prayers, but anybody who should openly disregard the rule of fasting would be subject to a very severe punishment.[1] Even the privilege granted to travellers and sick persons is not readily taken advantage of. During their marches in the middle of summer nothing but the apprehension of death can induce the Aeneze to interrupt the fast;[2] and when Burton, in the disguise of a Muhammedan doctor, was in Cairo making preparations for his pilgrimage to Mecca, he found among all those who suffered severely from such total abstinence only one patient who would eat even to save his life.[3] There is no evidence that the fast of Ramaḍân was an ancient, pre-Muhammedan custom.[4] On the other hand, its similarity with the Harranian and Manichaean fasts is so striking that we are almost compelled to regard them all as fundamentally the same institution; and if this assumption is correct, Muhammed must have borrowed his fast from the Harranians or Manichaeans or both. Indeed, Dr. Jacob has shown that in the year 623, when this fast seems to have been instituted, Ramaḍân exactly
- ↑ von Kremer, Culturgeschichte des Orients, i. 460.
- ↑ Burckhardt, Bedouins and Wahábys, p. 57.
- ↑ Burton, Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1898), i. 74.
- ↑ We can hardly regard as such the passage in the Koran (ii. 179) where it is said, "O ye who believe! There is prescribed for you the fast as it was prescribed for those before you; haply ye may fear." The traditionists say that Muhammed was in the habit of spending the month of Ramaḍân every year in the cave at Hirâ, meditating and feeding all the poor who resorted to him, and that he did so in accordance with a religious practice which the Koreish used to perform in the days of their heathenism. Others add that 'Abd al-Muṭṭalib commenced the practice, saying "that it was the worship of God which that patriarch used to begin with the new moon of Ramaḍân, and continue during the whole of the month" (Muir, Life of Mahomet, ii. 56, n*. Sell, Faith of Islám, p. 316). But, as Muir remarks (op. cit. ii. 56, n*), it is the tendency of the traditionists to foreshadow the customs and precepts of Islam as if some of them had existed prior to Muhammed, and constituted part of "the religion of Abraham." See Jacob, "Der muslimische Fastenmonat Ramaḍân," in VI. Jahresbericht der Geographischen Gesellsch. zu Greifswald, p. i. 1893–96, p. 2 sqq.
