Fasting Was Never About Hunger: The Purpose the Qur'an Names

Most commands in the Qur’an arrive without a stated reason. Establish prayer; pay zakāh; be just — the “why” is left to be worked out, argued over, and mined from context across centuries of tafsīr. The verse that legislates fasting does something rarer: it tells you, inside the same sentence that makes fasting obligatory, exactly what the obligation is for.

يَـٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوا۟ كُتِبَ عَلَيْكُمُ ٱلصِّيَامُ كَمَا كُتِبَ عَلَى ٱلَّذِينَ مِن قَبْلِكُمْ لَعَلَّكُمْ تَتَّقُونَ

“O you who believe, fasting has been decreed for you, as it was decreed for those before you, so that you may attain taqwā.”

— Sūrat al-Baqarah, 2:183.

Two things are doing quiet work in that verse before the ruling even gets particular. Fasting is placed inside a lineage — “as it was decreed for those before you” — so the practice is not a new invention tailored to this community; it is one recurring instrument across revealed religion. And the reason for the instrument is named in the same breath: la’allakum tattaqūn, “so that you may attain taqwā.”

Taqwā is often translated as “piety,” which flattens it. The word comes from a root meaning to guard, to shield oneself from harm. Taqwā, in the sense the Qur’an keeps returning to, is a guardedness of the self against Allah’s displeasure — a person watchful enough of what pleases and angers their Lord that they place a shield between themselves and disobedience before it happens, rather than regretting it after. Fasting, according to the verse that establishes it, exists to produce that watchfulness. Not health. Not the discipline of a schedule. Not empathy with the hungry as an end in itself, worthy as that outcome is. Taqwā, specifically.

There is a grammatical hinge in that verse worth sitting with: la’alla. It is not a word of guaranteed causation — it does not say fasting produces taqwā the way heat produces steam. La’alla carries the sense of hoping, of an expected-but-not-automatic outcome. The Lawgiver states the goal and holds it out as what fasting is for, without promising that going hungry from dawn to sunset delivers it as a mechanical side effect. That gap — between doing the outward act and reaching the named purpose — is not a grammatical curiosity. It is the whole reason a warning had to be issued about it.

A Chapter Titled After Its Own Warning

Muhammad ibn Ismā’īl al-Bukhārī organized the Book of Fasting in his Ṣaḥīḥ into chapters, each carrying a heading that frames the hadith beneath it. Most chapter titles summarize a ruling — what breaks a fast, who is exempt, when to begin. One chapter heading in the middle of the book does something different: it does not summarize a ruling. It states a warning, almost word for word, before the hadith itself is even read:

Chapter: One who does not give up false speech and acting upon it, during the fast.

Underneath that heading sits a single report, narrated from Abū Hurayrah, in which the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said:

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 him giving up his food and drink.”

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

Read this hadith next to the verse that opened this piece, and the relationship between them is not incidental. Sūrat al-Baqarah names the destination — taqwā. Bukhārī’s chapter, and the single hadith he places inside it, names the exact way a person can perform the entire outward journey — dawn to sunset, no food, no water — and arrive nowhere near it.

The Fast That Is Kept and Still Fails

It would be a smaller claim to say this hadith merely discourages lying while fasting, as though it were listing one bad habit among many to avoid during Ramaḍān. Read carefully, it is making a sharper claim than that. It does not say the fast is invalid, or that it must be repeated, or that the person who lies while fasting has broken their fast in the legal sense that would require making up the day. The fiqh of the fast — no food, no drink, no marital relations from dawn to sunset — has still been kept in full. What the hadith denies is not the fast’s validity. It is its point.

“Allah has no need of him giving up his food and drink” is a striking sentence precisely because of what it does not say. It does not say the hunger was sinful, or that it will be punished. It says it was not wanted — that the entire mechanism of withholding food and drink, kept perfectly and to the letter, produced nothing Allah was asking for, because the thing being asked for was never the hunger itself. The hunger was always instrumental — a means toward the guardedness named in 2:183 — and a means that fails to reach its end has not, in the sense that matters, succeeded, however correctly its outward steps were followed.

This is why the verse’s la’alla and the hadith’s warning belong together rather than as two separate teachings about fasting. The Qur’an states that fasting is for taqwā rather than simply commanding fasting outright, and states it with a word that leaves room for the goal to be missed. The hadith is what missing it looks like from the inside: a tongue still practiced in false speech, a habit still acted upon, sitting underneath an unbroken fast. Nothing about the outward form flags the failure. The stomach is as empty at the end of that day as at the end of any other fast. Only the purpose named in the legislating verse is absent, and it is absent in a way no external observer can detect.

What the Purpose Being Named Changes

Most acts of worship in the Qur’an leave a believer to trust that obedience itself is the point, and to work out any deeper wisdom as a bonus insight rather than the measure of success. Fasting is legislated differently. The measure of success was written into the command itself, in the same verse that made the command binding — which means a person cannot honestly ask, partway through a fast, “did I do it?” without also being able to ask a second question the verse itself supplied: toward what?

That second question is the one the hadith about false speech will not let a fasting person avoid. It is possible to answer the first question — did I abstain? — correctly every single day of a month and answer the second one wrong. The Qur’an did not leave taqwā as an incidental byproduct scholars noticed centuries later and attached to the ruling. It named it inside the verse that creates the obligation, using a word that admits the outcome is not automatic. Bukhārī then preserved, under a chapter heading that says almost exactly the same thing the hadith itself says, a single report making sure no reader could mistake the hunger for the goal.

Fasting was never about hunger. Hunger is what fasting looks like from the outside, and it is not what it was decreed for. What it was decreed for is a guardedness that either grows across the day the stomach is empty, or does not — and only the person fasting, watching their own tongue and their own hands from dawn to sunset, is in a position to know which.