“commemorating the where arḥām (ties of relationship) occurs as beginning of the siege of Jerusalem, the capture of the city, the destruction of the temple and the assassination of Gedaliah” (ibid). Thus it was generally some trouble or sad event of which the memory was kept up by a fast. Moses’ fasting for forty days — which example was later followed by Jesus Christ — seems to be the only exception, and the fast, in this case, was kept preparatory to receiving a revelation. Christianity did not introduce any new meaning into the fast; Christ’s words that his disciples would fast oftener when he was taken away from their midst, only lend support to the Jewish conception of the fast, as connected with national grief or mourning.

The idea underlying this voluntary suffering in the form of a fast in times of sorrow and affliction seems to have been to propitiate an angry Deity and excite compassion in Him. The idea that fasting was an act of penitence seems gradually to have developed from this, as an affliction or calamity was considered to be due to sin, and fasting thus became an outward expression of the change of heart brought about by repentance. It was in Islām that the practice received a highly developed significance. It rejected in toto the idea of appeasing Divine wrath, or exciting Divine compassion through voluntary suffering and introduced in its place regular and continuous fasting, irrespective of the condition of the individual or the nation, as a means, like prayer, to the development of the inner faculties of man. Though the Holy Qur’ān speaks of expiatory or compensatory fasts in certain cases of violation of the Divine law, yet these are quite distinct from the obligatory fasting in the month of Ramadzān, and are mentioned only as an alternative to an act of charity, such as the feeding of the poor or freeing of a slave. Fasting, as an institution, is here made a spiritual, moral and physical discipline of the highest order, and this is made clear by changing both the form and the motive. By making the institution permanent, all ideas of distress, affliction and sin are dissociated from it, while its true object is made plain, which is “that you may guard (tattaqūn)” The word ittiqā from which tattaqūn is derived, means the guarding of a thing from what harms or injures it, or the guarding of self against that of which the evil consequences may be feared (R.) But besides this, the word has been freely used in the Holy Qur’ān in the sense of fulfilment of duties, as in (4:1) an object