Say the word “Muslim” these days, especially “American Muslim,” and many people get jittery. The antidote to this jitteriness, I’m convinced, is to get to know lots of American Muslims, in all their variety, all their individualities.

And there’s no better place to start—or to continue—than by reading Kazim Ali’s new book, Fasting for Ramadan.

Poet and Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College, Ali is as American as apple pie—or as bagels or pizza or curry or hummus.

These food analogies might seem a bit odd for a book with this title. But Fasting for Ramadan isn’t just about fasting. For Ali, the 30-day Ramadan fast draws his attention to the body’s nature in ever-new ways. So the book is about what it means to live in a body, how body-mind-spirit are connected, where our “self” resides, how the practices of Islam and yoga reinforce each other.

Yes, yoga. Ali has taught yoga and has a yoga practice. (What could be more American than that?) “Yoga,” he writes,” is from the same Sanskrit word that gives the word ‘yolk.’ And ‘yoke.’

And, interestingly: ‘religion.’ Which can be both yolk and yoke, fruitfully and restrictively. Yoga is a practice, not unlike fasting, that allows us to link the inside—the private experiences of the body and the mind—with the outside—the pulsing, breathing, actual world”(82).

This passage is from the first of Fasting for Ramadan’s two sections. Each section is a daily journal kept during the month of Ramadan’s fast in two different years. The section printed first in the book appeared originally as a blog at Kenyon Review Online.

Addressing an audience—and an audience predominately of non-Muslims—Ali writes these entries in discursive and explanatory mode. He explains, for instance, the basic rules of the Ramadan fast: not only no food or drink from sunrise to sunset, but also no sex, no anger, no smoking or drugs, no violence in speech or action.

“In other words, your relationship to the community and world around you has to switch from contesting and confrontation to acceptance and receptiveness” (41).

But even when discursive, Ali can’t help asking questions. As in his poetry, which I first met when reviewing his collection The Fortieth Day for Image #45, Ali’s most comfortable mode is interrogative. So as he observes what happens to his body’s relation to itself and to the outer world during the thirty days of the fast, even his declarative sentences have the feel of a probing, a wondering.

“Maybe the body is like the sky, not a corporeal individual after all, but merely a locus, a space in which phenomena occur” (35).

“Maybe the moon and the sun only hang in the sky to explain something to us. Maybe the mouth also, the cells and organs of the body, our bones and muscles, the way we eat and drink and breathe and live, maybe all of these are lines of verse, looping script in the darkness, which we still have to learn how to read” (69-70).

As these passages indicate, the cosmos is where Ali’s mind—and body—are most at home. And he refuses to claim any religion’s monopoly on understanding the cosmos. He practices Islam in his own way (as Christians do in their incalculable variety of ways); the yoga room in his house has small statues of Ganesh and of Buddha for meditation; he fasts by the rules of Islam but is uncomfortable with communal prayer.

And always he is forthright about his own weaknesses and fears, his ambivalence about socializing or speaking in public, his ongoing questions about what his “self” is.

These motifs also run through the book’s second section, but this section is less discursive and—to my reading—more overtly poetic. That’s because the second section was composed as a private journal (written actually a few years earlier). So explanations to a readership aren’t needed; the journal can simply record and explore.

So, for instance, the entry for the first day of the fast begins:

To empty myself in the afternoon.

White sunlight comes through the window.

I walk through the apartment trying to reposition the plants to catch the most light, elephant-ears velvet green, a drop of dew the tip of each leaf.

And from day two:

Days I am hungry I stretch myself into the air and want to be empty, want to empty myself into the air.

And on the twenty-second day:

No one can talk to breath or spirit but ask to answer or answer to ask.

We pray best by opening ourselves like a book.

We will then be written in or perhaps more-so be written.

Those of us who are Christians, with our incarnational spirituality, think a lot about the body: its nature, its place in the economy of salvation. But as a Christian, I was opened to new ways of understanding the body by this book.

I happened to receive my pre-publication copy of Fasting for Ramadan during Lent, and I immediately thought, from the title, that Lent would be the season to write this post.

But as I read the book, I realized that—though fasting is certainly at its core, and a fasting more stringent than what Christians nowadays are called on to practice—this is a book for all seasons. And for people of any faith or no practiced faith.

It’s American in the best sense of our plurality: wisdom from one faith that is the opposite of exclusionary, that speaks to and for our shared humanness.