The same or different?

"I don't get it," said my non-Muslim friend in Hackensack, far from home. "In Lent, if people give something up, they give it up. How is it you can pick and choose?"

He was referring to the Qur'anic exemption that makes it permissible for the serious Muslim not to fast during times of travel. And he enjoyed teasing me about the pleasure I was taking in dear old daily sustenance during the holy month. But beneath his question lies another question, or set of questions. Can one look at Ramadan as a kind of Lent, just because the two observances have certain features in common? Is "giving something up" always the same act? Without your whole experience, what can I understand about what your practice means to you?

I enjoy such questions, because they are so human. I notice that when we try to grasp something new, the first move our brain makes is to pick out what the novelty has in common with things we have already met. First impressions can be powerful. Yet our instant categorizing tends to be ethically primitive, because it is ultimately survival-based. "Friend or foe?" is not a decision we can afford to spend a lot of time pondering when the unexpected animal in our path is baring its teeth. A slow reaction might mean a quick demise, and in that frame of mind we don't care much about the other guy. When we leave the primal threat zone and enter the articulate world, however, the body starts processing its information in multiple channels, and there are more points of interest to you than simply whether you plan to eat me. Then we need to stop sorting what we encounter into bins, and instead start linking it into networks. "This resembles that in one way, but not in another." "You are like me sometimes." "I have no idea what this is, myself: what do you think?" And as new brain structures kick in, we graduate from the danger of wrong calls to the danger of false assumptions. Blessed is the question that punctures a false assumption -- whether what I'm assuming is that you are like me, or that you are different.

As it happens, we can draw a legitimate parallel between Ramadan and Lent in at least one dimension. The Qur'an says to the faithful

"Fasting is prescribed for you, as it was prescribed for those before you..." (2:183)

...including Christians, of course. So the revelation has in mind some sort of continuing broad spiritual enterprise, relevant across more than a single religious culture.

On the other hand, after Ramadan is specified as the month of the descent of the Qur'an "as a guide to humanity," the very specific receiving community is instructed to fast that month, exemptions from fasting are enumerated, and a rationale is appended

"God desires ease for you, He does not desire difficulty for you... (2:185)

all of which moves the hearer with breathtaking speed from the universal to the particular. For earlier communities do not observe this month, nor do they have these exemptions. And it seems to me that few practices of renunciation are so explicitly and paradoxically linked to the notion that they are NOT supposed to be hard. Catholics please feel free to correct me, but I am certainly under the impression that this is the opposite of Lent.

But then, what's it all about, this fasting we Muslims are up to? What's the point? (Sometimes it takes an "outsider" to properly pose that kind of question.) And assuming we get something out of it, how well can we share with others whatever that something might be?

I hope to ponder these goodies in coming days, insha'Allah.