A girl arranges plates before iftar – the breaking-fast meal– during Ramadan at the Grand Mosque in Delhi, India. Photograph: Ahmad Masood/Reuters
Muslims around the world are preparing for the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. From waking up in the early hours for a quick bite and sip of water, to the waiting – date in hand – for the seconds to tick by until the call to prayer at sunset, why do Muslims fast and what is Ramadan?
What is Ramadan?
Muslims – there are 1.6 billion in the world – believe Ramadan is the holiest month in the year , when the Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, was revealed to the prophet Muhammad.
Ramadan is the ninth month in the Islamic calendar, or the Hijri calendar based on the lunar cycle, which began in AD622 when Muhammad migrated from Mecca to Medina.
When is Ramadan?
Depending on the sighting of the crescent moon, or hilal, the month begins this year on the evening of the Wednesday 17 June, which means Muslims will begin their first day of fasting at dawn on Thursday 18 June.
The month of fasting will end on either Friday 17 July or Saturday 18 July, as there are either 29 or 30 days in a lunar month.
As Ramadan begins about 11 days earlier each year, it sometimes falls in winter months when the fasts are short, and in summer months when the fasts are long.
Why do Muslims fast?
During this month, observant Muslims do not eat or drink during daylight hours. This is because fasting is one of the five pillars of Islam. The other acts of worship are the shahadah, which is the declaration of faith; salat, the five daily prayers; zakat, or almsgiving; and the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.
Fasting in Ramadan is obligatory for Muslims, and in the Qur’an it states:
O you who believe! Fasting is prescribed for you as it was prescribed for those before you, that you may attain Taqwa [God-consciousness]. – The Qur’an, Al-Baqarah:183
You can hear the recitation of this verse in Arabic: Fasting, or sawm in Arabic, literally means “to refrain” – and not only is it abstaining from food, drink and sex, but also actions such as smoking cigarettes, talking about others behind their backs, or using foul language.
Fasting does not mean Muslims retreat from their daily routine, rather they are encouraged to continue as normal in their work and usual activities. In fact, this is where the challenge of patience and endurance comes in. Muslims believe fasting is not merely a physical ritual, but is primarily a time for reflection and spiritual recharging.
During the fast, Muslims believe that their desires are curbed and that they can gain understanding of how those who are less privileged than them feel. It is considered to increase one’s patience, closeness to God and generosity towards others.
The month is also a time of community; it is the custom for Muslims to invite their neighbours and friends to share their evening meal – iftar – and recite special Tarawih prayers in congregation. It is also a time when Muslims try to reconnect with the Qur’an, which they believe is the word of God.
Workers break their fast outside the Imam Turki bin Abdullah mosque in the Saudi capital, Riyadh. Photograph: Fayez Nureldine/AFP/Getty Images
Who fasts?
Healthy Muslim men and women are required to fast during the month according to Islamic teachings.
Who is exempt from fasting?
Children, people who are sick or who have mental illness, elderly people, travellers and women who are menstruating , postnatal , pregnant or breast-feeding do not have to fast.
People exempt from fasting during Ramadan can make up the missed fasts later. But if a person is not able to fast at all – particularly if that is for health reasons – can compensate by feeding a needy person for each day they do not fast.
Is it healthy?
Muslims do not fast continuously throughout the month: they eat before dawn and break their fast at sunset each day. Scientists have found that short periods of fasting – if properly controlled – can have a number of health benefits, as well as potentially helping overweight people. Health advice from the NHS includes keeping hydrated and having the right proportion of carbohydrates, fat and protein in between fasts, and not bingeing on oily feasts – however tempting. This may, in fact, lead to gaining weight.
During fasting, the body uses up glucose and then starts to burn fat, which can lead to weight loss. So with prolonged fasting of many days or weeks, the body starts using protein for energy.
After a few days of the fast, higher levels of endorphins – hormones related to mood – appear in the blood and can make a person more alert and give an overall feeling of general mental wellbeing, according to the NHS website.
Dr Razeen Mahroof, an anaesthetist from Oxford, said in a statement about fasting to the NHS: “A detoxification process also occurs, because any toxins stored in the body’s fat are dissolved and removed from the body.”
The Muslim call to prayer
Some traditions
Muslims have varying Ramadan customs across the world, depending on their culture. Islamic traditions include:
Eating and drinking at sahoor, the pre-fast meal, just before dawn
Not delaying breaking the fast at sunset, which is iftar time
Breaking the fast with an odd number of fresh dates, or dried dates if none are available, or a few sips of water
Searching for the “Night of Power” or Laylat al-Qadr. According to Islamic tradition, this is when the first verses of the Qur’an were revealed to the prophet Muhammad by God. This falls within the last 10 nights of Ramadan.
Why do Muslims start Ramadan on different days?
Muslims often joke that they start fasting on different days. The most likely reason for differences over the start and end dates of Ramadan, from one country to another, is variations in the sighting of the moon.
In places where it is not possible to see the crescent moon, Muslims may begin fasting according to the closest place where the moon has been sighted, while other scholars rely on the calculations of astronomers.
However, some Islamic scholars have called for Muslims to be united in fasting, and to start the month of fasting based on the sighting of the moon in the holy city of Mecca.
As Muslims across the globe have no institutionalised leadership, there is no single edict on which approach should be followed.
A street vendor plugs in decorations for Ramadan in Amman, Jordan. Photograph: Mohammad Hannon/AP
How do Muslims fast in places with no sunset?
It’s a good question. How does a Muslim in Juneau, Alaska, fast? The sun remains visible at midnight in the Arctic Circle, and in northernmost Finland, it does not set at all for 60 days during summer.
As a result, local scholars have said it is permissible to follow more reasonable dawn and sunset times of another country. The Islamic Centre of Northern Norway, issued a fatwa – a ruling by a scholar of Islamic law or Muslim judicial authority – that gives local Muslims the option of following the fasting hours of Mecca, when the fasting day in Norway exceeds 20 hours. The Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America made a similar ruling that Muslims living in the most northerly regions of Alaska can use the dawn and sunset times of another part of the country where “day is distinguishable from night”.
A family after morning prayers during an Eid celebration in Burgess Park, south London. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Muslims worldwide celebrate Eid al-Fitr, the festival of breaking of the fast, which marks the end of Ramadan. According to tradition the angels call it the day of prizegiving because all those who fasted are rewarded by God on this day, and so it is common to hear Muslims greet each other with Eid Mubārak (Happy Eid). It falls on the first day of the new Islamic month of Shawwal and it is forbidden to fast on this day.
It is Islamic custom to celebrate Eid with a small sweet breakfast, and to give charity before Eid prayers in congregation. Many Muslims celebrate by giving gifts, wearing new or clean clothes, and visiting friends and family.
In Malaysia it is called Hari Raya Aidilfitri, in Urdu it is Choṭī ʿĪd meaning smaller Eid,while in Turkey it is Şeker Bayramı or sugar feast.
Do people of other faiths fast?
Jews fast for about 25 hours on Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement, to ask for God’s forgiveness. Orthodox Christians can spend up to half a year in various forms of fasting, which they believe brings them closer to God.
• This article was amended on 18 June 2015. References to “sunrise” in an earlier version have been changed to “dawn”, to clarify that fasting during Ramadan begins at dawn (the beginning of the twilight before sunrise) and not at sunrise (when the sun appears above the horizon).
Bite into that bread before your main meal, and you'll spike your blood sugar and amp up your appetite. Waiting until the end of your dinner to nosh on bread can blunt those effects.
Ah, the bread basket. You sit down for a nice meal out, and there it appears: piping hot, giving off a waft of yeasty divinity.
Who can resist?
There's a reason this age-old tradition prevails. Even in the era of paleo and gluten-free, there are still hordes of us who will gladly nosh on crusty, chewy, soul-warming bread.
But the downside may be more than just some extra calories. Turns out, eating all those carbs before a meal can amp up our appetites and spike our blood sugar.
"The worst situation is having refined carbohydrates on an empty stomach, because there's nothing to slow down the digestion of that carbohydrate into sugar," explains David Ludwig, director of the Optimal Weight for Life Clinic at Boston Children's Hospital.
So, here's an idea: Why not eat bread at the end of your meal? A new study published in Diabetes Care finds that making this simple swap can blunt that rise in blood sugar — and it may tamp down your appetite, too.
"What we looked at was the effect of the order of consuming food on blood sugar and insulin," explains obesity researcher Louis Aronne of Weill-Cornell Medical College.
Aronne and his colleagues recruited a small group of participants, including six women and five men who had Type 2 diabetes.
On one day, the participants were served a meal of grilled chicken, steamed vegetables and a salad dressed with vinaigrette. To start the meal, each participant ate a standard-sized ciabatta roll from Au Bon Pain.
"Then we reversed the order," explains Aronne: On another day, the participants ate the same meal — but this time, the bread was served last.
"And what we found was a striking difference in blood sugar and the insulin required to keep that blood sugar under control," Aronne says.
On average, the participants' peak blood sugar was about 30 percent lower when they ate the bread last.
"That's a huge difference," Aronne says. And the significance for people with diabetes is that, by swapping carbs to the end of the meal, they may need to take less insulin to keep blood sugar in check.
The shortcoming of this study is that it's small, and the researcher only analyzed glucose and insulin responses in the few hours after the meal. So, it's unclear what the long-term effect would be.
But Aronne says the findings may be of interest to all the dieters who've ever lost weight by swearing off carbs temporarily, only to pack the pounds back on when they revert back to eating bread — and other carb-rich foods — again.
"It could be that this helps people to maintain their weight loss by helping them to understand when to eat carbs so it won't rev up their appetite," Aronne says.
In addressing one question, Aronne may have raised many new ones with these findings, such as: How about sandwiches? When we take in bready carbs simultaneously with protein and fat, would you find the same effect? "That question wasn't addressed here," says David Ludwig, who was not involved in the study, "but carbohydrate [bread eaten] with other foods would probably have an intermediate effect."
Hard to believe but true- the industrial production of the lovable VW Bug was partially the brainchild of none other than Adolf Hitler. While most of us, when we think of Hitler and the Nazis remember the six million Jews and many, many others killed during the Holocaust, we generally forget that the Nazis were a socialist party committed to improving the lives of (Aryan) workers. The Volkswagen, as the “people’s car,” was seen as one key step in making Germany a workers’ utopia.
Rise of National Socialism in Germany
With its roots in militant, racist nationalism, the National Socialist German Workers (Nazi) Party arose from the political and economic instability suffered by Germans in the early 1920s. The hyperinflation, poor wages and unemployment that marked Germany’s infamous Weimar Republic were caused in large part by war reparations and other Draconian measures demanded by the victors of World War I in the Treaty of Versailles.
Although the German economy enjoyed a period of stability through the mid-1920s, it crashed hard
in late 1929 partially as a result of the American stock market crash of that same year. In response, the government adopted strict austerity measures to control inflation including reducing benefits for the unemployed, sick and aging. By 1931, the government’s policies had driven down the price of goods, which led to further reductions in wages and jobs. By 1932, this downward spiral had driven Germany’s workers to the socialist parties that catered to them, including the Nazis. In the elections of that year, the Nazis gained a number of seats to hold a powerful position in the Reichstag (Germany’s legislature); under pressure, Germany’s president appointed Hitler, the leader of the Nazi party, as Chancellor of Germany in 1933.
Inside the Nazi Party
Preaching to the choir, the Nazis evangelized the evils of capitalism and the rights of workers. Party members believed that the nation’s economic woes were the fault of greedy capitalists and, above all, wealthy Jewish financiers who held much of Germany’s debt. To redress the problem, the Nazis proposed a number of measures to improve workers’ lives; known as the Twenty-Five Points, the proposals included the nationalization of industry, benefits for the elderly, land reform, public education reform, an end to child labor, the creation and fostering of a middle class, and the end of high interest money lending, otherwise known as usury. (Of course, a number of the reforms were geared toward disenfranchising the Jews and other “inferior” races, but that’s a subject for a different article).
Once the Nazis had political power, some of the 25 points began to be put into effect through practical programs. The production of the Volkswagen was one of them.
In the 1920s, a number of European carmakers were looking at creating smaller, more affordable cars for average, working class families. One of these, Ferdinand Porsche, designed and built a prototype he named the Volksauto, a predecessor to the Volkswagen.
The Nazis saw the value in equipping the average German family with a car that sat five, could reach respectable speeds and was still affordable for working-class Germans. After being appointed Chancellor, Hitler adopted Porsche’s design for his “people’s car.” Because private industry could not produce the car at the low price Hitler envisioned, he had a factory built to make the cars in 1938. To help workers afford the modest price, a government-sponsored savings program was also administered.
At this factory, on May 26, 1938, Hitler said in a speech about the car that would be produced there:
Hence, I believe there is only one name that can be given to this car, a name I shall give to it on this very evening. It shall bear the name of that organization that strives to instill both joy and strength in the masses. The name shall be: “Strength through Joy Car”! (Kraft durch Freude-Wagen)
Unfortunately, war broke out (or perhaps more accurately was waged), and the state-owned plant stopped making the people’s cars and switched to producing military vehicles.
Just before the war, Porsche was having trouble with the fact that his new people’s car violated quite a lot of patents from the Czechoslovakian car company Tatra, who’d built a very similar car already. Porsche agreed to pay Tatra a settlement for the infringements, but Hitler intervened and told Porsche he’d “solve his problem” for him. Needless to say, Tatra wasn’t happy about not getting paid, but this ultimately was a moot point as Germany shortly thereafter invaded Czechoslovakia and took over management of Tatra and its factory. Eventually Volkswagen did finally settle out of court with Tatra in 1961 for the patent violations.
Modern Production
After the war, the factory eventually went back to making cars and production soon ramped up. Volkswagen’s iconic former “people’s car” or as it was actually called- the Type 1 (the official name for the Beetle)- quickly became a favorite in North America, and by 1972, over 15 million had been sold. By the time the last Love Bug was taken off the line in 2003, over 21 million of these efficient and relatively inexpensive beetles had been produced.
Bonus Facts:
A Nazi rocket scientist, Werner von Braun, invented the first long-range ballistic missile – the V2. First launched in battle in 1944, it was used approximately 3000 times during World War II. After the war, von Braun was brought to the United States. He went on to direct the Marshall Space Flight Center and lead the team that created the Saturn V rockets which propelled America’s Apollo missions.
When the V2’s first started striking Britain, the government initially tried to cover it up, stating that the explosions were caused by gas main leaks. This resulted in the public mockingly calling the rockets “flying gas pipes”.
The V2’s weren’t nearly as devastating as they could have been as British intelligence managed to convince the Germans that the rockets were missing London by about 20 miles, rather than hitting it, as they were. As a result, many of the V2’s launched were recalibrated to correct for this “error”. After that, most of the rockets missed London completely.
The Nazi’s had a prototype for a stealth fighter that, if flown only a few feet above the English Channel, would have been invisible to the British. Luckily, the Horten 2-29 was not put into production prior to VE Day on May 8, 1945.
During World War II, allied fighter pilots frequently observed glowing balls of moving fire while on combat missions over Europe. Named foo fighters, there are a number of theories on the source of the fireballs, including UFOs and ball lightning. One explanation is that they were the air equivalent of land mines, launched into the skies by the Nazis to disrupt the pilots’ plans and even interfere with the planes electronics.
A DEEP LEARNING MACHINE JUST BEAT HUMANS IN AN IQ TEST
For the first time ever, a computer has outperformed humans in the verbal reasoning portion of an IQ test.
The machine was programmed by researchers in China using a technique known as deep learning, which involves converting data into a set of algorithms that a computer can make sense of.
Until now, computers have been pretty successful at beating humans in two out of the three parts of a standard intelligence quotient test, or IQ test – the mathematical questions and the logic question – but they’d struggled to master the verbal reasoning portion, which looks at things like analogies and classifications. You know, those questions that ask you to find the word that doesn’t fit in with the others, or “Which of these words is the opposite of ubiquitous?”
This is where the deep learning comes in. In the past, the furthest programmers had gotten was to build machines that were capable of analysing millions of millions of texts to figure out which words are often associated with each other, essentially turning words into vectors that could be compared, added and subtracted.
“But this approach has a well-known shortcoming: it assumes that each word has a single meaning represented by a single vector. Not only is that often not the case, verbal tests tend to focus on words with more than one meaning as a way of making questions harder,” writes MIT Technology Review about the research.
The researchers, from the University of Science and Technology of China and Microsoft Research in Beijing, tried a different tack – they looked at words and the words that often appeared nearby in big bodies of text. Using an algorithm, they worked out how the words are clustered, and they then looked up the different definitions of each word in a dictionary. This allowed them to match each cluster to a meaning.
“This can be done automatically because the dictionary definition includes sample sentences in which the word is used in each different way. So by calculating the vector representation of these sentences and comparing them to the vector representation in each cluster, it is possible to match them.”
This means that the machine is able to recognise the different meanings of words for the first time.
The team helped the computers out further by feeding them multiple examples of questions so that they were able to recognise the question type and match it to the appropriate answering strategy.
They then tested the computer against 200 human participants of various ages and educational backgrounds.
“To our surprise, the average performance of human beings is a little lower than that of our proposed method,”the team writes in arxiv org, where the results were published. “Our model can reach the competitive performance between [participants] with the bachelor degrees and those with the master degrees.”
This is a big step forward for artificial intelligence, and shows just how powerful deep learning can be. The strategy has also been used to teach computers how to beat us at 49 oldschool atari games, recognise food calories from a photo and evencook by watching youtube videos
“With appropriate uses of the deep learning technologies, we could be a further step closer to the true human intelligence,” the authors write.
Your Facial
Bone Structure Has a Big Influence on How People See You
New research shows that although we perceive
character traits like trustworthiness based on a person’s facial expressions,
our perceptions of abilities like strength are influenced by facial structure
We can alter our facial features in
ways that make us look more trustworthy, but don't have the same ability to
appear more competent. A face resembling a happy expression, with upturned
eyebrows and upward curving mouth, is likely to be seen as trustworthy while
one resembling an angry expression, with downturned eyebrows, is likely to be
seen as untrustworthy. However, competence judgments are based on facial
structure, a trait that cannot be altered, with wider faces seen as more
competent.
Image
courtesy of Jonathan Freeman and Eric Hehman
Selfies, headshots, mug shots —
photos of oneself convey more these days than snapshots ever did back in the
Kodak era. Most digitally minded people continually post and update pictures of
themselves at professional, social media and dating sites such as LinkedIn,
Facebook, Match.com and Tinder. For better or worse, viewers then tend to make
snap judgments about someone’s personality or character from a single shot. As
such, it can be a stressful task to select the photo that conveys the best
impression of ourselves. For those of us seeking to appear friendly and
trustworthy to others, a new study underscores an old, chipper piece of
advice: Put on a happy
face.
A newly published series of
experiments by cognitive neuroscientists at New York University is reinforcing
the relevance of facial expressions to perceptions of characteristics such as
trustworthiness and friendliness. More importantly, the research also revealed
the unexpected finding that perceptions of abilities such as physical strength
are not dependent on facial expressions but rather on facial bone structure.
The team’s first experiment featured
photographs of 10 different people presenting five different facial expressions
each. Study subjects rated how friendly, trustworthy or strong the person in
each photo appeared. A separate group of subjects scored each face on an
emotional scale from “very angry” to “very happy.” And three experts not
involved in either of the previous two ratings to avoid confounding results
calculated the facial width-to-height ratio for each face. An analysis revealed
that participants generally ranked people with a happy expression as friendly
and trustworthy but not those with angry expressions. Surprisingly,
participants did not rank faces as indicative of physical strength based on
facial expression but graded faces that were very broad as that of a strong
individual.
In a second survey facial expression
and facial structure were manipulated in computer-generated faces. Participants
rated each face for the same traits as in the first survey, with the addition
of a rating for warmth. Again, people thought a happy expression, but not an
angry one, indicated friendliness, trustworthiness — and in this case, warmth.
The researchers then showed two additional sets of participants the same faces,
this time either with areas relevant to facial expressions obscured or the
width cropped. In the first variation, for faces lacking emotional cues, people
could no longer perceive personality traits but could still perceive strength
based on width. Similarly, for those faces lacking structural cues, people
could no longer perceive strength but could still perceive personality traits
based on facial expressions.
In a third iteration of the survey
participants had to pick four faces out of a lineup of eight faces varied for
expression and width that they might select either as their financial advisor
or as the winner of a power-lifting competition. As might be expected,
participants picked faces with happier expressions as financial advisors and
selected broader faces as belonging to power-lifting champs.
In a final survey the researchers
generated more than 100 variations of one individual “base face” by varying
facial features. Participants saw two faces at a time, and then picked one as
either trustworthy or high in ability or as a good financial advisor or
power-lifting winner. Using these results, a computer then created an average
face for each of these four categories, which were shown to a separate set of
participants who had to pick which face appeared either more trustworthy or
stronger. Most of the participants found the computer-generated averages to be
good representations of trustworthiness or strength — and generally saw the
average “financial advisor” face as more trustworthy and the “power-lifter” face
as stronger. The findings from
all four surveys were published in the Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin on June 18.
Taken together the findings suggest
facial expressions strongly influence perception of traits such as
trustworthiness, friendliness or warmth, but not ability (strength, in these
experiments). Conversely, facial structure influences the perception of
physical ability but not intentions (such as friendliness and trustworthiness,
in this instance). In addition, decisions that involve guessing at the possible
intentions of a person such as to whom you would entrust your money management
are more strongly influenced by facial expression, whereas those based on
physical ability such as whom you would bet on in a sporting event are more
strongly influenced by facial structure.
Previous studies also
have shown the effect of facial cues on how we perceive and interact with
others but this new work reveals how perceptions of the same person can vary
greatly depending on that person’s facial expression in any given moment. This
variability “has implications for both the people presenting themselves and the
perceivers in social interactions,” says Jonathan Freeman, a social
neuroscientist at New York University and senior author of the study. So, we
might consider the impact of our facial expressions in the photos we post
online. At the same time, in an ideal world people who look at our photos would
give us the benefit of the doubt and hesitate to make spontaneous judgments based
only on a single image.
The findings above come with a big
caveat: Only male faces were shown to subjects. The researchers chose this
approach because previous studies involving the ratio of facial width to height
have shown that greater facial width is often associated with
higher testosterone levels as well as heightened aggression and
strength in men. Studies of facial width and height in females have shown mixed results,
so presenting study subjects with a mix of male and female faces would have
yielded inconclusive results. Despite the relative lack of evidence on how
facial structure influences perception of women’s faces, there have been humorous portrayals of
popular speculations. Future research, however, is needed to definitively
establish whether any such patterns exist.
Furthermore, the researchers refer
to “ability” when discussing physical strength in the study. No specific
measurements were made, for example, of perceptions of
intellectual ability or ability to perform in certain job
positions. These abilities are more abstract and thus might rely on a
combination of different dynamic and static facial cues, Freeman explains, so
it would be difficult to test these relationships definitively.
In our everyday lives this study and
others make clear that although we might try to influence others’ perceptions
of us with photos showing us donning sharp attire or displaying a self-assured
attitude, the most important determinant of others'
perception of and consequent
behavior toward us is our faces.
So the next time you want to win
someone’s trust, try a smile and a happy face. But for those folks hoping to
get picked for a pick-up game of football, basketball and so on, don’t worry
about your facial expression. The best you can do is hope you have a wider face
and then let your physical prowess speak for itself.
