Reading the therapeutic contract in the Quran

Day # 27

On fasting and the night of determination

Al Ghazali, 12th century Muslim scholar, wrote in his book, The revival of Religious Sciences, that there were three classes of fast.

1) fast of the general Muslims. It is to restrain oneself from eating and drinking and from sexual passion. This is the lowest kind of fast.

2) Fast of the few select Muslims. In this kind of fasting, besides the above things, one refrains himself from sins of hands, feet, sight and other limbs of body.

3) Fast of the elite. These people keep fast of mind. In other words, they do not think of anything else except God and the next world.

From a psychodynamic perspective, We can understand these, as three positions a Muslim assumes depending on his mindfulness of God. The first class are those who have fallen into habitual practice without depth. Habits create automatisation of processes in the mind, things are stored in our unconscious and we do them without real mindfulness. This deprives the act of its depth of meaning. It is an individual fast that puts the self through an existential discomfort without necessarily grasping its deeper purpose.

In the second type of fasting, man begins to gain insight and is aware of himself in relation to others, he understands his internal fragility and is challenged in the external world not to act out, to guard the appetitive drives from transgression against God through his actions towards others. An interpersonal expression of fasting develops.

The third type is a transcendent type of fast, where mindfulness of God becomes very heightened in one’s awareness. We reach that through a process of a whole month of mindful fasting which takes us from the first level through the second to reach the third stage. This is symbolised in the nights of determination which are the last 10 nights of Ramadan.

Those who reach these nights with a purified heart are those who have managed to rise from the first level to the third.

This psychic process of spiritual growth is based on negations: The negation of appetitive drives which guarantee our survival during the duration of the fast from sunrise to sunset. But there is another form of negation which we get to understand through the negation of the drives. So what is this other form of negation?

TBC…

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