04/02/2022
Please join us in welcoming to campus Muslim Chaplain Stephen Curto, who has joined the great team at the Sister Mary T. Clark Center for Religion and Social Justice. As we enter into the month of Ramaḍān, Chaplain Curto invites all members of the Manhattanville Community to exercise reflection and contemplation as we continue our personal spiritual journeys.
What follows is a message from Chaplain Curto in honor of the start of Ramaḍān.
“With the termination of the month of Sha‘bān and the approach of the month of Ramaḍān, Muslims globally enter the observance of a month of piety, God consciousness, and most importantly the tadabbur (deep contemplation) of the profundity of the Qur’ān. While the noble month of Ramadan most often elicits the connotation of fasting, the primary religious significance of this blessed month is to cultivate a deep reflection upon, and relationship with the Qur’ān. This is emphasized in multiple Prophetic Ḥadīth.
Muslims around the world will observe the fast beginning on different days and hold to different interpretive frameworks for the fiqhī requirements of the fast. Some communities have emphasized the esoteric or spiritual concept of the fast, others have emphasized the outward abstention from food and drink, and the concomitant jurisprudential entailments. However, these are beautiful examples of the jurisprudential philosophical diversity in the Islamic tradition. Muslims streams of tradition and schools of thought, irrespective of any other credal or jurisprudential variegation, will agree that this month is the month of the Qur’ān. When we ponder the divine Qur’ānic imperatives, we are reminded of the necessity to contemplate our own reality, the reality of our own nature and our interconnectedness, and likewise, we are called to ponder deeply upon the nature of divinity. As the Great Muslim thinker ‘Allāmah Nasir al-Dīn Nasīr Hunzai has said in his work The Wise Qur’ān and the World of Humanity (pg. 30) “…all souls become annihilated in the Single Soul (nafs-e wāhidah) in the spiritual resurrection and then all souls unite as one individual with the Single Soul and become annihilated in one God.”
We are ultimately called to remember are creation from this Single Soul (mentioned in the Holy Qur’ān 7:189), and are ultimate interconnectedness with those of our brothers and sisters in faith, and in humanity, and we are reminded that a universal humanity demands us to consider if one of us is bereft of the means to satiate our hunger and thirst, all of us are intrinsically mandated to ameliorate this condition. If we grow in spiritual and moral empathy and courage, then we shall be successful. I send my humble felicitations on this noble month, and hope that you are guided by nūr Allah, the magisterial light of the Divine. May the love of Allah, the sublime and the exalted, allow this month to be one of health, peace, and God-consciousness.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDLOn9Aqyho&t=11s
