Fasting is a revolt against the modern condition. It is an existential act of disobedience against the secular age. It is existential in that it situates man at the crossroads between two existential orientations (how to be in the world) and by orientation I mean a consciousness, attitude, and the totality of our behavior. Moreover, to understand fasting as an existential act, it is imperative that we say something about the nature of man. Ali Shariati reminds us that man is constituted by two poles: tin (clayness), which is sedentary and driven towards the corporeal, and the rūḥ (spirit), which is driven towards the sublime and transcendence. It is an act of disobedience in that the secular age reduces man to a one-dimensional man (to borrow a term from Herbert Marcuse), or what Taha ‘Abd ar-Rahman calls the horizontal man whereas the act of fasting cultivates the vertical self that drives towards the sublime.
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