Finding Rest in Ramadan: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Challenges — Epoche B2
Dear Omar, I hope this finds you and the family well, with Ramadan only a fortnight away. I have been thinking about what you said on the phone — that by the second week you are useless at work after about two in the afternoon, and that you feel guilty about it on top of everything else. I want to put a suggestion to you, because I think the guilt is the part that is misplaced. I have set it out at more length than a letter usually needs, and in four parts: what the month actually does to your nights, why the fog is not caused by the fasting, what qailulah is and what our sources really say about it, and — last — a correction to the advice I gave you on the phone, which I have since discovered was not quite right. First: the arithmetic of your nights Take your own timings. Suhoor here in Amman will be finishing around half past four, and taraweeh does not let out much before ten. Suppose you are home and settled by eleven, and up again at a quarter to four to eat before the fast begins: that is four and three quarter hours. If you then go back to sleep at five, after the dawn prayer, and rise at eight for a nine o'clock start at the ministry, that is a further three. Nearly eight hours, then, which sounds perfectly adequate — and this is the first thing worth being exact about, because your figure of five hours is only correct if you do not take the second block, and I suspect you often do not. But the total is not the trouble in any case. The trouble is that it arrives in two pieces at the wrong times. Sleep is not uniform. It runs in cycles of roughly ninety minutes through light stages, then deep slow-wave sleep, then a period of rapid-eye-movement sleep, and — this is the part that matters here — the proportions shift across the night. Deep slow-wave sleep is concentrated in the first cycles; REM sleep predominates in the last ones, in the hours before an ordinary waking time. A night ending at a quarter to four therefore does not simply give you a shorter version of a full night. It gives you most of the deep sleep and comparatively little of what should have come between four and seven. The second block, taken after dawn, begins from cold and is over before the balance is made up. Even with the ministry hours shortened to nine until three, that leaves most people trying to do a full day's thinking on broken sleep at the wrong end of the clock. Treating the resulting fog as a failure of will seems to me a misreading of the situation. It is a scheduling problem, and our tradition has an answer to it that we have largely stopped using. Second: the fog is not caused by the fasting That claim of mine deserves evidence rather than assertion, and there is a good deal of it, some of it from this region. Ahmed BaHammam and colleagues in Riyadh have studied sleep during Ramadan for years, and the consistent finding across their work and the literature they review is that the month delays sleep and fragments it — bedtime and rising time both shift later, night sleep shortens, daytime sleepiness increases. The important part is the next step. In a review of the field, Qasrawi, Pandi-Perumal and BaHammam separated the effect of the fast from the effect of the schedule by comparing studies in which sleep timing was allowed to shift with studies in which it was held fixed. Where sleep schedules and light exposure were controlled, abstaining from food and drink during daylight had little detectable effect on sleepiness or on cognitive performance. What produces the fog is the altered timing of sleep, meals and light — not the hunger. There is a second, smaller piece of evidence that I find oddly persuasive, and it concerns the hour you named. You said two in the afternoon. That trough is a documented phenomenon called the post-lunch dip, and it is misnamed: alertness and performance fall in the early afternoon in people who have eaten nothing at all, because it reflects a secondary dip in the body's daily rhythm roughly twelve hours out of phase with the deep trough of the night. You have no lunch to blame it on. It would be happening anyway, and Ramadan simply removes the reserves you would normally have to override it. So the honest description of your two o'clock is: a normal circadian trough, arriving on a body that slept in two pieces. Neither half of that is a moral fact about you. Third: what qailulah is, and what our sources actually say The answer is qailulah , the short rest in the middle of the day. It is not a lie-in and it is not idleness; the classical scholars define it as rest in the middle of the day, whether or not sleep actually comes — which, as it happens, matches what the sleep researchers find, since lying quietly without sleeping recovers some of the same ground. There is a well-known narration recorded by al-Tabarani in which the Prophet, peace be upon him, tells his companions: "Take a midday nap, for the devils do not take midday naps." Read plainly, it is an instruction to rest, given to people who were not short of work. But I should be careful with it in a letter that is otherwise asking you to weigh evidence. That narration is not in Bukhari or Muslim; it comes through al-Tabarani's al-Mu'jam al-Awsat , and the hadith scholars have graded its chain differently, some accepting it as sound enough to act on and others weakening it. I would not want to rest a recommendation on it alone. What is not in doubt is the practice itself, which is attested in the strongest collections: Bukhari records that the Companions took their midday meal and their qailulah after the Friday prayer, which tells us the rest was a settled part of the ordinary day rather than an indulgence needing justification. Ibn al-Qayyim, writing in the fourteenth century on the Prophet's regimen of health in Zad al-Ma'ad , treats the midday rest as a matter of bodily good order alongside diet and exercise — that is, as medicine, not merely as piety. And it was not only a religious habit — it was how anyon