RaRaOohLaLaRaRaRamadan

=__//**Ramadan &other Muslim Rituals**//__=

Sawm: Fasting Fasting, known to Muslims as Sawm, the fourth Pillar of Islam, is also prescribed for Muslim for the whole month of Ramadan, one of the lunar months of the Muslim calendar lasting either twenty-nine or thirty days. No food, drink, medicine, smoke, or sensual pleasure may be taken from dawn until dark. In the evening it is permitted to eat and enjoy marital relations, and before dawn a meal is eaten to provide sufficient strength for the coming day’s activities. The ill, children, the aged, and certain other classes are excused from the fast, although those who can should make it up later. Ramadan is the month in which the Qur’an first came down upon Muhammad and it is considered auspicious for other reasons, too. Muslims try to improve their spiritual and ethical lives during this holy month. Evenings are spent in special prayer gatherings in mosques, where cycles of pious exercises are recited, some twenty in all. There is congregational recitation of the Qur’an, as well as increase individual recitation. Some people observe a retreat during the last ten days of Ramadan by residing in the mosque. Ramadan is a time of sober reflection and, depending on the season and region, it can be a difficult discipline. But experienced fasters soon get into the rhythm of the observance and testify to physical as well as spiritual benefits of rhythm of the observance and testify to physical as well as spiritual benefits of fasting. One of the major benefits is a shared feeling of common humanity, with differences of rank, status, wealth, and other circumstances that distinguish people from each other minimized. With all the effort that the fast entails, Ramadan is not a sad or anxiety-ridden period. Evenings are usually joyful occasions and people strive to be at their best at all times and to be especially aware of the dangers of crossness and hasty, angry words. There may be weariness for some, but there is also keenness of perception and self-scrutiny. At the close of the Ramadan fast comes one of the two canonical festivals of the Muslim year, the Feast of the Fast-Breaking, when Muslims send greeting cards to each other, enjoy special foods, and travel to be with family. A special Salat service opens the festival. The Hajj: Pilgrimage The fifth and final Pillar of Islam is the pilgrimage, or Hajj, to Mecca during the special month established for it. This is the only Pillar that is not absolutely obligatory. It is to be performed only if personal, financial, and family circumstances permit. Completing the Hajj confers on the pilgrim the honorific title Hajji, which may then be attached to the person’s name for the rest of his or her life. The Salat is a continuous exercise in worship and communal strengthening, with ritual concentration directed toward Mecca. The Hajj permits the worshiper to travel in body to the sacred center, where Muslims believe that Adam and Eve lived, where Abraham and his son Ishmael erected the Ka’ba as the first house of worship of the One True God, and where Muhammad often raised up the Salat and led his fellow believers, even when they were persecuted cruelly as they prostrated in prayer and praise. Prostration was ridiculed as craven by the proud pagan Arabs, but it became a new symbol of pride for Muslims in submission before their Lord. Pilgrims experience the thrill of seeing, hearing, and meeting fellow believers of all races and languages and cultures from the corners of the glove. Male pilgrims are required to don a two-piece, white, seamless garment, symbolizing their entry into the ritually pure and consecrated state of ihram. Women may also wear a white garment that covers their entire body and head, but they are also allowed to wear clean, modest clothing in their national styles. When men wear the ihram garment and women their national dress, Muslims rejoice at this dual symbolism of Muslim unity and equality alongside rich and creative cultural diversity. The Umma, thus, is both strongly focused in its common dedication of God, and brilliantly diffuse in its variegated cultural forms, all of which are turned toward the common task, which God commanded in the Qur’an, of "enjoining the right and forbidding the wrong." Although Islam knows no rite of passage into the Umma, the Hajj can be compared to a ritual of passage marked by separation from one spiritual status and movement of a higher one. The first step in this separation is formal leave-taking and the writing of one’s last will and testament. In Mecca, the dedicated state of ihram requires abstention form sexual relations, from shaving the beard or cutting one’s head or body hair, wearing scent or precious ornaments, hunting animals, and uprooting vegetation. The pilgrim is thus separated from everyday life and placed in a special ritual state, a common feature of rites of passage the world over. The actual time of the pilgrimage rites, in Mecca near the Ka’ba and in several locales outside, includes ritual reenactments of primordial spiritual events: Pilgrims pray where Abraham prayed; they run in frantic search of water as Hagar did for her defenseless son Ishmael, when they were cast out into the wilderness; they circumambulate the Ka’ba seven times on three occasions, just as the monotheistic worshipers of old were believed to do and as Muhammad prescribed by his example; and they perform a blood sacrifice of consecrated animals in commemoration of Abraham’s sacrifice of a ram when God had tested his faith and then released him from the awful command to sacrifice his son (who the Qur’an identifies as Ishmael). The climactic event of the Hajj is a standing ceremony on the Plain of Arafat, several miles from Mecca, near the Mountain of Mercy, where Muhammad sat astride his camel as he delivered his farewell sermon to the assembled pilgrims in the last year of his life. The standing ceremony begins at noon with a special Salat and continues until sundown. The pilgrims observe a reflective afternoon, seeking God’s forgiveness of their sins and resolving to spend the remainder of their lives in renewed and more intense service of God and the Muslims. There may be as many as three million pilgrims gathered in the vast plain for the standing ceremony, ample witness to the great worldwide community of Muslims. If one misses the standing ceremony, for whatever reason, the entire pilgrimage is thus rendered invalid and must be repeated in another annual season. Notice that the standing ceremony focuses on the individual pilgrim’s own recommitment, which is renewed in light of the reenactments leading up to it. In ritual studies terminology, this is a "betwixt and between" time when a spiritual transformation and the graduation of the new status occur definitively, the status of Hajji. After the standing ceremony comes the blood sacrifice that extends symbolically back to Abraham. This sacrifice of sheep, goats, camels, cattle is of double significance. Not only is it a high point of the pilgrimage, a sort of liturgical release just as it was for Abraham and Ishmael; it is also the one point in the Hajj when Muslims around the world also participate by means of a Festival Salat and animal sacrifices at home. This observance is known as the Great Feast and with the Feast of Fast-Breaking completes the annual canonical observances of Muslim festivity. The performance of the sacrifice is done by pointing the animal’s head toward the Ka’ba in Mecca, saying "God is great" and "In the Name of God," and then slitting its throat quickly and cleanly. The blood is thoroughly drained before the meat is butchered, in a way similar to the Jewish practice of koshering meat. Again, this is a kind of ritual separation and believed to render the flesh pure as well as wholesome. The meat is divided into portions, at least in the case of Muslims not on pilgrimage, and usually given to the needy, and to neighbors, with the third portion remaining for the use of the sacrificer and his or her family. Only males may perform the slaughter; females have it done on their behalf by a male relative or special agent. During the final days of the Hajj and after the sacrifice, the pilgrims gradually emerge from the state of ihram by having their hair cut and beard shaved, by donning everyday clothes, and by beginning to focus on the tasks ahead beyond Mecca. Sexual relations are still forbidden until after certain final rites have been completed, like the ritual stoning of the devil and a farewell circumambulation of the Ka’ba. If they have not done it before the Hajj, pilgrims usually try to visit Medina, the City of the Prophet, some 280 miles to the north. Medina, like Mecca, is a forbidden city, open only to Muslims. Although the visit to Medina is not obligatory, it is meritorious and always deeply meaningful, because it provides an opportunity to pay respects at the Prophet Muhammad’s tomb and to visit other holy places nearby in this oasis city where the Umma was first organized under the guidance of the Qur’an and God’s Prophet. Emergence from the pilgrimage, symbolized by the lifting of the requirements of ihram, departure from Mecca, and being welcomed home by relatives and friends (there is typically a large crowd of greeters at airports and seaports) marks the return to normal life in a new status, which ritual studies experts call "reincorporation." Not only is the Hajji permitted to bear that title before his or her name, but in some places there are additional marks of the new status. In Egypt, for example, it is common for pilgrims to have special Hajj paintings applied to the exterior walls of their homes. Typically, these paintings depict scenes of the journey — a steamship, airplane, camel, or horse with rider (some traditionalists like to enter Mecca as Muhammad did, on a mount) — and they always contain a representation of the holy Ka’ba and usually also the Prophet’s tomb in Medina. Such Hajj art can be interpreted at various levels, but the main meaning, according to recent field analyses, centers in Egyptian ideas of saintly persons and the blessings and spiritual power that they provide in a community. The returning pilgrim is, as it were, a living saint who resides in a sacred house marked by the symbols of the supreme centers of Islamic sacral power, Mecca and Medina. Jihad

The five Pillars of Islam witnessing to God’s oneness and Muhammad’s messengerhood, worship through the Salat service, almsgiving, fasting in Ramadan, and pilgrimage to Mecca constitute only a minimum structure of Muslim orthopraxy. There are also many additional practices both at the individual and communal levels that make up the total way of life that is Islam. The Muslim term for worship is ibada, a word that literally means "service" in the same sense Christians mean it when they say worship service. God is served through worship, and worship is reserved for God alone. One additional form of service to god in Islam is jihad, whose meaning must be carefully explained. Jihad is often mentioned in news releases from the Middle East in which Muslims have proclaimed "holy war" against evil and Islam’s enemies, whether Western countries or fellow Muslims with whom they disagree (the extremist "Islamic Jihad" movement in Lebanon is an example). But jihad properly speaking means "exertion" in the way of God. It may mean fighting against Islam’s enemies or even attempting to spread the religion by force (although Muslim opinion on the latter differs sharply); but a famous teaching of Muhammad’s holds that the "greater jihad" is the spiritual struggle each individual has with her or his own faith and need for repentance, whereas jihad as armed conflict is called the "lesser" exertion. Whatever the prevailing opinion or practice, jihad has sometimes been considered a sixth Pillar of Islam, and thus a form of worship, or service according to specified rules.