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revenge towards them. Instead, feelings of love and
respect are born within him for them. Since Zakah is given
for the cause of Allah, its most important value is that of an
act of worship. True, it is distributed among the people, but
in its essence it becomes a means of linking the giver with
Allah, of bringing man closer to Allah. Zakahin spirit is an
act of worship, while in its external form it is the carrying out
an act of social service.
Sawm
The Qur’an declares the primary purpose of fasting is that,
“...you may learn taqwa...”. The word taqwa, for which there
is no precise equivalent in English, refers to the immediate
consciousness that Allah is watching one’s acts. Those
who have carried out the Ramadan fast know how much
one’s other acts of worship improve as one’s awareness of
Allah progressively grows through fasting. Fasting awak-
ens in man the feeling of gratefulness. The temporary dep-
rivation of food and water emphasizes the importance of
these mundane things as divine blessings. Then when he
partakes of food and water after having experienced
hunger and thirst, he can feel how truly precious the food
and water provided to him abundantly by Allah is. This
experience increases manifold his feelings of gratitude to
Allah. Fasting produces moral discipline within man. By
restricting the basic things he desires, the devotee is
trained to lead a life of self-restraint and not of permissive-
ness. What the speed-breaker does for the speeding
motorist, fasting does for the devotee. By having a curb put
on his various desires for one month at a time man is
trained to lead a life of self- restraint for the whole year,
making no attempt to exceed the limits set by Allah. What
man does by fasting is engage himself more and more in
the remembrance and worship of Allah, and in the recita-
tion of the Qur'an. Thus fasting serves as a strategy to
increase the efficacy of worship. In this way Allah accepts
our worship in its heightened form. Fasting is, in short, a
training course. Its purpose is to place man on a special
spiritual plane for one month so that he may be better able
to lead the life of a true devotee of Allah and a true lover of
