Ramadan, Lived Religion, and the Celebration of Ambiguity

Abstract

In this paper, I demonstrate how the lived practice of Ramadan in the UK signifies a tolerance and celebration of ambiguity in everyday life. I position my work against Bauer’s (2021) argument that Muslims have become increasingly unaccepting of ambiguity and that this “intolerance of ambiguity in modern Islam is a phenomenon of modernity” (29). Rather, my participants tolerated seemingly contradictory ideas, embracing subjectivity and contrasting a post-Enlightenment emphasis on certainty and objective truth.
I demonstrate these subjective and ambiguous attitudes and practices through several examples. Firstly, participants displayed an ambiguous approach to sacred times. This is explored in the context of variant methods of moonsighting – to determine the start and end of Islamic months – and the perceived unknowability of one of the most sacred times of the year, Laylatu-l-qadr (The Night of Power). Secondly, participants expressed paradoxical attitudes towards food, simultaneously shunning and rejoicing in bodily desires.

My paper contributes to several contemporary understandings of Islam – including the works of Thomas Bauer (2021) and Shahab Ahmed (2016) – which tend towards the idea that Muslims today have become increasingly intolerant of ambiguity and subjectivity instead adopting more rigid and binary positions. I contrast such arguments, displaying particularly how the everyday, often domestic, practice of Islam is more nuanced and complex than public discourses might reveal. Furthermore, I argue that studies of everyday, mundane aspects of religion are vital in illuminating our understanding of Islam in the modern world.