Ritual Restraint

Every year, nearly two billion people engage in one of the most profound social experiments in discipline and devotion: Ramadan. For an entire lunar month, Muslims abstain not just from food and water during daylight hours, but from many forms of indulgence and distraction.

Walking through the streets of Fes, Morocco during these first days of Ramadan, the sacrifice is visible on nearly every face—a city-wide exercise in collective willpower that makes my occasional skipped breakfast seem like amateur hour. While for me, missing my morning coffee leads to psychological breakdown, those observing Ramadan navigate entire workdays without so much as a sip of water.

But Ramadan transcends individual sacrifice. At sunset, the atmosphere transforms as families gather to break their fast together, strangers share meals in mosques, and charitable giving multiplies across communities. It's a reminder of something increasingly rare in our hyper-individualized world: collective forbearance in service of something greater than ourselves.

The contrast with contemporary wellness culture couldn't be starker. Today's secular fasting trends come packaged with promises that would make any advertiser proud: mental clarity! cellular repair! metabolic flexibility! These approaches frame self-denial as just another tool in the personal optimisation toolkit—less about spiritual growth and more about becoming an upgraded version of yourself. Traditional fasting, whether in Ramadan, Yom Kippur, Lent, or Buddhist practices, offers something decidedly different—belonging.

To the skeptical mind, this collective dimension raises questions about choice and conformity. When freely embraced, rituals of restraint can cultivate genuine self-mastery. Yet in conservative communities, the line between personal conviction and cultural compliance can blur like a mirage in the Sahara. In countries where public eating during Ramadan hours invites disapproval or legal consequences, one might wonder: does sacrifice retain its spiritual value when it's socially mandated?

I'm neither an expert nor an adherent of religious fasting, but I'm fascinated by how Ramadan functions as a social technology and can be seen as counterpoint to the excesses of our individualistic culture. There's an irony in watching fitness influencers with their chiseled abs earnestly explaining intermittent fasting principles that echo practices conservative Muslims have followed for centuries.

With all this said, I won't be participating in the fast. My willpower typically collapses if you whisper "couscous" softly in my ear. But seeing this city synchronise its hunger has been fascinating.

As I contemplate a month of restraint that feels impossible to me, it's given me food for thought (sorry!). While maintaining healthy skepticism toward religious institutions, there might be insights to be drawn from practices that appear across diverse traditional cultures.

We should also save some of our healthy skepticism for our own contemporary culture. Must it take an obesity epidemic or appetite-suppressing drugs for us to exercise self-restraint? Should it require a pandemic for us to spend more time with family or identify with common struggles in our community?

Whether your fasting inspiration comes from a sacred text or a scientific study, there's wisdom in ritual restraint. Perhaps the lesson is simpler than we think: experiment with doing less, for reasons we truly care about, alongside those we love.