Ramadan in the blaze of a revolution

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• Let us pause for a moment and think – who forces the shopkeepers to cheat in weight, to sell expired medicines, to treat food with toxic chemicals; who tells the quakes to pose as doctors and operate on critical patients only to expedite their death

The autocrat has fallen – its images have been removed from the premises of big mansions, from squares, from roads, from offices. Statues have been knocked down, busts pulverised; and residences linked to the allies of the ousted ruler have been razed to the ground.

The ripples of anger and hatred, caused by the killing of hundreds of people and the injuries of many more thousands by the regime, seem not to stop any time soon. They are only widening in bigger circles and seizing everything that comes in the way.

Every day, processions are parading streets, vowing to take revenge for the protracted misrule of the past 16 years, when rights were downtrodden, dreams shattered; when people were reduced to just numbers, bereft of all humanity; when all cried in silence and waited for the misrule to end. The wait was long indeed.

Now that it has ended, now that the ruler has fled in the face of the surging tide of mass protests, will this thirst for revenge stop — satisfied and quenched? It does not seem so because we are only finding new enemies every day. We are looking at each other with suspicion, closely watching our fellows.  

It will not stop, because we have lost sight of something crucial — the enemy within that lurks in the dark, waits in ambush and attacks. It deludes us into thinking that the enemy is only on the outside – in the mansions, in the streets, in the shops, in the offices. And when we are alone with ourselves, there is no enemy, it is all good. Clear delusion.

Let us pause for a moment and think – who forces the shopkeepers to cheat in weight, to sell expired medicines, to treat food with toxic chemicals; who tells the quakes to pose as doctors and operate on critical patients only to expedite their death; what inspires the rickshaw-pullers to charge a person in danger an exorbitant fare; what makes the brothers not give their sisters their due share of the property when the parents are no more; who whispers into the ears of rapists, robbers, thieves, telling them to do what they do; who tells a person to pester the neighbours with trifles, giving them sleepless nights and who ……and ……who? 

Does any government stand on our shoulders and force us to do these evil things? No. Then what makes us do these? 

The answer: the evil within us, the bad things that we harbour in our heart, from where these filthy things find their way to our limbs, and come out in the form of bad words or evil deeds. And done repeatedly, they become habits, bad habits in fact. And our habits are our soft institutions with rules of their own. 

These soft institutions within us keep driving the institutions in the external world – the offices, the markets, the clubs, the cooperatives and whatnot. 

This is why we see so many bad things happening around us every day. 

Now, can't we say we have a share in the making of a bad regime, an autocratic one; or, going a bit further, can't we infer that a bad regime is the sum total of all the evils done by us all, which find the ultimate expression through a person named General Ayub Khan, General Ershad or Sheikh Hasina? But are we not a part of them at a deeper level? 

So, when we bring down the structure of an autocratic regime, we leave out a similar structure deep inside us and this deep structure will, in only a matter of time, give rise to many more structures of another autocratic regime. This is a never-ending process. 

The only way out is to break the cycle by drying up the source from where the evils draw their sustenance. This is fasting, abstaining from food and drink during the prescribed hours and more importantly from indulging in our bestiality. And Ramadan brings us the opportunity to tame the beast in us, to chain it. 

The Quran says: "O you who have believed, fasting has been prescribed upon you as it was prescribed upon those before you so that you may become righteous." [2:183] 

So, the fight is both ways – while fighting the beast outside, we must not lose sight of the darkness within us – the breeding ground of beasts, and while fighting the autocrats, we must not forget the autocrat within us. This is the teaching of Ramadan, the month of fasting.