heart and mind to communion with God that casual approaches don’t affect. I can better feel the plight of the poor because of the emphasis I learned from Islam. Seeing things from another perspective helped me to review and appreciate my own scriptures with new eyes, like this passage from Isaiah 58:3-7, NIV:

“‘Why have we fasted,’ they say,
‘and you have not seen it?
Why have we humbled ourselves,
and you have not noticed?’

“Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please
and exploit all your workers.
Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife,
and in striking each other with wicked fists.
You cannot fast as you do today
and expect your voice to be heard on high.
Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
only a day for people to humble themselves?
Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed
and for lying in sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call a fast,
a day acceptable to the Lord?

“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?
Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?”

(*If you want to know more about Ramadan, ask an imam or the internet, but we’re not going to argue the details here.)

Carl McRoy is an ordained minister in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, host of Message magazine’s “Your Liberation Library,” and author of Yell at God and Live, R U Tuff Enuff? and Impediments to Power. He enjoys quality time with family, posing as an amateur historian, and shooting pool.