What Is Ramadan?

Ramadan is held to be the month in which the Quran began to be revealed, which is why it is treated as the most significant month of the year. The fast lasts the whole month, ending with a major festival.

Because the Islamic calendar is lunar, Ramadan moves roughly eleven days earlier each year against the solar calendar. Over a lifetime a Muslim will fast Ramadan in every season, with very different day lengths depending on the time of year and how far from the equator they live.

Those fasting eat a meal before dawn, called suhoor, then take no food or drink until sunset. The fast is broken with a meal called iftar, traditionally started with dates and water.

The fast covers more than eating. It includes drinking, and Muslims are also encouraged to avoid arguments, gossip and anger, treating the month as training in self restraint. Extra prayers are common in the evenings, and many aim to read through the whole Quran during the month.

Fasting is expected of healthy adults, and the tradition contains clear exemptions:

• •Young children, who often try partial fasts as they grow
• •People who are ill, temporarily or long term
• •Travellers, who may make up the days later
• •Pregnant, nursing and menstruating women

Ramadan ends with Eid al-Fitr, the festival of breaking the fast. It begins with a communal prayer, usually in the morning, followed by visiting family, sharing food and giving gifts, especially to children.

A charitable payment is expected before the Eid prayer so that everyone in the community can take part in the celebration. That link between fasting and giving is a recurring theme, and many describe the experience of hunger as sharpening awareness of those who go without by necessity.

Ramadan poses a genuine practical problem far north or south, where summer days can run beyond twenty hours and in some places the sun barely sets at all. A dawn to sunset fast becomes impossible or dangerous.

Religious authorities have issued several rulings for these situations. Common approaches include following the timings of the nearest location with a normal day and night cycle, or following the timings of Mecca. Different scholars and communities have adopted different solutions, and Muslims in northern Europe generally follow the guidance of their own local authorities.

Because Islamic months follow the moon, Ramadan traditionally begins when the new crescent is sighted after sunset at the end of the previous month. If clouds hide it, the previous month is counted as complete at thirty days. Some communities rely on local sighting, some follow announcements from another country such as Saudi Arabia, and others use astronomical calculations made in advance. This is why Muslims in the same city occasionally begin fasting, or celebrate Eid, on different days. It is a practical disagreement about method rather than about the importance of the month.

Within Ramadan, one night carries special weight. Laylat al-Qadr, often translated as the Night of Power or the Night of Decree, commemorates the night when revelation of the Quran is believed to have begun. The Quran describes it as better than a thousand months. Its exact date is not fixed, but tradition places it in the last ten nights of the month, most often looked for on the odd-numbered ones. Many Muslims intensify their prayer during this period, and some spend the final ten days in retreat at a mosque, a practice called itikaf.

Around the Muslim world, Ramadan has gathered local customs that are not religious requirements but are deeply loved. In Cairo and several other cities, a cannon has traditionally been fired to announce sunset and the start of iftar, a practice still kept up in some places as a ceremonial signal. Egypt is also known for the fanous, a decorated lantern that children carry and that families hang in streets and windows throughout the month, turning neighbourhoods into strings of coloured light.

Before alarm clocks, someone had to wake people in time for suhoor. In many places that job fell to a figure known in Egypt as the mesaharati, who walked the streets before dawn beating a drum and calling out to residents, sometimes by name. The role survives in some neighbourhoods, though phones now do most of the work. In many towns, nights in Ramadan are unusually busy, with families eating late, visiting relatives and shopping after iftar, so the daily rhythm of the whole community shifts for a month.

Fasting in Ramadan was not part of Islam from its very beginning. Muslim tradition dates the command to the second year after the Hijra, the migration of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina, which corresponds to around 624 CE. The relevant verses, in the second chapter of the Quran, present fasting as something that had also been prescribed for earlier communities, so Muslims understood it as part of a long religious tradition rather than an entirely new practice. Before this, Muhammad had kept a fast on the day of Ashura, the tenth day of the month of Muharram.

Once Ramadan became obligatory, the Ashura fast continued as a voluntary one, and many Muslims still keep it today. The month soon gathered historical memories of its own. The Battle of Badr, the first major victory of the Muslims of Medina over the Meccans, was fought during Ramadan in that same year, and the taking of Mecca in 630, achieved largely without fighting, also happened in Ramadan. These events gave the month an association with renewal and decisive change in Muslim memory, alongside its central link with the beginning of revelation.

A dawn to sunset fast changes how the body finds its fuel. For the first few hours after the pre-dawn meal, cells run mainly on glucose absorbed from that food. As it runs low, the liver releases glucose from its stored glycogen to keep blood sugar steady. Later in a long fasting day, the body relies increasingly on fat, and in longer fasts the liver begins making ketones that some tissues, including the brain, can use. For most healthy adults this switch is routine. Because no water is drunk during the day, the bigger challenge on long, hot days is often fluid rather than food.

Practical habits have grown up around this. Many people choose a pre-dawn meal of slowly digested foods, such as oats, wholegrains, eggs or beans, with plenty of water, and avoid very salty dishes that increase thirst. Between iftar and suhoor they drink steadily rather than all at once. Regular coffee and tea drinkers often notice headaches in the first days as they adjust to going without caffeine. People with conditions such as diabetes, who may be affected by long gaps without food or medicine, are advised to plan with a doctor, which fits the tradition's own exemptions for those whose health would be put at risk.

Ramadan is a month of dawn to sunset fasting, extra prayer and deliberate self restraint, ending in the celebration of Eid al-Fitr, and it functions as one of the strongest shared experiences in Muslim life.