The critique has some truth in it. In many Muslim-majority contexts, Ramadan has become a month of shifted consumption — heavy pre-dawn meals, restaurant culture after sunset, daytime sleep, and social celebration that in aggregate may involve more food than ordinary months, not less. If the point of Ramadan is caloric reduction, the practice often fails its own goals. But caloric reduction is not what Ramadan is for.
What the tradition says fasting is doing
The stated purpose is taqwa — God-consciousness, translated variously as piety, awareness, or restraint. Not weight loss. Not health optimisation. The voluntary withholding of food and water during daylight hours is a practice of restraint that is supposed to extend inward: if you can discipline the appetite for food and drink, you are practicing the faculty of restraint that makes ethical life possible.
The Prophet said: “Whoever does not give up false speech and acting upon it, God has no need of his giving up his food and drink.” This is the tradition’s own self-correction of the reduced version of fasting. A person who abstains from food while lying, gossiping, and treating others badly has not fasted in any meaningful sense. The external practice is the scaffold for an internal reorientation.
The communal and empathy dimension
Fasting also has an empathy function. A person who has spent a day genuinely hungry and thirsty has a concrete experiential basis for understanding what deprivation feels like — something that is otherwise easy to intellectually acknowledge and personally ignore. The practice of giving zakat al-fitr — a mandatory charitable payment at the end of Ramadan — is structurally linked to this: the fast is supposed to produce awareness of need, and that awareness is supposed to produce action.
The version of Ramadan the critique describes — pre-dawn feasts, elaborate iftars, daytime sleep — is the hollowed-out cultural shell of a practice from which the formative core has been removed. Pointing to the shell and saying the practice is pointless is like watching someone go through the motions of exercise without effort and concluding that exercise does nothing.
The health question
The claim that Ramadan fasting is harmful to health is empirically contested. The Islamic framework includes extensive exemptions: the sick, travellers, pregnant women, the elderly, and those for whom fasting would cause genuine harm are all exempt. The tradition has never mandated self-harm in the name of religious practice.
Research on intermittent fasting — which Ramadan structurally resembles — shows metabolic effects that range from neutral to beneficial when practiced appropriately. For workers in extreme heat, certain medical conditions, or other genuinely difficult circumstances, the exemption structures exist and should be used. A religion that explicitly provides exit clauses for hardship cannot coherently be accused of requiring people to harm themselves.
What a criticism of Ramadan practice should actually target
The legitimate criticism of how Ramadan is often practiced — the commercialisation, the reversed sleep schedules, the social pressure to perform piety rather than practice it — is a criticism that the tradition itself makes, from the inside. The Prophet explicitly warned against a fast that is only hunger and thirst with no spiritual substance. The criticism, properly directed, lands on the gap between what Ramadan is supposed to form and what it often produces in practice. That gap is real. But it is a failure of formation, not a failure of the practice itself.