Ramadan and ego of hard work

Here is a neurophilosophical and theological essay based on the provided Hadith from Sunan Abi Dawud.

The Unfastened Self: Neurophilosophical and Theological Reflections on a Prohibition of Speech

The Prophet Muhammad’s (ﷺ) teaching recorded in Sunan Abi Dawud 2415 is, at first glance, a simple instruction on speech. He forbids a believer from declaring, “I fasted the whole of Ramadan, and I prayed during the night in the whole of Ramadan.” The narrator, AbuBakrah, is uncertain of the precise reason, suggesting it might be a dislike of self-purification (tazkiyah) or a reminder of the necessity of sleep. This ambiguity, however, is the very door through which a profound exploration of the self can enter. By weaving together threads from theology, philosophy of mind, and neuroscience, this seemingly minor prohibition reveals itself as a deep safeguard for the integrity of religious experience, a check against the self-narrating brain’s tendency to construct a fiction of a unified, perfect self.

Theologically, the primary interpretation offered—a dislike of self-purification (tazkiyah)—strikes at the heart of riya’ (showmanship or ostentation), a major spiritual ailment in Islam. To declare “I fasted the whole of Ramadan” is not merely a factual statement; it is a public claim to a certain spiritual status. It transforms an act of pure devotion, ideally a secret conversation between the servant and God, into a social currency. This aligns with the Qur’anic injunction, “So do not claim yourselves to be pure; He is most knowing of who fears Him” (53:32). The prohibition guards against the subtle egoism that can contaminate even the most sacred acts, reminding the believer that the true evaluation of devotion rests solely with the Omniscient.

The narrator’s second speculation—that the Prophet (ﷺ) meant one must have slept and rested—introduces a radically different, yet complementary, dimension. It grounds the spiritual teaching in the undeniable, mundane reality of the human condition. This perspective resonates powerfully with modern neuroscience. Our consciousness is not a monolithic, continuous entity. It is an emergent property of a brain that cycles through distinct states: the high-order cognitive processing of wakefulness and the radically different neurochemistry and electrophysiology of sleep. To claim “I stood the whole night in prayer” is to deny the physiological necessity of sleep stages—of Non-REM and REM cycles—that are essential for memory consolidation, emotional regulation, and metabolic restoration. The body, with its inescapable biological rhythms, rebels against such a totalizing claim. The Prophet’s (ﷺ) teaching, therefore, is not just spiritually prudent but is a profound acknowledgment of the embodied nature of human existence.

This brings us to the neurophilosophical core of the matter. The human brain is, to a large extent, a “narrative machine.” Neuroscientists speak of the brain’s “default mode network” (DMN), a set of brain regions that becomes most active when we are at rest and not focused on the external world. This network is heavily implicated in self-referential thought, mental time travel (remembering the past and imagining the future), and constructing a coherent “autobiographical self.” It is the neurological engine of the story we tell ourselves about who we are—the self-narrative.

The statement “I fasted the whole of Ramadan” is a perfect product of this narrative machine. It takes a complex, month-long sequence of actions, sensations, thoughts, moments of intense focus, and inevitable lapses into distraction, and synthesizes them into a simple, linear, and self-aggrandizing summary. The DMN, in its quest for coherence, often glosses over the messy, discontinuous, and fragmented reality of experience. It creates a protagonist—a unified, consistent “I”—who performed a unified, consistent “whole” action.

The Prophet’s (ﷺ) prohibition acts as a powerful disruptor of this neural and narrative process. By forbidding the utterance, he is, in effect, forbidding the cognitive act of synthesizing one’s spiritual life into a tidy, boastful package. He forces a confrontation with the fragmented reality of experience. The phrase “the whole of Ramadan” becomes a linguistic impossibility, a violation of the truth of human consciousness. The self that wakes with fervor is not the same self that struggles with drowsiness before dawn; the self that prays with presence in the first rak’ah is not the same self counting the rak’ahs in the last. By silencing the narrative of the “whole,” the teaching allows the believer to inhabit the part. It cultivates a state of humble awareness of one’s own limitations and the fragmented nature of even our best efforts.

Furthermore, the brain’s predictive processing model suggests that our perceptions are not passive recordings but are actively constructed predictions based on prior experience. Our sense of self is also a prediction—a best guess of a stable entity navigating the world. The declaration of having performed a “whole” month of perfect devotion is a grand, self-flattering prediction that overwrites the moment-to-moment reality of the experience. The prophetic teaching, therefore, is a call to return to the raw data of consciousness, to the “error signal” that arises when the proud prediction (“I am one who perfectly observed the month”) meets the reality of a mind that wandered, a body that tired, and a self that was never truly whole in its devotion.

In synthesizing these perspectives, the Hadith emerges as a guide to a specific kind of intellectual and spiritual humility. It uses a theological concern (avoiding self-praise) and a biological fact (the necessity of sleep) to dismantle a philosophical illusion (the unified, continuous self). The command not to say “I did it all” is a command to recognize that the “I” which acts is as fragmented and intermittent as the acts themselves. It is a protection against what we might call neuro-spiritual pride—the ego’s hijacking of the brain’s narrative machinery to construct a false self of perfect devotion.

The true fasting of Ramadan, then, is not the fasting of the unified, boastful “I.” It is the fasting of the self that acknowledges its need for sleep, its moments of inattention, and its reliance on divine mercy to accept the fragments of its effort. It is the fasting of a self that, by refusing to narrate its own completion, opens itself to being completed by the One who is Al-Kamil (The Perfect). The Hadith ultimately invites us to unfasten the self from its own proud story and, in that silence, discover a more profound truth: that we are known, in our entirety, by a Knower whose knowledge is not a narrative, but a reality.