Ihya Ulum al-Din, Book 6: The Book of Fasting

The Book of Fasting is Book 6 of al-Ghazālī’s Revival of the Religious Sciences — the shortest book of the First Quarter, and one of its sharpest.

Anyone can go without food until sunset. This book asks what the eyes, the tongue and the heart were doing all day. Al-Ghazālī gives the outward law in a single chapter — what breaks the fast, what does not, what is owed if it is broken — then spends the rest on the fast nobody sees: the limbs from sin, and the heart from everything other than God.

He sets out three grades of fasting, six inward conditions, the danger of a fast that ends in a feast, and the voluntary fasts across the week, the month and the year. Book 5 asked you to let go of wealth. Book 6 asks for appetite itself.

This English is taken from the classical Arabic of the Iḥyāʾ, not rebuilt from an older translation. It can be read straight through, or studied beside the original.

You have fasted your whole life. This is the fast you have not tried.