Fasting is often understood simply as abstaining from food and drink.
Yet in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, it entails far more: a discipline of desire, a reordering of time, and an ethics of speech. The Qur’an offers a striking expression of this through Mary’s ṣawm—a “fast of speech.” And a prophetic hadith forcefully reminds us that a fast without moral integrity is nothing more than an empty deprivation.
Fasting is not merely a matter of the stomach
From the outside, fasting seems easy to define: not eating, not drinking, abstaining for a number of hours. This definition is not incorrect—but it is incomplete. In the great monotheistic traditions, fasting is never reduced to a bodily mechanism. It is an exercise in the transformation of the self.
To fast is not merely to starve the body. It is to interrupt habit. It is to break the ordinary flow of immediate satisfactions. It introduces restraint into one’s existence, a heightened awareness of the self.
Fasting challenges a very modern illusion: the belief that living consists in satisfying our needs, desires, and impulses as quickly as possible. Human beings, however, are not merely organisms to be filled. They are also beings of speech, desire, memory, and responsibility.
The lesson of words: Ṣiyām, Ṣawm, and Restraint
This deeper meaning becomes visible as soon as one pays attention to language. In the Qur’an, the usual term for the prescribed fast is ṣiyām, notably in the verse:
“O you who believe, fasting (ṣiyām) has been prescribed for you as it was prescribed for those before you, so that you may attain taqwā.” (Qur’an 2:183)
Here fasting is presented as an obligation, but above all as a path toward the spiritual vigilance and moral awareness denoted by taqwā.
Yet the Qur’an also employs another word from the same root: ṣawm. And here the text becomes especially illuminating. In Sūrat Maryam (19:26), when Mary has just given birth and must face the gaze and accusations of her people, she declares:
“I have vowed a ṣawm to the Most Merciful; today I will not speak to any human being.”
In this instance, the fast is not dietary—it is verbal. It is voluntary silence, the suspension of speech.
The Arabic root Ṣ-W-M fundamentally conveys the idea of abstention, restraint, voluntary cessation—an understanding already emphasized by classical Arabic lexicographers, from al-Khalīl ibn Aḥmad (d. 791) to Ibn Manẓūr in his Lisān al-ʿArab. Before becoming the technical name of a ritual practice, the term referred to a more essential movement: stopping, refusing to yield to immediacy. Mary’s ṣawm thus reminds us that fasting, in its deepest horizon, concerns not only what enters the mouth—but also what comes out of it.
Mary and the fast of speech
Mary’s ṣawm is one of the Qur’an’s most subtle reflections on the nature of fasting.
Mary does not respond. She does not immediately defend herself. She suspends speech at the very moment when every human instinct would push one to explain, justify, and argue.
This silence is not emptiness. On the contrary, it is a spiritual gesture of remarkable intensity: a withdrawal of the ego, a willingness to allow truth to manifest itself without the agitation of language.
In this scene, fasting reaches a profoundly interior dimension. It becomes mastery of the word. For it is sometimes easier to abstain from bread for a few hours than to restrain a word of anger, a slander, or a hurtful reply.
The Hadith that changes everything
This Qur’anic intuition is confirmed in the prophetic tradition. A hadith reported by al-Bukhari (Ṣaḥīḥ, Book of Fasting, no. 1903) states:
“Whoever does not abandon false speech and acting upon it, God has no need of his abandoning his food and drink.”
The formulation is strikingly rigorous. It does not diminish the ritual fast; it reveals its meaning.
What God expects is not merely material deprivation, but moral rectitude. Bodily abstinence has no value if the tongue continues to lie, slander, and humiliate.
This is where the difference lies between a living fast and a dead one. The first transforms the human being. The second merely exhausts him.
Lent and Yom Kippur: Other grammars of lack
Christianity and Judaism likewise recognize this moral depth. The Christian season of Lent proceeds from a similar intuition: fasting has meaning only if it serves conversion. As early as the fourth century, John Chrysostom stated this forcefully in his Homilies on the Statues:
“The true fast is the rejection of evil, the restraint of the tongue, the suppression of anger, the distancing from desires, slander, falsehood, and perjury.”
Within this tradition, fasting is ordinarily associated with prayer and almsgiving—a triad inherited from Second Temple spirituality and explicitly reiterated in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:1–18).
Judaism, for its part, observes several fasts, the most solemn of which is Yom Kippur. The Book of Isaiah offers a decisive prophetic critique:
“Is such the fast that I choose? […] Is not this the fast that I desire: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free?” (Isaiah 58:5–6)
The Mishnah, Yoma (VIII, 9), further clarifies that Yom Kippur does not erase sins committed against others until reconciliation has taken place. The point is not suffering for its own sake, but a return to moral truth.
Fasting also means reforming one’s speech
Perhaps the deepest common point among these religious experiences lies here: fasting is complete only if it reaches speech. One may abstain from drinking while allowing slander to flow freely. One may remain hungry all day while continuing to wound others through language.
Speech is, in truth, the most difficult arena of ascetic discipline. It engages the ego, impulse, anger, and the need to be right. To fast from speech does not mean withdrawing into silence. It means learning not to say everything, not to react to everything, not to make language the immediate instrument of one’s passions.
An ancient practice for a saturated world
Fasting may appear archaic in societies dominated by consumption and constant self-expression. In reality, it is strikingly contemporary.
We live in a world that encourages immediacy: immediate satisfaction, immediate outrage, immediate commentary. Fasting introduces resistance to this logic.
It tells the modern individual: not everything that can be taken must be taken immediately. And not everything that can be said deserves to be spoken.
Ramadan, Lent, Yom Kippur—these names belong to distinct histories and theologies. Yet they converge on a fundamental point. What Islamic tradition calls taqwā, the Christian tradition names compunctio, and the Jewish tradition calls teshuvah: the human being does not live only from what he consumes.
He also lives from what he learns to restrain.
To restrain a gesture.
To restrain anger.
To restrain a word.
Perhaps that is the deepest lesson of fasting: we do not become more human by endlessly filling our lives, but by discovering what absence—at times—can reveal within them.
The space that used to exist where we can draw wisdom from one another is severely constrained. I am grateful that there are still voices and pens that remind us of adab—the art of high civilization—where a spirit of wisdom pierces the darkness of our times. This article is a beautiful example. Thank you for this offering.