Ramadan is an excellent time to talk about disordered eating, metaphorical self-flagellation, and accepting Allah's dispensations

Bismillah. We begin everything with the name of Allah. We recite Bismillah to initiate an act, acknowledging the intention and ethics that follow.

Table of Contents

Pre-I. No Promises

I. Uno Reverse

II. A Confession

III. A Nested Confession

IV. Self-Flagellation

V. An IEP with Allah?

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Pre-I. No Promises

Just seven days ago, I published “Ramadan is an excellent time to stop being a scardey cat,” and today I am publishing “Ramadan is an excellent time to talk about disordered eating, metaphorical self-flagellation, and accepting Allah’s dispensations”.

My immediate thought was, “Oh, this is a series released every seven days during Ramadan.”

Then I said, “Girl, chill.”

Everything does not need to be formalized, and you are already burnt out, so why are you committing to more?

If it feels easeful, I will do two more “Ramadan is an excellent time…” And if I do not, then you are always welcome to reread the two that exist!

I. Uno Reverse

I am writing this after saying I wouldn’t.

Yesterday, between meetings, I read Ayana Zaire’s Cotton’s (Seeda School) newsletter, Transmuting AI Shame Into Erotic Self-Respect as soon as it was delivered to my feed. Shame is a familiar sensation for me. It is almost a default.

Typically, I let it fester, but I am trying, with some success, to rewire my nervous system.

II. A Confession

For the past six years, I have felt like a bad Muslim.

Well, if we are being brutally honest, I have always felt like a bad Muslim, but for today, we are just going to focus on Ramadan, lol.

Between medication switches that left me exhausted, low blood sugar issues that made fasting dangerous, traveling commitments that interrupted a steady fasting schedule, and emerging diagnoses that facilitated my understanding of how my neurology impacts burnout and consistency, Ramadan has been a time of deep shame and anxiety.

Even as I typed that sentence, I felt like I was making excuses for my spiritual lack.

A good Muslim fasts during Ramadan. That is just what good Muslims do.

III. A Nested Confession

I do not approach the month with excitement; I approach it with extreme guilt because I have not fasted consistently for six years.

My ability to abstain from food and drink for a full lunar cycle was such a point of pride.

Look at me! I am so good at self-restraint and discipline.

I have fasted since the age of thirteen. I have fasted more years than I have not. I found it quite easy; I like a challenge, and as an obsessive-compulsive person, Ramadan provides a cadence of hyperfocus, achievement, and perfection that feels comforting and familiar. It was not just the discipline, but my ability to override my healthy internal cues.

Fasting often made me sick. I developed disordered eating in the attempt to both restrain consumption and to eat the cleanest. I would also overcommit to gym sessions in order to maximize the health benefits of fasting. Some days, I could not wake up in time for suhoor but would still fast despite delirium and low blood sugar.

Fasting often made me sad. I never felt like I could catch up. I was behind on my daily juz’. I couldn’t always make the Taraweeh prayer because I was let out late from work. My prayers were often rushed because there was not enough time between lunch breaks.

IV. Self-Flagellation

Everything was all or nothing. If I had a bad fasting day, I believed the whole month was ruined and assumed Allah was angry with me. I punished myself for imperfection.

This was a form of self-flagellation. Allah’s love could only manifest through my suffering.

From ages 13 - 16, I attended an elite private Catholic School in one of the most affluent neighborhoods in the country. There, I learned a lot about suffering, confession, and redemption. I learned to sharpen my perfectionism and self-competition mechanisms. Needless to say, metaphorical self-flagellation is a logic I may have absorbed during those years, though it is just as likely that this was the metastasizing of latent religious OCD or scrupulosity.

When I moved to New York in 2010, one of the first books I read was Jennifer Traig’s Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood (2006). It tells the story a Jewish girl with undiagnosis religious OCD that manifests as trying, quite earnestly, to follow every single obscure Jewish laws.

The book’s comical made me dismiss my own symptoms. She laughed about it and turned out just fine — she wrote a book!

Yet I saw pieces of myself in her story: performing wudu dozens of times to make sure I did it correctly; repeating prayers to ensure my Arabic pronounciation as if a slight mispronunciation would conjure some evil.

It would be another eight years and a lot of confusion before I had my own OCD diagnosis.

None of what I described is the fault of Ramadan, of Islam, of Allah. Practicing any spiritual commitment under capitalism’s imperatives of productivity, speed, and performance thereof — paired with my neurobiology — has made Ramadan a terrorizing and terrifying time.

I do not want to feel like that.

I do not deserve to feel like that.

And Allah does not want me to feel like that.

V. An IEP with Allah?

In a recent phonecall with my mother, I said I am writing an IEP plan for my relationship with Allah. My mom laughed, but I was serious. An IEP is an Individual Education Plan. An IEP outlines the legal obligations an institution has to ensure students with disabilities have access to a full educational experience. I am familiar with IEPs, as I have attended them with my mother for a sibling, and as a high school teacher, I often engaged with these documents. Having worked in secondary public school education through 2022, I am very familiar with the flaws in the IEP structure and disability services broadly.

In invoking the IEP as a surrogate structure for this conversation about spiritual practice, I am interested in what it means to acknowledge that my connection to Allah is not plug-and-play, but requires scaffolding rooted in mercy and grace rather than punishment.

And the mercy and grace have always been there. I have simply rejected them. For everything Allah asks us to do, there are dispensations.

So here is another uno reversal moment:

I do not need an IEP or accommodations that sit outside of Islam.

Allah has already provided them.

I only need to accept them.

Here is to me, slowly accepting the mercy that has always been there.

Thank you for reading. All the best, always,

Kameelah 👽

Finally, while I don’t organize my finances around paid newsletter subscriptions, wouldn’t it be cool if this little newsletter let me take quarterly self-imposed writing retreats? Consider getting a one-year membership at USD 70 :)

How to cite this newsletter: Rasheed, K. (Year, Month Day). Newsletter Title. I Will (?) Figure This All Out Later. URL