Reflections from the Holy Month

The writer is an analyst and
commentator.

The Holy Month of Ramadan, or Ramzaan, is almost over. Like every year, hundreds of millions of Muslims have spent these last four weeks voluntarily depriving ourselves of food, water and other essential and non-essential things from dusk till dawn.

On the eve of the twenty seventh of the Holy Month, or the night of each odd numbered night during the last third of the month, many Muslims invest a special effort in prayer and worship in pursuit of the mercy of God during what is known as the Night of Power, or Layl’tul-Qadr. This is the night during which the Quran was first revealed, and the night during which the Muslim tradition of seeking God’s forgiveness for our transgressions has the greatest likelihood of being met with God’s favour.

As the Holy Month ends, I wanted to share some very humble layman’s reflections of the experience of Ramadan, or Ramzaan. The first, of course, is the new urban Pakistani compulsion to have a strong opinion on the correct pronunciation of the word Ramadan, or Ramzaan. Does our faith or imaan really hinge on the quality of our commitment to either our Persian roots, or our sincere attempts to pronounce Arabic words as they are phonetically constructed by native Arab speakers?

For many, this is a topic worth having great clarity about. Arguments for and against resisting the Arabisation of Urdu, and those for and against, investing in the phonetical integrity of proper nouns are rooted in a social experience of an era of conflict, metastasized by the technological democratisation of opinion. After several years of engaging in this debate with people I know, and people I don’t know – largely through social media – I thought it was worth giving this one a pass. The point of the Holy Month is not winning arguments about how to pronounce a word. It is about eschewing what we would normally indulge. You can pronounce it as you like. I will pronounce it as I do. What better application of Surah Al Kafiroon.

It was the very beginning of this year’s Ramzaan festivities that the country’s parliament witnessed a bitter exchange between Khawaja Asif, the defence minister, and Shireen Mazari, a renowned international relations expert and parliamentarian for the opposition PTI. Khawaja Asif’s poor choice of both style and substance in trying to counter the opposition on the floor of the House negated not only the best parliamentary traditions, but reminded us all of the enduring misogyny in our broader cultural milieu.

Perhaps most of all, it represented a less than graceful beginning to the Holy Month. If the point is to eschew what we would normally indulge, a leader blessed with the high office of defence minister may have sought to choose a less combative, less sexist and more elegant means of countering whatever resistance to his speech that Shireen Mazari was offering.

Not long after the debacle on the floor of the house, I found myself in an exchange on social media in which I allowed my ego to control the tone and tenor of how I spoke to a younger friend about something on which we disagreed. Social media is, by definition, a public forum. Those blessed by Allah with a large platform through which they can express their views have a sacred duty to establish traditions of public engagement that are reflective of their values.

It hardly behoves someone to be invested in the rituals of the Holy Month, and yet to allow their lesser self to dominate their judgement and react harshly or sharply to any hint of provocation. Over the last few years, I have sought to moderate my consumption of, and feeding into, social media during the Holy Month. At the conclusion of the short, but sharp exchange with my friend, I decided that perhaps this year is another chance during Ramadan, for me to take some time off of social media, and indeed, all media.

Since I had the privilege to grow up Muslim in a somewhat Catholic environment, I’ve been lucky throughout life to be able to juxtapose my own choices and journey as a Muslim with the journeys of others, particularly our Catholic brothers and sisters. I’ve always found the abstention that many Catholic friends choose during Lent to be a fascinating expression of love and devotion to one’s concept of the Almighty and His Mercy.

Not eating or drinking during the roza is the prescription for Ramadan, but adding on things that we avoid or choose not to do seems like an important expression of devotion. For me, eschewing the platforms available to me to express my opinion seemed like a reasonable choice to make after the incident with my friend. I found myself exploring what exactly the difference is between a parliamentarian that gets carried away on the floor of the National Assembly, and a critic of that parliamentarian that gets carried away on his Twitter account. Surely, one of the utilities of Ramzaan is reflection – about what is important, about what is not important, and about the distances and spaces between what we believe, what we think we believe, what we actually believe, and what we end up doing.

I have written and spoken forcefully about Pakistan’s leaders, and the deeply distressing lack of visionary leadership in Pakistan. I have also written about the need for a wholesale reflection on, and improvement of, our public discourse. Yet I found myself asking what my own contribution to this discourse was, and what example of leadership I was setting, but getting caught up in an exchange that reflected not the best Muslim traditions, but the worst human ones: a surrender to one’s ego.

Taking a break from both social media, and for the most part, broadcast and podcast media has been an illuminating experience. I have three broad reflections. First, time is a finite resource. There is hardly any better means of affirmation of this truth for high-volume, and high-consumption users of Whatsapp, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and/or other social media applications, than to take a finite break from them.

Second, our first impulse in 140 characters cannot be more sophisticated than ideas or opinions that have the luxury of being measured and considered because we afforded them the time and space to be measured and considered. In short, completing a thought, by walking through the second, and third (and fourth and fifth!) layers or implications of the initial impulse, is a valuable experience for high-volume and high-consumption social media users. Or, in other words, the quality of our contributions to the discourse very often depends on whether we have taken time to reflect on that contribution, or whether that contribution is being offered in the proverbial heat of the moment.

Third, and finally, the sense of community that media – and particularly social media – engenders is fascinating and worth thinking about more. I experienced Amjad Sabri’s murder as someone temporarily disengaged from the wider sense of collective anguish, grief and anger in the country. In other words, I grieved for Sabri, for Karachi, and for the shrinking humanity in this country – privately. This is unlike most recent events of this nature, during which I have been privileged to be able to express anguish and grief with thousands of people, online and through broadcast platforms.

There are definite advantages to be able to share one’s grief and anger at a large scale. But there are also pitfalls and perils. How much of our outrage in the digital age ends up becoming mere exhibition, and how much of it is privately experienced or internalised? What is the spiritual dimension of grief in the digital age? What qualitative difference is there between clicking ‘Like’, or favouriting, or RT-ing something as opposed to reflecting, silently, in the tradition of the Holy Prophet (pbuh) at the Cave of Hira?

I wish all the readers of The News a very happy and fulfilling Eidul Fitr, and pray that I am able to live up to the sacred responsibility of making a meaningful contribution to our public discourse. I pray that we are all able to use technology to better ourselves, and better the world around us. I pray that we are able to reflect, and find God’s Mercy and blessings through our reflections and prayers.