Ramadan, community and the religious interface with unbelief

A few years back I fasted during Ramadan in a roughly Muslim way: I refrained from food during daylight, though I didn't do all the stuff with Qur'an recitals and stuff like that! I did so when I was living in an area where there are a lot of Muslims and I did so as part of praying for Muslims. I also had an experience as I did so on one or two occasions of sensing what I then labelled 'the spirit of the fast'. I think I still would go with that and I'm still musing about what it might mean and what was involved. However, what I do recall is having a sense of the way that the corporate fast engendered a sense of solidarity and communal cohesion. (It'd be great if we could have some of that back in Lent).

Anyway, Ramadan has started and this, Face to faith: Khaled Diab on Ramadan | Comment is free | The Guardian an article by a secular person of Muslim background has some interesting insights which I thought some of you might be interested to read:

"... fasting Ramadan – but not the marathon prayer sessions and Quranic recitals associated with the holy month – is the only aspect of Islam that I have ever stuck to religiously.
I'm not entirely sure why that was. Part of the reason could be the special spirit of solidarity that marks Ramadan. The short fuses, ready tempers and irritability excepted, there is the camaraderie, unison and communalism of the season, the festive air, like Christmas for a whole month, the enchantment associated with the partial reversal of night and day, the bubbling late-night waterpipes, the pre-dawn beans on a Cairo street corner.
More profoundly, another explanation could be that, beyond the religious duty, Ramadan carries a secular appeal. Praying would involve expressing devotion to a being – or creator – and a belief system which have always raised doubts in my mind. In contrast, fasting is not just a ritual for its own sake but is also about self-discipline, exercising control over your body and empathising with the predicament of the less fortunate."

Worth bearing in mind when we observe Ramadan going on: all may not be as we think in terms of interpretation. Clearly a 'liturgy' like this will have formative effects; but the interpretation of the thing also steers and directs those effects in terms of the inner apprehension and dispositions. The danger of religious practice which becomes embedded in the cultural domain is that it becomes a commonly-'owned' religious artefact and subject to the semiotic flexes produced by hegemonic and resistant dialectics, for example. That's part of what Jesus is dealing with in contrasting heart and hands in the 'clean/unclean' controversies, of course.