Yesterday was the first day of Ramadan, a month most widely recognized as a time of fasting and abstinence from any vice. Yesterday evening, families around the world gathered for iftar, the breaking of the fast, for the first time this year. After each iftar, people spend time together, watching new television series, visit friends and family, and/or participate in cultural events–especially in the second half of the month. The sense of community during Ramadan is remarkably similar to nostalgic depictions of Christmas in Western countries. The major difference is that it lasts an entire month.
Ramadan is also a time for serious spiritual reflection. The purpose of the fast is to fight against temptation. It is easy to reach for a bottle of water or a bit of bread midway through the day. But, instead of doing so, Muslims are expected to reach out to God for aid in fighting this desire. It is said that the power of good deeds are amplified during Ramadan, and many people behave with this in mind.
Many Muslims spend time reading, reciting, or listening to the Qur’an, which early Muslim scholars divided into thirty juz. The ajzā’ (plural of juz) are a form of pacing. They allow the Qur’an to be divided into digestible chunks, spread evenly over the course of the month. Many people can complete a juz in thirty minutes of careful reading. If recited, a juz would take approximately forty-five minutes to an hour to complete.
In the days before Ramadan, I spent some time reflecting on what I could do during the month. Although I am not Muslim, I was raised in a Christian household, and would consider myself open to religion. Nondualist traditions like Buddhism and Daosim have typically resonated most strongly with me, but I realized that I never engaged in any serious study of the Qur’an beyond a series of surface-level texts on Islam as a whole. I had read a few surahs and sampled other passages, but I had never engaged with the text in a sustained, meaningful way. This Ramadan, then, is an opportunity for me to do exactly that
The Project
Over the course of the next month, I will read the Qur’an in its entirety, juz by juz, alongside essays by a number of scholars–both religious Muslim scholars and non-religious academic scholars. My outside reading will not be comprehensive, by any means. The purpose of secondary reading will be to establish a stronger understanding of both religious practice and broader academic debates. Living in an Arabo-Islamic country, I will also take close note of my own observations and experiences during the month of Ramadan.
As part of my own practice I will fast for the second half of the month.
At the end of each week, I will write a blog post synthesizing things that I have learned as well as my own observations, which I hope will be informative or insightful to readers. For those who practice, I hope that my own thoughts will resonate with yours.
Part 1 will be about days 1-7, Part 2 about days 8-14, Part 3 about days 15-21, and Part 4 about days 22-28. There will also be a concluding, Part 5, about the last two days, as well as concluding remarks about the entire project.
The Source Material
Unfortunately, my command of Arabic is not strong enough to read the Qur’an itself (that is, in the original language). I will instead be relying on a translated version entitled The Study Qur’an, which was edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr.1Seyyed Hossein Nasr (ed.), The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary (New York: HarperOne, 2015). The team of translators, commentators, and essayists who produced the final edition are all Muslims, and they avoided both modernist and fundamentalist approaches. The idea here was to bring traditional Muslim perspectives to the forefront.
In addition to the Qur’an itself, I will read the full range of essays included at the end of the text, although not the commentaries.
Finally, the translation of the Qur’an and the essays within The Study Quran will be supplemented by a variety of chapters from The Oxford Handbook of Qur’anic Studies and The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Theology.2Mustafa Shah and Muhammad Abdel Haleem (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Qur’anic Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020) and Sabine Schmidtke (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). The purpose of these collections is to help me better understand both the major themes of the Qur’an, as well as the ways in which Islam as a religion developed over time. I will read the entirety of The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Theology and only a sampling of chapters from The Oxford Handbook of Qur’anic Studies.
All essays will be divided evenly over the course of the thirty days, alternating between two and three essays per day, alongside the given juz.
I hope that this series of blog posts will be as enlightening for you as it is for me. Ramadanek mabrouk!
Endnotes
- 1Seyyed Hossein Nasr (ed.), The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary (New York: HarperOne, 2015).
- 2Mustafa Shah and Muhammad Abdel Haleem (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Qur’anic Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020) and Sabine Schmidtke (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).