Matthew Kaemingk:
Welcome to Zealots at the Gate, a podcast of Comment Magazine. I’m Matthew Kaemingk.
Shadi Hamid:
I’m Shadi Hamid.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Together we research politics, religion, and the future of democracy at Fuller Seminary’s Mouw Institute of Faith and Public Life.
Shadi Hamid:
We are writing a book together. This podcast represents an informal space where we can talk about how to live with deep difference. Thanks so much for joining us.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Friends, welcome back. We’re into season two now, and always remember, please subscribe wherever you listen. Please leave us a review. Join the conversation. Feel free to ask us a question on Twitter or via email. You can reach us via email, zealots@comment.org, and we would just love to engage you in more conversation.
As many of you know, I myself am a Christian theologian, Shadi is a Muslim political scientist, and this is a space where Shadi and I can mix it up and engage in fruitful and frank conversation about faith and politics. We are working on a book on faith and politics, sort of comparing and contrasting Muslim and Christian perspectives on democracy. This is where you get to peek behind the curtain and see what we’re up to.
Shadi Hamid:
This is our safe space.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Though I’ve been told I need to make it less safe for you, Shadi. I’ve got to push you a little harder. And today we’re going to be talking-
Shadi Hamid:
That’s the plan today. You’re going to put me on this spot.
Matthew Kaemingk:
That’s right, because today we’re talking about fasting and specifically of course, we’ve just started Ramadan, which I’d love for you to share just a little bit about. Our producer, Matt Crummy, self identifies as a North Dakotan. So he says, because he’s from North Dakota, he doesn’t know very much about Ramadan, so he was wondering, he was wondering if you could share, for those of us who are less cultured, just a little bit about what Ramadan is.
But, the real thing that we’re trying to tackle here is this practice of fasting, this strange ancient practice of fasting that both Muslims and Christians engage in. What on earth does that have to do with politics and public life? Last week we talked about prayer and politics and public life, and today we’re digging into what does this practice of fasting have to do with public life. Typically, people think about things like prayer and fasting as personal and private, as spiritual and not at all political. But what you and I discussed last week was that actually prayer has very real political consequences. And today we’re going to be exploring that of fasting. But yeah, before we get into, for the sake of dear Matt Crummy and all those in North Dakota who maybe don’t hang out with Muslims quite as much, first of all, what is Ramadan and how does the fasting element of Ramadan work?
Shadi Hamid:
So the holy month of Ramadan, it happens according to a lunar calendar. So it actually shifts each year. So you can’t just put it on your calendar for your Muslim friends and have it the same day in perpetuity. People are probably familiar with the basics of you fast from sunrise to sunset. I think where there’s sometimes confusion is, people will sometimes be like, “Well, oh, of course you drink water though. You’re just fasting from food during this period. It wouldn’t be realistic or healthy to not drink water, and it would affect your productivity presumably too.” And we’ll get to that, this question of whether fasting hurts your productivity.
But yes, the fast does include any kind of liquids. So there is no water for this entire period. So if we calculate the hours here, around 14 hours of zero water and basically nothing entering one’s mouth. Smoking is prohibited, shisha, various other things that people enjoy doing like that. And sexual activity is also prohibited during the fast. That’s the basic gist. When you guys hear this episode, we’ll probably be about almost two weeks into Ramadan. This is actually the first podcast episode I’ve done this year without the benefit of caffeine or any kind of liquid. So I’m not sure exactly what’s going to happen today.
Matthew Kaemingk:
I’m going to have to carry the energy, the energy on this conversation.
Shadi Hamid:
Just to flag that for you all. But I’m going to try my best. I’m going to try my best to be cogent. But just to add a couple things, and this gets to what is the purpose of fasting, and I struggle with this a little bit. And I have to say thanks to Matt. I know we did this in the previous episode where I thanked Matt for broadening my view and deepening my view and appreciation of prayer and some of its public and political implications. Matt has also helped change how I view Ramadan. I used to be a little bit, I don’t know if angry is the right word, but sometimes I would just be like, “Why does Islam have to be so difficult in this way?” This is 30 days of fasting without tea or coffee, which I’m very much dependent on when I’m writing and doing research, and I have to go without that, and it really does affect how much I’m able to get done. So I almost felt a kind of resentment like, “Yeah, I mean, I believe his son was-”
Matthew Kaemingk:
Well, you were hungry, right? You were hungry anyways, so that already made you mad.
Shadi Hamid:
Exactly. Yeah. Why is God asking us to do this seemingly unreasonable thing? My main concern is, someone who has been, unfortunately, I think preoccupied with productivity for much of my adult life, that it was hard for me to accept this idea that productivity has to go down. And not just that, that it should go down. And that’s where our conversations really came in, where it was just like, you’re not supposed to be productive in the fast. You’re supposed to completely shift your orientation. So you’re not in that kind of standard late capitalist, like everything is about getting things done and just being perpetually active.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, well, Shadi, you’re very-
Shadi Hamid:
And I had to come to terms with that.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, I mean, you’re a busy guy. You’re ambitious. You’re productive. You’re writing books. You’re in articles. You’re doing interviews. And you love your work. You genuinely love it. And you’re surrounded in Washington D.C. with a very buzzing activity of people who are very ambitious, who are building resumes. And then you have this experience of Islam telling you, you have to slow down, you have to be less productive for this month. Yeah. So I mean, talk a little bit about what that’s like being in that world of hyper-productivity and then being told to just being tired.
Shadi Hamid:
Exactly. And it is really different being a Muslim minority in America than, say being in Egypt, Jordan, or anywhere else in Muslim majority context because there, everyone else, or almost everyone else, is taking part in the fast or at least respecting it. So the whole community, the whole population is oriented towards less productivity. Sometimes it gets pretty over the top where people get extremely lazy and use Ramadan as an excuse to not do basically anything of purpose or productivity, but at least you’re synchronized with your fellow Muslims and fellow citizens and your own rhythm in terms of when people wake up, when they leave work, you’re all on the same page and you feel like you’re part of something bigger. And that does make it easier.
But here in D.C., 99% of the rest of the population around me is not fasting and may not be aware that I’m fasting. So there is a disjuncture where I am approaching my life in a particular way and I am swimming against the current, and the current is strong because D.C. is a place where everyone is trying to be as ambitious as possible. When it comes to writers and analysts and authors, they’re writing books, they’re writing a lot, and I have to kind of dial that down. So there’s a gap that is introduced between me and everyone else. And I just had to start not seeing this as a negative of Ramadan, but to accept it as precisely the point. I have to learn how to accept that productivity is not everything, and that life is about trade-offs. If you want to get closer to God, if you want to increase your self-discipline, if you want to orient your mind and heart towards friends, family, community, and your spiritual practice, you have to give something up.
So to the extent that we feel resentful towards Islam for making us fast, we should actually appreciate this very aspect of it. And that took me a while. I know intellectually we all know that, but to actually embrace that and come to terms with it and to stop fighting it. I’m no longer fighting it. I have a kind of resignation that this is the way it’s going to have to be for the next 20, 26 days or whatever. So that’s been a shift. And Matt, you’ve been really helpful. I actually remember a conversation precisely about the productivity question that we had last year, and then I wrote a piece about it for Wisdom of Crowds, which we can include in the show notes. I think it was titled something like Against the Cult of Productivity, where I got to learn to accept certain things. So that’s been important for me.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. I mean, when you’re hungry, when you’re fasting, it has this exposing effect. It exposes things about your culture. So for example, it exposes your city’s ambition. It also exposes something about you, right? When we’re hungry, we learn things about ourselves, we’re forced to look at ourselves and think about these kinds of things. But there’s also something that you kind of tipped in on there. It reconnects us to our community in an important way, and I get that in my readings about fasting in Ramadan, is that it’s meant to reconnect you to family, but also to the poor, and that there’s an aspect for Muslims of understanding and seeing the poor. Could you share just a little bit about that side of things as well?
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, sure. So there is one aspect of it where I wouldn’t overemphasize this, but an idea that you can simulate what it might feel like to be hungry and to feel that as something that is sometimes even overwhelming in its intensity when you haven’t eaten for God knows how many hours, that it can help you relate to those who are less fortunate and to just change your basic outlook. And then there is also the practical aspect of giving more to charity during the month of Ramadan, and specifically towards the end of Ramadan where the charity aspect, what is known as zakat or almsgiving, becomes central. So these things are intertwined that to fast is to open yourself up to these other practices. I mean, there’s also an basic expectation that you pray more during Ramadan. There’s a nightly prayer that is kind of extra or supplementary that people do over the course of the week.
And also, when you’re fasting, you’re going to feel guilty about missing any of the five prayers. So you’re just going to like, “Oh, I’m fasting. I should probably also make sure that I’m reaching five instead of being lazy and doing three.” So just when you make that kind of initial intention of deciding to fast, it opens up these other possibilities of spiritual and community practice. And also, just spending more time with Muslims. So as someone who maybe doesn’t spend as much time with Muslims as I might like, or at least in the community here in D.C., Ramadan is the month where I actually go out of my way to do that. And you’re almost, in a sense, forced to because every day you have to break fast, and it’s nice to not break fast alone. That can be a little bit depressing. So you actually go out of your way to find other Muslims who are breaking fast at the same time, so you can share in that experience with them.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. You and I dug in a little bit too. One of my good friends, his name is Kyle David Bennett, who has done some really great research on fasting and on the politics of fasting, the ethics of fasting. He has this great piece in Comment Magazine, which is the host of this podcast. It’s on the thickness of fasting, exploring the connection between fasting and public life. In there, he really presses on Christians. But from what I read, it has some real relevance for Muslims as well, is that Christians often think about fasting as a way to draw closer to God. They often think of fasting as a spiritual or a vertical thing between them and God. Of course, that is an important aspect of what fasting is, but fasting also has a social component or a horizontal that fasting connects us to those around us. So it connects us to the poor, but to just our communities in an important way.
He talks about it in somewhat similar ways to what I’ve been seeing in my readings on Ramadan, which is this sense of we can be extremely self-centered when it comes to thinking about food. What do I want to eat? When do I want to eat? What restaurant do I want to eat? What kind of diet fits me and my needs? Our food practices can be extremely self-centered. We don’t think about where food comes from, how it was produced or the justice involved in those kinds of things. We don’t think about our waiters or those who prepare the food for us. We tend to be just extremely self-centered in how we think about our diets and our food. And in fasting, a whole bit of time is opened up for us to begin to think about others and to reorient ourselves in new ways to redefine our relationship with food and with our city and with others, but also it’s an opportunity to reflect on our own selfishness and the ways that we center ourselves. I don’t know how that connects with you and your own experience with fasting.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. I like that piece a lot by Kyle David Bennett, and we’ll include a link to that in the show notes. It is really worth reading. Just one or two things that stood out to me in the piece that really resonated with me. There’s this idea that once you introduce these radical changes in your daily routine, other people are affected by it around you, and it creates new possibilities that otherwise wouldn’t be possible. And to think of it as this kind of expansive act that it shakes things up and you don’t exactly know what’s going to happen as a result. Here’s one thing that Kyle David Bennett says. He says, “The silence I devote myself to in fasting affects my wife and daughter. It tones their temperament, conditions their interactions. It encourages them to fast and pray. Well, at least my wife. Similarly, it affects my neighbors.” So that’s one.
He also says, “My register of pleasure and pain is recalibrated. I tweak how I respond to bodily pleasure and pain. When my stomach reaches for the table or turns because of what it sees, I know what it wants and respond differently because of previous experiences of fasting.” So these are just a couple examples of how introducing this change has these kinds of knock-on effects in other parts of your life, and then other people are changed because of it. And then when you think about a community of people fasting together, then you can almost amplify those effects and multiply the impact. At least that would be the idea in theory.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, just the fact that you are reflecting on your own struggles with productivity and ambition, that invites everyone around you to reflect on their own relationship with their work and their own relationship with productivity.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Do I need to slow down? So you’re inviting your neighbors to reflect on that as well, and to just reflect on the ways that an ambitious city is impacting them. So yeah, absolutely.
Shadi Hamid:
And it’s helpful for these folks in D.C. and elsewhere because I think a growing number of us intuitively understand that our work, however much we love it, even if we feel that it’s a calling, I think both you and I, Matt, feel that our work is a calling, that it’s never going to give us the satisfaction that we think it will. There’s a built-in limitation we keep on chasing after one accolade over another. And I think book writing is a good example of it, where you just get on this treadmill and it just literally never ends.
You think, “Oh, when I finish my PhD dissertation, I can take a break and enjoy my life a little bit,” but then you want to convert your dissertation into your first book. Then you’re like, “Oh, once I get my first book out and prove myself, I’m done.” Not done, but you can just chill. But then it’s like, “Well, what if people think my first book was a fluke? I have to show them that I have more in me, that I can improve upon the first book and show that I’m a proper author.” So then the second book comes out, it does better, and you get additional accolades. But then, where do you say that… The more success we have and the more productive we are, it invites a desire for yet more success and for more productivity, and there’s no way to know where to draw the line. And that’s, I think, at a basic level what religion can and should do.
Now, a lot of what we’re talking about is theoretical because this is not actually how it works in practice. People aren’t necessarily changed by the fasting experience, and they might actually emphasize overeating at night, and then they stay up until 5:00 AM and then they wake up really late. They’re doing the fast technically, but they’re losing the spirit of it. It’s not actually about overindulgence and partying with your Muslim friends and smoking shisha all night. You know?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. It was funny, I was reading, I think it was Tariq Ramadan and a couple others who are complaining about the ways in which Ramadan has been commercialized like Christmas. And they’re saying, if we’re not careful, Ramadan is going to become as meaningless as Christmas has become in the West. Christmas is now commercialized and capitalism has taken over Christmas, and it has nothing to do with Jesus Christ anymore. And the good news, it’s just all about over consumption. Yeah, I was wondering what you think about all that.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. So I was just home with my parents for the first couple days of Ramadan, and it’s interesting that my mom had all these Ramadan decorations and Ramadan napkins and all of that, which is all great. But it’s interesting that how more and more party stores are carrying Ramadan-themed products that we as consumers are meant to… The commercialization of Ramadan, I think, is a risk because it’s become more part of mainstream culture. You hear reference to it on TV shows and movies. There are more and more schools, actually, public schools including, where I grew up in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, that now have Ramadan as one of their recognized holidays. And then there’s a celebration at the end of Ramadan called Eid, which is now being given as a holiday for all students where they take off school and that sort of thing. So there’s a kind of Americanization of Ramadan and the idea of Muslims as consumers, and then companies who have to meet that need is interesting and we’ll have to see where it goes.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah.
Shadi Hamid:
But I think, more broadly, the fact that we live in a late capitalist society where structurally we’re encouraged to have immediate gratification that we’re not actually conditioned to engage in reflection and sacrifice and orienting towards non-worldly things. So I think there’s also just a broader issue that in the societies that we live in, in much of the world including Muslim countries, it’s harder to have the full spiritual impact of Ramadan because the way our consumption patterns are structured and how we don’t know how to stay still in the moment, we’re always being primed for wanting things and desiring things, and we want what other people want. And it makes it more difficult.
But I want to turn the tables on you a little bit, Matt, because we’ve talked about how Muslims fast. I actually, still to this day, unfortunately, despite our friendship, don’t have as informed of an understanding of how Christian fast work and Lent being one example. I think in different traditions there are different ways of doing it, but because it’s less regimented, and we talked about this in the previous episode about prayer, Muslims have more “regimented practices” where there’s less room for improvisation. Where I hear from my Christian friends though, that some of it seems kind of soft and fluffy. They’re like, “Oh, I won’t eat meat for Lent,” or “I won’t have dessert or ice cream.” I don’t know how far people take it, but it seems kind of soft and not particularly rigorous, and I wonder if that’s considered a legitimate fast. But we, as Muslims, we’re a little bit more intense about certain ritual practices, right?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yes, yes. We’ve discussed multiple times how Islam is more badass than Christianity. So yeah. Yes, yes.
Shadi Hamid:
Don’t want to … too much.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So, a couple things on fasting in Christianity. One is that historically, it’s been sort of owned by the really intense Christians of the monks and the nuns and the aesthetics, whereas it’s much more rare for modern Christians to engage in the practice of fasting. Often, when fasting happens for us, it can be sort of this sense of, I have a very important decision coming up and so I really need to listen to God, so I’m going to engage in fasting for a period of time to help me as I’m making this decision. Or it could be this sense that I need to give this thing up because my relationship with this particular thing is disordered. Often, Christians, at least the Christian circles that I run in, it can be sort of, I need to reconnect with God, I need to make a big decision. Or I’ve got a disordered relationship with some particular thing, whether it be sugar or alcohol or whatever it is. But I need to fast to reorient myself towards that thing.
I think all of those Christian practices are legitimate and valuable. But I think for me, a couple of things. One, I mean, this is why I really appreciate Kyle’s article, is that it’s not just about reconnecting with God or self-improvement, but Christian fasting is supposed to reconnect us to our neighbors and our world. It’s not supposed to be in otherworldly practice, but actually deeply material. And as you were talking about how fasting can cause us to reflect on what really matters in life and what are the things that don’t matter in life. It connects with me with another Christian practice, which is communion, or the Lord’s Supper, or the Eucharist in which we take the bread and the wine, and remember Christ’s death and resurrection. It’s at that table, it’s in that consumption that we remember that this is the consumption that will truly satisfy us as opposed to the daily consumption that will not ultimately satisfy us for a long period of time. This is what Jesus calls living water that will satisfy us. So fasting is meant to reorient us towards the things that truly matter, but also reorient us towards others.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah.
Matthew Kaemingk:
I want to bring this to politics now, because it seems to me that American political life, it sort of goes without saying, is extremely self-centered. We talk a lot about tribalism, which is this understanding that I want the state to serve my tribe, to protect my tribe, to protect my interests and my way of life. And fasting, as a practice, is meant to orient ourselves to people who are not like us, and to remember that and to remember our responsibility to those who are not in our tribe. So we can think about fasting from the political news, which is something you’ve written about recently, about the need to withdraw.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah.
Matthew Kaemingk:
This kind of withdrawal is strategic and temporary. It’s not permanent. You’re not withdrawing from political life permanently, but you pull back in order to see the world rightly, in order to see food rightly and feasting rightly. And when I think about the politics of fasting, that’s where I’m at, is we need to withdraw, as human beings, from time to time to have our political lives assessed and reordered, that when you’re in the mix and the noise, you can’t see certain things. And it’s when you withdraw that, with God and with others, you’re able to reassess and reorder maybe your political activity and your political perspectives. And it’s not so self-centered. So those are some of the things I’m thinking about.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. Okay. I wanted to dive more into the politics. A thought does come to mind though. It’s a little bit of a tangent, but I think it’s relevant. I was talking to a couple friends the other night, and for some reason we were talking about COVID, even though obviously people have mostly forgotten about it or moved on or whatever, but we were reminiscing about how we long for those first few months of COVID, not for the bad parts, but-
Matthew Kaemingk:
The death and destruction.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. But in terms of those couple months where almost everything was closed. At most, you were just maybe seeing a couple friends who were part of your bubble or whatever, and spending just a lot of time at home. I think a lot of people came out of that experience with a different set of priorities. And you did notice a lot of people who did change their lives in fundamental ways by quitting their job or deciding that they wanted to do something completely different that they were more passionate about, or people who ended relationships or got married in a very short period of time, because there was just this kind of concentration of attention and you weren’t distracted by all these other things. And that’s actually very difficult. It’s very difficult to have a situation like that in modern life, and we need external interventions for that to even be possible. So COVID was an external intervention that we had no control over, and it forced a reckoning for many of us. And without that, many people wouldn’t have had that reckoning.
I think that fasting, and also just the constraints that religion puts upon us, is a certain kind of external constraint, it comes outside of us and we feel… So sometimes I think non-religious folks will look at this as a sort of silly thing when religious people say, “Well, I can’t do that. I’m not allowed to do that.” And then they’ll say, “Well, you can do it. No one is actually physically preventing you from doing those things.” But for the believer, it does feel like a pretty strong constraint, even though no one is literally physically shackling you. So Ramadan, I think if you’ve decided that you’re going to fast, you’ve introduced an external constraint that is beyond you, and you’re almost, I don’t want to say you’re trapped because that is a pejorative connotation, but you’ve accepted a set of constraints and then you have to operate accordingly with that as the given. Similar to with COVID, we didn’t have a choice, the constraint was there for those couple months. And within those constraints, we had to pursue our lives in a different way.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Well, and I think this is the wisdom you see in the Sabbath laws that you find in Judaism, these resting laws in Christianity, and of course in Ramadan in Islam, is that constraint can actually produce freedom. And I can imagine your more secular friends thinking that you are oppressed by your religion, but actually Ramadan can free you from your own ambition for a little while. It can offer a little bit of liberation from Shadi’s career goals. You can take a break from that because you have to.
Shadi Hamid:
Right. Yeah. Yeah. But even secular folks, I think deep down, many of them want something like this. And I don’t know if I’ve made this joke to you before, Matt, but I used to do keto sometime back and I stopped, so-
Matthew Kaemingk:
The keto diet?
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, the keto diet, right. What I found really compelling about it was… Okay, well, I have described it in the past as the Islam of diets. I do see it as having some really interesting resemblances to how Islam views constraints. So keto, for those of you who are not familiar, is a very intense practice, and there are pretty serious far-reaching constraints on what you can eat. You can’t really go above a certain level of net carbs per day, like around 20 to 30. But for those of you who don’t know what that means, that means no bread, no rice, no sugar. The things that people like, a lot of those are going to be out. So no pizza and burgers because both include bread and so forth. And it’s really constraining. But once you accept those constraints and just give in to them, you’re no longer resisting. So there has to be that initial choice where you come to terms with the constraint.
Within those constraints, you have this incredible freedom. You can have as much cheese as you want and as much meat as you want. You can pretty much do anything you want as long as you’re not crossing certain boundaries, which I think is also, I don’t want to overstate this, but kind of how Islam works too. People think, “Oh, there’s so many things that you can’t do, it’s so restrictive.” But once you know what those restrictions are, you don’t always have to follow them. You should, whatever, but people are sinners, so on and so forth. But then, within those constraints, you can find a different kind of freedom.
I think that this is also something I increasingly hear from Christian writers and authors, especially those who are critical of liberalism, those who might call themselves postliberal. This idea of freedom within constraint is very much central. And it also fits in with a lot of recent research and behavioral economics about the paradox of choice, that having unlimited choice makes us unhappy. Even from a secular perspective, we have to find ways to restrict our choice, otherwise we’re going to be in trouble. The whole jars of jam experiment where you give one group three jars of jam and the other group 27 jars of jam, and then you see their self-reported satisfaction after they try the jam. And it’s like a massive difference. The people who only have the three jars of jam are much more happy with their choice afterwards because they’re not wondering about all these alternative possibilities. Where with 27, you’re never going to feel comfortable with your choice.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah.
Shadi Hamid:
This is also, I think, the way that our free society is structured. We can choose to be anything we want and do anything we want whenever we want, which sounds awesome at first, but is actually paralyzing in a way.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. I think this sense is that you become a prisoner of your own appetite, you become a prisoner of your own desire. And that’s the core difference between Ramadan and Keto, is that keto is a fad that will come and go, and there’ll be a new diet that comes next year and the year after that, and they will all be designed to be sold and commercialized, and they’re designed specifically to help you get healthy and self-actualize and become more productive. The purpose is, this diet will help you be healthier and work longer and harder. Ramadan is not designed to make you healthy and productive and serving the capitalist technological progress. The purpose of Ramadan is to connect you to God and to other people. And that’s, I think, the difference. Keto doesn’t care at all about your relationship to your neighbors and your family and the poor.
Shadi Hamid:
True, true.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Right?
Shadi Hamid:
Definitely true. And all of this stuff falls under the rubric of self-optimization. Everyone is trying to maximize their potential, and so many things are marketed towards us that are supposed to help us do this.
Matthew Kaemingk:
The productivity hacks and all that.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, productivity hacks, life hacks, all of that. Yeah. There’s much more to say about the politics of it, and we can go back to that in terms of how we think about this on the broader level of American public debate and politics. If we imagine a situation where a growing number of Muslims, Christians, and Jews in America fasted more and more intently and incorporated that into their spiritual practice, what kind of political effects that might have? But before we get into that, just so I have a better understanding of your starting points, can you tell me and our dear listeners, how does Matt fast and what does it mean to you?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, it’s not a very common practice for me. I did engage in a fast, I remember in college that was designed with my college community around the issue of poverty, and we were fasting on behalf of a poor community and we were raising money for them to eat. A group of us college kids did that. So that one was economically oriented. Another fast that I engaged in had to do with a spiritual retreat in which we fasted. And that, once again, was very oriented towards connecting me to God. So the first one was economic, reflecting on the fact that I had a lot and I was wealthy. The second fasting was more about connecting me to God and it was more spiritual. So that’s kind of how it’s worked for me, but I’m-
Shadi Hamid:
Don’t you also do Lent?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yes, I do. And from time to time I’ve given up alcohol for Lent and things like that, but I’ve never fasted for Lent like a 40-day fast.
Shadi Hamid:
Oh, okay, okay. But I still think maybe it’s not a fast in the kind of full sense of Ramadan is, but Lent is its own kind of fast. You’re fasting from something in particular and you’re making a conscious choice to refrain from some kind of consumption. Would the aim to get closer to God?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yes, to be closer to God to prepare for Holy Week and for Easter. So it’s sort of a time of purification and reflection and preparation so that when you approach the time of Jesus’ death and resurrection, you have considered the ways in which your life and your heart is disordered, and you have brought those things to God. When you give up something, that helps you reflect upon what’s going on in your heart. Because often food can have, we talk about emotional eating, food can have a numbing effect on our mind and heart. It’s a great way to distract yourself.
When you are hungry and when you’ve constrained yourself from maybe having a drink of alcohol at the end of the day, or having coffee in the morning, when you’ve withheld that and you feel that gap, that’s sort of a bodily trigger for you to reflect on spiritual questions that you would prefer to ignore. There are just conversations with God that you don’t want to have, but you know need to have them. And when you are hungry or when you are craving coffee or when you’re craving alcohol or whatever it is in your rhythm of your day, during Lent you’ve created a disruption that triggers a conversation you know you need to have with God that you don’t want to have. So yeah, those are just a couple of things.
Shadi Hamid:
That’s helpful.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Lastly, I think I would love for Christians to reflect more upon the fact the question of, why don’t we fast more and in what ways have our consumption patterns have we been trained to just consume and numb and acquire in such ways that we don’t practice fasting the way we should and need to? The Muslim practice of fasting during Ramadan is very convicting for me as a Christian. Sometimes I have some Muslim friends who it’s pretty obvious their faith is not terribly important to them. It’s kind of a peripheral thing in their life, and yet they do fast. And that’s very convicting to me that here’s this person who really doesn’t take their faith terribly seriously, but they’re capable of fasting. So what’s going on with me and what do I need to be thinking about in that way? And that’s part of this underlying theme for our podcast and our conversation, is the ways that you and I compel one another to return to our faith and return to our God.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, it’s a really interesting point you make about even lax Muslims taking the fast pretty seriously, which is true. And sometimes I wonder about it because, considering it is quite hard to do, especially in a Muslim minority context, these people who otherwise are maybe we can call them cultural Muslims or they’re not as theologically centered, it’s just more of a kind of identity, yet they will oftentimes do the fast, or people who are otherwise not practicing will take the fast seriously. Part of that is social pressure, and a reminder that social pressure can be good, where people feel guilty if they’re not at least performing the fast. Now, we don’t know what people are doing in the comfort of their own homes, but there is a lot of expectation that publicly you will act as if you’ve been fasting the whole day, and if you’ve cheated or had a little bite of something or some coffee.
So it is interesting that the stigma on not fasting is very strong even in otherwise secularized context. And obviously some people might not see that as a positive thing because it makes them think of coercive aspect of social pressure. But that’s just worth noting as an interesting thing that has always struck me. But I do wonder in the pre-capitalist period in Christendom, was there a more normal regular practice of fasting that people took part in? Because you mentioned that Christians should reflect on how a consumerist, materialist society has maybe moved them away from some of these types of practices. And it just makes me wonder, was it different when we didn’t have these consumerist patterns?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, I don’t know too much about the history of these things. I mean, on one side of it, the Catholic tradition has often had a bit of a spiritual hierarchy where the monks and the nuns are the ones who are extra spiritual. So fasting is more of a practice for them to do, almost on our behalf than for the regular folks to be doing. But I mean, I imagine there are a variety of issues there.
One of them, for the Protestants, is just getting away from… I want to be careful with how I say this but, one thing that’s very important for Protestants is this understanding that God loves you, not because of the things that you do, but God just loves you. So Protestants never want to say, you should fast so that God will love you. Or if you fast, God will reward you with extra points. So that should never be the purpose of… You don’t want to encourage people to think that God doesn’t love you because you don’t fast enough, but you fast out of this free desire to really draw near to God and draw near to others and to reorder your life, not to convince God that you’re lovable. So that’s an important thing. Whereas with Islam, I do get the sense that there is this more of a reward system with fasting.
Shadi Hamid:
I mean, yeah, reward system sounds a bit like a point system and then you kind of like-
Matthew Kaemingk:
But even sinning during Ramadan is extra bad, right?
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, you’re definitely not… Yeah, I don’t know how much worse in a quantifiable sense, but yes, I mean, sinning is more frowned upon because in holy months, and there’s also some traditions about how something like the devil has changed during Ramadan, so to the extent that you commit sins during the holy month, it’s more you doing it, the devil isn’t tempting you. So there’s that of sort of thing.
But yeah, as we’ve talked about in previous episodes, it’s always fascinating to me how we come back to this point of the incentive structures in our respective faith, how Islam has a quite different incentive structure than Christianity does. And just even what you were just saying now, it almost sounded to me, in a sense, there aren’t supposed to be obligations to… I don’t know if that’s the right way of putting it, but there aren’t things that you have to do and there aren’t rules in the same way because there’s justification by faith alone. I mean, works aren’t as central in the Protestant imagination, which means that it would be hard to actually have a regimented kind of requirement of prayer or fasting, because part of it in Islam is that if you don’t pray five times a day, you’re getting some serious sins there. You’re accumulating some. And if you’re not fasting, you’re getting some sins there. There is this sense of, where are my good deeds and where are my bad deeds? Because I have to be thinking about my overall balance in terms of the whole getting into heaven thing.
But anyway. One thing that you brought up to me sometime back is, you’re saying that Christians should be more appreciative of the conviction that Muslims display in the process of fasting during Ramadan. I think that one reply that listeners might have in their own minds is, “Well, is it worth it for them to try fasting a day of Ramadan in solidarity or in community with their Muslim friends and neighbors?” I think that you had actually thought about this before about the idea of, you want to understand more about how your Muslim friends experienced the fast from an anthropological perspective, but also there might be some benefit in just becoming more familiar with that in terms of your own thinking. From what I recall, you had debated whether or not this would be an appropriate thing to do. Do you want to say more about that? Because I really find that fascinating. There are oftentimes people who will do like, “Oh, for Islam Awareness Week, we’re going to fast to show our friendship with the Muslim group or community, and we’ll just try it for a day and then join for Iftar at the end.”
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, yeah. I talked about this because I had thought about, “Hey, what if I did a little fasting and joined you for Iftar?” We talked about it and you said something that as soon as you said, it just snapped in for me of why I didn’t like what I had just suggested, which was it feels like spiritual tourism. It feels like, “Hey, let me try on Islam for fun as this technique and just see what it’s like, but keeping myself distant from those kinds of things.”
I would be very curious of our listeners, our dear listeners, to chime in on Twitter or on email for their wise reflections on participation in other faith’s practices and what they think and what their experience has been of those things. It’s not something that I have considered very often, and I know a lot of other people and other scholars have fought long and hard about it, but my big time concern is cheap spiritual tourism in which you’re just like, “Hey, it’d be neat to be Muslim for a day and see what that’s like,” or as if Shadi would think of me as a true friend and ally if I did this practice with him. I hate that the word ally came out of my mouth.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, yeah.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So anyways, I do want to someday experience the Iftar with you. I think that the communal, familial connection of feasting is really attractive to me. It’s been one thing that I’ve tried to convince my fellow Christians of, is the practice of feasting, on the other side of the practice of fasting. The practice of feasting is really important to celebrate the goodness of God and the goodness of our community and to encourage one another and to take joy in good food and friends and family. I believe that God delights in that. And not only does God delight in feasting, I think it’s good for us. I think that we need those periods of feasting and celebration. Once again, the Muslim practice of Iftar is something I’m jealous of for Christians to have more of a celebratory practice. Historically, Easter feasts and Christmas feasts were a big deal, but we lose that frankly because American Christians are constantly feasting. We’re like gorging ourselves, rather than having these special moments of celebration before God and community.
Shadi Hamid:
I would really second your call to listeners to tell us if you’ve had your own internal debates about how to engage in other people’s or other religions fasting practices. And just a reminder that you can get in touch with us on Twitter by using the hashtag #ZealotsPod or just tag us. You can also email us, as Matt said. That would be really interesting to hear because I actually don’t have a great sense of how widespread this spiritual tourism, if you will, is, or one might even call it perhaps more pejoratively spiritual brown face.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. Well, there you go. We’re getting a little more intense. I appreciate that. One question I did want to get in here before we close up has to do with the politics of Ramadan in the Middle East and the ways in which political behavior in the Middle East changes at all during Ramadan, or what sorts of things you’ve seen from your studies of Middle Eastern politics around what happens in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and things like that?
Shadi Hamid:
There’s two ways of looking at it. One is that because people are more apathetic, because they’re tired, that it’s harder to actually get people to do things. That’s one side of it, but I think it’s almost… But then, fasting has been tied to political movements and political intensification and liberation struggles over the past century. But part of that is because if people are more focused on God, if they are actually embracing the full experience of the fast, it will focus the mind. It will give you a sense of what’s more important and maybe even what’s worth fighting for. It’ll also perhaps introduce a fearlessness where you might have otherwise been afraid of being arrested for participating in a protest. You might feel, because you feel closer to God, empowered because you trust in God. So I think we see a variation and it would be hard to generalize, but I think those are two of the ways of looking at it.
There are some debates, which I think are a little bit outside the scope of this conversation, on how fasting affects military struggles sometimes in intuitive ways, but also encounter intuitive ways, where there can be sometimes an intensification of certain military confrontations historically and more recently that are tied to the time of the year it is. So, interesting stuff there. But I don’t know. Well, maybe this is a good segue to ask you ask because I think in our last episode we talked about prayer and how it was quite political in certain ways, and I think the link there was more clear.
I think fasting, it’s not as obvious. There’s the basic stuff that if you’re fasting and you’re then humbling yourself before God because you’re doing something very difficult out of submission to Him, then there is a political aspect to that as we’ve talked about, where it encourages you to see yourself as smaller and to humble yourself before God. But I do wonder about scaling up fasting. And in some ways this is already happening in America through intermittent fasting, which is a secular practice that bears some resemblance to Ramadan. I wouldn’t want to overstate that resemblance. And it’s interesting, another conversation I had recently was with a few friends who were not Muslim, who have all done intermittent fasting to one degree or another in the past, but also several of them are sober curious, and just in the last year or so have kind of reassessed their own relationship to alcohol consumption. And I’m thinking to myself, okay, they’re doing intermittent fasting and they’ve stopped drinking, that is-
Matthew Kaemingk:
Just become Muslim already.
Shadi Hamid:
I think Muslims appreciate these sorts of things when they’re seeing them in other people because in a way it confirms to them that Islam has a wisdom that is applicable to those who don’t even share the theological convictions that Muslims have, that people just naturally on their own gravitate towards these spiritual practices, but secularize them. And then we started talking about whether we can imagine a religious awakening on a mass level. A lot of us have been noticing people changing in interesting ways anecdotally, and whether there is this spiritual yearning that is undergirding some of these decisions that people are making, that they’re searching for something, and now they’re doing it in a more kind of self-denying. There’s a aspect of self-denial and that is almost religious in nature. Anyway, I don’t know where I’m going with this, just to say that I do wonder, okay, what does all of this mean politically? And maybe just, what do you think? How political is some of this stuff?
Matthew Kaemingk:
I would say that there’s a lot there. I mean, particularly, we talked about how in Ramadan you are expected to be giving to the poor. You are expected to be reflecting upon the fact that others are hungry. So there is a political dimension to this of reflecting on those who are not like you in the same socioeconomic situation. So my understanding, my reading of Ramadan is that it should have political consequences for how Muslims orient themselves and think about the responsibilities of the state and of corporations to be thinking about others and not simply thinking about themselves and what they want, but to be reminded of the fact that they live in a society with neighbors who don’t have homes and don’t have food.
Similarly, for Christianity, one of the chief sins is gluttony, which is core to selfishness, this sense of it’s never enough and it can never be enough about me. And to think about your secular friends who are engaging in dieting and things like that and looking for constraints and looking for spiritual practices, yeah, there is this haunting sense in late modernity, in secularism that we were created for something more and that we should treat one another with respect and we should share what we have with others. And we’re haunted. We are just haunted with a lack of satisfaction with self-centered living and a lack of satisfaction with consumption that it’s never enough. So I, too, I see my secular neighbors looking for ways to be involved in a political economy that helps others, looking for ways to constrain their insatiable desires.
But ultimately, I mean, like keto and all of these others, the things that we create for ourselves, the constraints we create for ourselves are ultimately fads. And we end up creating constraints that are all about self-actualization again. So it just becomes this wheel where this time it’s keto and next time it’s mindfulness and the next time it’s whatever. Actually, it’s capitalism that produces these various diets and these various practices of self-actualization and constraint, and it ultimately will not satisfy. And the fact that Christianity and Islam over the centuries have reservoirs of wisdom, not simply for reordering our own lives, but for reconnecting us to others. And that’s why I don’t have any faith in keto making better citizens who care about each other. I don’t think keto would ever be able to produce that. And I don’t have any faith in a mindfulness, spiritual retreat ever inspiring people to start up a soup kitchen or to start to house homeless people because they’re fundamentally self-centered spiritual practices, and they are creations of a capitalist order, which is about consumption.
Shadi Hamid:
I love that we’re getting that anti-capitalist towards the end of this episode, our kind of latent socialist.
Matthew Kaemingk:
I’m not a socialist, I’m not a socialist.
Shadi Hamid:
Well, you know what? Some people say Jesus was a socialist.
Matthew Kaemingk:
I know.
Shadi Hamid:
That’s what I hear.
Matthew Kaemingk:
We’ll talk about that some other time.
Shadi Hamid:
But as we end here, I just want to say one thing after what you said which is, I do wonder if the only way we can truly move beyond ourselves is by having a higher power. At some basic level, we keep on coming back to this starting premise. There’s all these things that people can try out, all these pseudo spiritual or even spiritual practices that are detached from God. And that detachment means that they are inherently limited in what they can do because they always fall back on the self and the ego and making the self sovereign instead of making something beyond ourselves sovereign. And this is not to suggest to those of our listeners who are atheists or agnostics or not religious that things are hopeless for them or anything.
Matthew Kaemingk:
We want to invite you to believe in God.
Shadi Hamid:
Well, that’s not… Okay, look, you know how I feel about conversion.
Matthew Kaemingk:
I know.
Shadi Hamid:
But I do know for sure that there is a reply from non-religious people and they understandably can bristle a little bit at the kind of sometimes perhaps perceived superiority of believers who think that they have the key, and because they believe in God, it allows them to be more moral, to be more giving, to be more thoughtful towards others. So I do also want to acknowledge how that is a tricky thing. That can be a little bit offensive, I don’t know. But I’d be curious if anyone has thoughts on that in particular. Do feel free to share that with us as well. I think there’s a lot in this episode that is worth unpacking.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. And of course, I mean to speak to that, really quickly before we wrap up, the purpose of fasting is not to demonstrate or to learn about how awesome we are, but actually as we fast, we learn about our own disorders frankly, and our own needs for redemption and restoration and our need for God. So the proper end of fasting is not a proud religious person, but a humble religious person.
Shadi Hamid:
Amen to that.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. Let’s end it there. Thank you so much for listening to Zealots at the Gate. We would love to hear from you, your own practices of fasting either in Ramadan or with Christianity. Or for those of you who are on a spiritual journey yourself, we’d love to hear about the role fasting plays in your public, political, social life, the way you relate to your neighbors.
If you like what you’ve heard, please check out the podcast’s intellectual seedbed at comment.org. You’ll find that article on fasting we were discussing. Yeah. So you can write to us at zealots@comment.org. You can also connect with us on Twitter at @ShadiHamid or at @MatthewKaemingk, and you can expect a sincere and kind exchange. Our thanks to our sponsor, Fuller Seminary’s Mouw Institute of Faith and Public Life, which hosts Shadi and I. Yeah, it’s been a great conversation, Shadi.
Shadi Hamid:
Thanks, Matt. We should also say that Zealots at the Gate is hosted by Comment magazine, produced by Allie Crummy, audience strategy by Matt Crummy, with editorial direction by Anne Snyder. Thanks to all them for their support and help with this podcast. I’m Shadi Hamid.
Matthew Kaemingk:
And I’m Matthew Kaemingk. We’ll see you next time.
Shadi Hamid:
Thanks for joining us, everyone. Bye.
