First of all, Eid Mubarak to everyone. Hope Ramadhan this year has been a good one for everybody. I was anticipating Ramadhan to fall on a Wednesday and therefore asked for the day off from my consultant, but it so happened that Regent Mosque in London announced that Eid falls on Tuesday so here I am on the eve of Eid on my bed, blogging after a few weeks of silence.
This year’s Ramadhan is a bit different for me. I’ve learned a few more things about myself as well as other people. It’s been one of the toughest Ramadhans so far as I’ve had a packed timetable for the whole month, but also one of the most enlightening. I want to share something with my fellow friends that I have observed throughout this holy month and hope that we all can learn something from it.
We are fast becoming a group of people who turn religion into rituals. And I mean, we Muslims especially from our part of the world tend to do all the good things during Ramadhan and yet fail to add that to our overall behaviour and personality during other times of the year. Some people fast just because everybody else fasts and they have been fasting every year since they were 8 or 9. What they fail to understand is the principles behind the ibadah, which isn’t merely not eating and drinking, but imposing an overall degree of control over our bad impulses. Being good when everybody else is doing good is not something surprising and probably fairly easy to do. But being able to still do good when the temptataion is so high to do the wrong things is what makes a man truly great. What is even worrying is that even during Ramadhan our good behaviour can be very periodic and interlaced with glimpses of bad akhlak.
So why does this happen? Well, there are many reasons for this of course. As I’ve mentioned earlier, we sometimes forget the principles behind the ibadah itself and take it just for its face-value and ritualistic aspects. Pray 5 times a day, tarawikh 8 rakaat every night, fast 30 days a year, which are all the things that people do collectively and can tend to be very ritualistic. When the ibadah becomes mere physical acts and loses its thinking process and ‘penghayatan’, then we will have a problem. That’s what they will become, just rituals and we will not be able to expand on that. Which is why we sometimes see people who, on the outside look more religious than others but on closer inspection, are found out and prove to be surprisingly the opposite. Baffles the mind at times, but does happen.
So I am reminding first and foremost myself and then my fellow friends, that we need to look at ourselves and see whether our work during Ramadhan has been reflected in our overall manner and performance throughout the year. If it doesn’t, or there’s something that doesn’t seem quite right and does not add up, then maybe we need to rethink the way we do things.
I sometimes think of religion as akin to something that we wear. If you’ve got nice jackets and pants but wear really smelly socks or torn shoes, then it just doesn’t look quite right does it? 
Eid Mubarak everyone 
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