Next week begins Ramadan, the month in which believers in Islam must fast during the day, abstaining from eating, drinking, smoking and having sex. This fundamental pillar involves a hustle and bustle of daily life: you must get up before dawn to breakfast and you often go to sleep late because having lunch With the setting of the sun, dinner must necessarily be later. The appetite lost during the day leads to preparing and eating copiously, also to compensate for the caloric deficit of the day. It is the month in which Muslims eat the most, in fact, and family spending on food can increase by 50% to 100%. In other words, as bikini operation It doesn't work.
Adults who carry out this practice have psychological resources that can help them overcome the long days of fasting, although I advise against interacting with certain individuals when the time to break it approaches, even more so if it is a smoker. Tempers are always high in homes on Ramadan afternoons and any trifle can trigger fights and conflicts. But most adults endure fasting without it having any effect on their behavior or productivity because religious motivation can become a kind of supernatural power when it comes to human endurance capacities. That is the only thing I envy believers for: that they can draw strength from which there seems to be no strength just because they believe in a superior being and, in a surprising display of masochism, they meekly submit to its will.
Another very different issue is the effects that this religious practice has on children. Children from Muslim families often want to be initiated into this ritual because of its emotional, family and symbolic meaning. Ramadan is a different time of year, when the boundary between being big and small is the ability to fast. And those who want to be older quickly try to imitate the adults they love. They usually start by doing half a day, or one day at the weekend to try it out, but when puberty arrives the game is over and there is no option: they have to fast at all costs. Even if they go to school or college and the demands of academic life are incompatible with going hungry and thirsty. Many teachers who have Muslim students see the evidence in the classrooms: the children's attention level plummets and many enter a state of lethargy. Perhaps there are families who would not ask their teenage children to observe Ramadan, but social pressure from the environment often makes this dispensation impossible. And those who decide to break the law on their own must do so by eating in secret (for example, in the toilets of schools) and carrying an enormous feeling of guilt. It should not be like this; religions should adapt to the social environments in which they are and to the century in which they are practiced. Fasting in Arabia in the 7th century and spending the day sleeping in a tent is not the same as having to solve second degree equations in cold latitudes. In fact, children should never do Ramadan because they are growing and this movement of food and dehydration is not good for their health. They should be able to choose once they have enough use of reason whether they want to do it or not. And Islam is a religion that throughout the centuries has had the capacity to adapt because its texts allow for readings and interpretations. The problem is that the version that has been imposed here now is that of the fundamentalists, who are characterized by being inflexible and intransigent and prefer to put boys and girls in conflict with the society in which they live than to find ways to allow them to be Muslims where they are.
