THERE’S a moment that happens every day this month, right before Maghrib. You’re sitting at the table – maybe at home, maybe at the surau, maybe at the Padungan bazaar with its smoke and crowds. The azan hasn’t called yet. In front of you: dates, water, something your mother cooked or you bought rushing from work.
Your stomach is empty. Has been since dawn. Fourteen hours, maybe fifteen.
And here’s what you notice: the Datuk at the next table, in his batik and gold watch, is just as hungry as you. The Bangladeshi worker in his faded shirt is just as thirsty. The teenager in her tudung, the grandfather in his songkok – everybody’s stomach is making the same sounds.
For these few hours before sunset, there is no difference. Everyone asks: “What’s the point of fasting?” But nobody asks: “What do we become when we’re all equally empty?” There’s a secret beneath the hunger.
The halal becomes haram
This is the beautiful madness of Ramadan: the things that are normally blessed – food, water, intimacy – become forbidden during daylight. Not because they’re wrong. Because it’s not their time.
Your mother’s nasi lemak sitting in the fridge. Completely halal. Touch it at 2 pm and you’ve broken your fast.
The glass of water. Pure, necessary, recommended by every health guideline. Drink it at noon and you’ve failed. Even the lawful becomes unlawful when the sun is up.
Think about what this does to you. You spend your whole life learning what’s halal and haram, permitted and forbidden. Then comes Ramadan and says: now even permission has a boundary. Even what’s good for you must wait.
This is the first secret: ‘discipline isn’t about avoiding the bad. It’s about delaying the good.’ Any fool can avoid poison. The test is whether you can sit with honey and not taste it yet.
When servants become cool
My non-Muslim friends sometimes ask: “Doesn’t fasting make you miserable?” And I used to try explaining: “No, actually it feels…” and I’d struggle for the word. This Ramadan I found ‘it feels cool to be a servant’. Not cool like temperature. Cool like dignity. Cool like freedom.
Here’s the paradox Western individualism can’t quite grasp: there is profound relief in submission. When you wake for suhoor at 4:30 am, when you keep your fast even though no one’s watching, when you bow in tarawih until your knees ache – you are choosing servanthood. And in that choice, something lifts.
The exhausting burden of being your own god. The constant negotiation of desire. The tyranny of “I want, therefore I should have”. For one month, the answer to every craving is simple: “Not now. Because Allah said so.” There’s a lightness in that. A clarity.
You’re not an autonomous individual optimising for maximum pleasure. You’re a servant fulfilling a command. And somehow – this is the part that sounds mad until you experience it – that feels like freedom.
Marcus Aurelius wrote: “You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realise this, and you will find strength.”
Ramadan says: You have power over your stomach, your tongue, your temper. Realise this, and you will find peace.
The secret of “we are one”
But here’s the deeper secret, the one the Quran keeps circling back to: ‘kullukum li Adam, wa Adam min turab’ – you are all from Adam, and Adam is from dust. Ramadan makes this visceral.
At iftar, the Tan Sri and the taxi driver are breaking fast with the same date, the same gratitude, the same relief. The professor and the cleaner are equally thirsty. The CEO and the security guard both smell of the same hunger.
Your bank account doesn’t make you less hungry. Your degree doesn’t make you less thirsty. Your influence doesn’t make the fast shorter. For these daylight hours, we are levelled.
This is what people miss when they think fasting is about “feeling what the poor feel”. That’s part of it, yes. But it’s deeper than empathy tourism. It’s recognition ‘we are fundamentally the same’.
Strip away the meals, the drinks, the small comforts that mark class and status, and what’s left? Bodies that need. Hearts that long. Souls that submit or resist.
The poor man’s hunger is not nobler than the rich man’s. The rich man’s thirst is not less real than the poor man’s. In this month, there is no hierarchy of suffering. There is only: we are all servants, and we are all hungry, and we are all waiting for sunset together.
What Ramadan reveals
Here’s what I’m learning this year: Ramadan doesn’t teach you something new. It reveals what was always true. You were always dependent on water, on food, on air. You just forgot because they were always available.
You were always capable of discipline. You just didn’t think you needed it. You were always connected to every other human who hungers and thirsts. You just built systems to hide that connection. Ramadan strips away the illusions.
For one month, you can’t pretend you’re self-sufficient. You can’t pretend your desires are emergencies. You can’t pretend class and wealth make you a different species from the person sitting next to you at the surau.
The Quran says: “O mankind, indeed We have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another. Indeed, the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous of you.” (49:13)
Ramadan makes you live that ayat. Everyone fasting is equally obedient. Everyone breaking fast is equally grateful. Righteousness becomes the only currency that matters, and it’s measured in submission, not status.
The practice beyond Ramadan
So, what happens when Ramadan ends? When the halal becomes halal again, when you can eat and drink as you please? If you’ve been paying attention, something has shifted.
You’ve learned ‘desire is not an emergency’. You can feel hunger and not act on it. You can want something and choose to wait. The craving doesn’t own you.
You’ve discovered ‘there is dignity in servanthood’. Following a command you didn’t design, submitting to a wisdom you don’t fully understand – this isn’t weakness. It’s strength of a kind the ego can’t compute.
You’ve remembered ‘we are all the same’. Hunger is the great equaliser. Thirst doesn’t respect your pay grade. Death certainly won’t.
The Dao teaches: “The sage puts himself last and finds himself in the foremost place.” Ramadan teaches the same: Put your desires last. Submit. Serve. And somehow, in that surrender, you find yourself. Not the anxious, grasping, optimising self. The clear, light, free self that was always there beneath the noise.
The beauty of this month
Non-Muslims sometimes say: “I could never do that. Go without food and water all day?” And I think: you’re missing the point. It’s not endurance. It’s alignment.
For one month, the whole ummah is on the same rhythm. Waking together for suhoor. Fasting together through the day. Breaking together at Maghrib. Praying tarawih together at night.
Kuching’s Masjid India, Jakarta’s Istiqlal, Mecca’s Haram – we’re all doing the same thing, at the same time, for the same reason. That’s the beauty.
Not that we suffer. But that we submit together. Not that we’re hungry. But that we’re equally empty, equally dependent, equally humbled.
Kings and beggars at the same table. All of us servants. All of us waiting for the azan. All of us remembering: we are one.
And for this one month, even the halal bows to that truth.
DISCLAIMER:
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune.
