Lawful at Night, Forbidden by Day: How Fasting Retrains the Appetites

Ramaḍān’s daily rhythm is set out in a single verse of Sūrat al-Baqarah, and the verse does something unusual for a legal instruction: it names one act, permits it at one hour, and withdraws it at the next, inside the same sentence.

أُحِلَّ لَكُمْ لَيْلَةَ ٱلصِّيَامِ ٱلرَّفَثُ إِلَىٰ نِسَآئِكُمْ ۚ هُنَّ لِبَاسٌ لَّكُمْ وَأَنتُمْ لِبَاسٌ لَّهُنَّ ۗ عَلِمَ ٱللَّهُ أَنَّكُمْ كُنتُمْ تَخْتَانُونَ أَنفُسَكُمْ فَتَابَ عَلَيْكُمْ وَعَفَا عَنكُمْ ۖ فَٱلْـَٔـٰنَ بَـٰشِرُوهُنَّ وَٱبْتَغُوا۟ مَا كَتَبَ ٱللَّهُ لَكُمْ ۚ وَكُلُوا۟ وَٱشْرَبُوا۟ حَتَّىٰ يَتَبَيَّنَ لَكُمُ ٱلْخَيْطُ ٱلْأَبْيَضُ مِنَ ٱلْخَيْطِ ٱلْأَسْوَدِ مِنَ ٱلْفَجْرِ ۖ ثُمَّ أَتِمُّوا۟ ٱلصِّيَامَ إِلَى ٱلَّيْلِ ۚ وَلَا تُبَـٰشِرُوهُنَّ وَأَنتُمْ عَـٰكِفُونَ فِى ٱلْمَسَـٰجِدِ ۗ تِلْكَ حُدُودُ ٱللَّهِ فَلَا تَقْرَبُوهَا ۗ كَذَٰلِكَ يُبَيِّنُ ٱللَّهُ ءَايَـٰتِهِۦ لِلنَّاسِ لَعَلَّهُمْ يَتَّقُونَ

“It has been made lawful for you, on the nights of the fast, to go to your wives. They are a garment for you, and you are a garment for them. Allah knew that you were betraying yourselves, so He turned to you in mercy and pardoned you. So now, be intimate with them, and seek what Allah has decreed for you. And eat and drink until the white thread of dawn becomes distinct to you from the black thread, then complete the fast until nightfall. And do not be intimate with them while you are secluded in the mosques. These are the limits set by Allah, so do not go near them. Thus does Allah make His signs clear to people, that they may attain taqwā.”

— Sūrat al-Baqarah, 2:187.

The word translated “go to your wives” is al-rafath — a word the Qur’an did not need to reach for. It could have used a plainer term for marital relations and moved on. Instead it chose one that, in ordinary Arabic usage, names both the act and the talk that goes with it: coarse, intimate speech as much as intimate contact. That choice matters, because the very same verse moves without a pause from permitting rafath at night to instructing believers to eat and drink until the white thread of dawn appears, then “complete the fast until nightfall.” Food, drink, and rafath sit inside one continuous sentence because the day withdraws all three on the same clock. None of them is stopped for being bad. All three are stopped because the sun is up, and the fast, once begun, has to be completed on nothing but its own terms.

The Same Word, Now Aimed at the Tongue

A hadith collected by Muslim under a chapter he titled, simply, “Guarding the Tongue for the One Who Fasts” takes that exact word and points it somewhere the verse never sent it. Abū Hurayrah reported it in his own wording, describing what a fasting day requires:

إِذَا أَصْبَحَ أَحَدُكُمْ يَوْمًا صَائِمًا، فَلَا يَرْفُثْ وَلَا يَجْهَلْ. فَإِنِ امْرُؤٌ شَاتَمَهُ أَوْ قَاتَلَهُ، فَلْيَقُلْ: إِنِّي صَائِمٌ. إني صائم

“When one of you wakes up on a day of fasting, let him not engage in rafath or in jahl. And if a man reviles him or picks a fight with him, let him say: I am fasting. I am fasting.”

— Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, hadith 1151, printed page 2/806 of Read this page: ت عبد الباقي. The edition’s footnote glosses rafath here as coarse and obscene speech, and adds that jahl — usually translated “foolishness” — sits “close to rafath: the opposite of wisdom and of correctness, in speech and in action.”

Notice what has and has not moved. The night’s rafath was a hand reaching toward a spouse. The day’s rafath is a mouth reaching toward an insult. The word is not being used loosely twice — it is being used precisely twice, for two different organs of the same appetite for release: the body’s and the tongue’s. A fast that only closed the mouth to food while leaving it open to abuse would have policed the wrong half of the sentence. The instruction to answer provocation with “I am fasting, I am fasting” — repeated, not stated once — is the practical shape of that same discipline: a person interrupted mid-argument is being told to remember which appetite this day was actually about.

A Shield, Not Just an Empty Stomach

The same page of the same edition carries a second, shorter report from Abū Hurayrah, placed by Muslim under the next chapter heading, “The Excellence of Fasting”:

الصيام جنة

“Fasting is a junnah.”

— Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, hadith 1151, printed page 2/806 of Read this page: ت عبد الباقي. The edition’s footnote explains: “meaning a covering, and a barrier against rafath and against sins — and a barrier, too, against the Fire. From it comes al-mijann, the shield.”

Junnah is a battlefield word before it is a religious one — the round shield a soldier holds between himself and a blow. The footnote’s gloss does real work here: it names rafath, by name, as one of the things the shield is held up against — the very word the earlier hadith had already aimed at the tongue. Read together, the two reports on this one page describe fasting not as an absence (no food, therefore automatically no wrongdoing) but as an active barrier that has to be held in position all day, the same barrier whether what is coming at it is hunger, an insult, or a provocation. A shield is not proven by what fails to reach the body while no one is attacking. It is proven under the blow.

What the Stomach Was Standing In For

Al-Bukhārī preserves a hadith that states, without softening it, what happens when that barrier is held up against food and drink but dropped for everything else. He places it under a chapter heading that is itself the whole argument: “Whoever Does Not Give Up False Speech and Acting Upon It, in the Fast.” Abū Hurayrah reported it:

مَنْ لَمْ يَدَعْ قَوْلَ الزُّورِ وَالْعَمَلَ بِهِ، فَلَيْسَ لِلهِ حَاجَةٌ فِي أَنْ يَدَعَ طَعَامَهُ وَشَرَابَهُ

“Whoever does not give up false speech and acting upon it, Allah has no need of his giving up his food and drink.”

— Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, hadith 1903, printed page 3/26 of Read this page: ط السلطانية.

This is the hinge the two earlier reports were building toward, stated as bluntly as a hadith ever states anything. An empty stomach, on its own, earns nothing here — the verb is ḥājah, need, and the sentence says outright that Allah has none of it if the rest of the person kept lying and dealing falsely while the stomach stayed obedient. That is a hard thing to say about a pillar of Islam, and the tradition says it anyway, because the point was never really the stomach. Food is simply the one appetite universal enough, physical enough, and checkable enough — by the person fasting and by no one else — to serve as the daily proof that restraint is possible at all. Pass that proof, and the fast has only demonstrated that a person can go without lunch. The training was aimed further out.

The Same Logic, Applied to a Different Appetite

One more hadith shows that the tongue is not a special case — it is one instance of a method the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, named directly for a different appetite entirely. ʿAbdullāh ibn Masʿūd reported what he was told, along with other young companions, in Kūfah:

يَا مَعْشَرَ الشَّبَابِ! مَنِ اسْتَطَاعَ مِنْكُمُ الْبَاءَةَ فَلْيَتَزَوَّجْ. فَإِنَّهُ أَغَضُّ لِلْبَصَرِ، وَأَحْصَنُ لِلْفَرْجِ. وَمَنْ لَمْ يَسْتَطِعْ فَعَلَيْهِ بِالصَّوْمِ. فَإِنَّهُ لَهُ وِجَاءٌ

“O assembly of young men, whoever among you can afford marriage, let him marry, for it lowers the gaze more and guards the private parts more. And whoever cannot, let him take up fasting, for it is a wijāʾ for him.”

— Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, hadith 1400, printed page 2/1019 of Read this page: ت عبد الباقي.

Wijāʾ is the lexicons’ word for bruising something deliberately to blunt its force — the term applied, outside this hadith, to a method of weakening an animal’s desire without destroying it. The Prophet reached for that specific word to describe what fasting does to a young man’s desire when marriage is not yet within reach: not eliminate it, but bruise its force enough that it stops driving him toward what is unlawful. It is the same mechanism the verse and the two hadiths before it had already described from a different angle — restraint from a lawful thing, held daily and on schedule, weakening the grip of an unlawful one. Fasting was prescribed for exactly this in a context that has nothing to do with lunch.

Put the four texts back in their original order and the argument closes on itself. The verse names one appetite, rafath, as lawful at night and withdrawn by day. The hadiths take the same word and the same withdrawal and walk them off the body and onto the tongue, then explain, without excuses, that the whole exercise fails if it stays parked on the stomach, then show the identical bruising effect applied to desire itself when a person cannot yet marry. None of it was ever a rule about eating. It is a rule about which hours of the day a person practices refusing something they are otherwise permitted — so that later, in the hour no clock regulates, refusing comes as no surprise to the appetite being asked to do it.