Muslims in Australia will begin the Ramadan fast on this coming Sunday. Most Australians will categorise it as a private religious practice. But it is significant precisely because it raises questions for all Australians about the place of religion in public life.
For Muslims, the observance of Ramadan touches the whole of life. It commemorates the month in which Mohammad began to receive revelations. They were gathered in the Quran, the definitive charter for the personal and public life of Muslims.
The practices associated with Ramadan do not simply touch the mind but also the body, committing people to fast from sunrise to sunset. Nor does it have implications simply for personal life. To adjust to fasting and giving time to prayer and reading the Quran throughout the working day has consequences for one's work, as many footballers at the World Cup can testify.
Nor is Ramadan simply about individual practice. It is highly social. Preparations for eating before and after sunset becomes a family industry. And the commitment to give alms is political in the broad sense — it invites people to look at the world around them, to notice people who need aid, and to ask why they are suffering.
So at Ramadan fasting is the symbol of a deeper commitment to focus on what matters and to ask what God wants. For Muslims it is a time for correcting bad habits, mending relationships, reading the Quran and praying, giving alms to the poor, and meeting people. It is about serious business, but it is not a private business.
The seriousness of this quest to recognise what matters and to live by it is a gift and a challenge to all Australians because it invites us to ask how we deal with these questions ourselves. It challenges Christians in particular because they share with Muslims a tradition of symbolising the search for God's will in public ways.
In earlier Catholic societies and some Eastern churches today Lent had the same public character as Ramadan, involving serious fasting, communal prayer and spiritual reflection. It was a time for conversion that also made a statement of public identity. Many Catholics went to the early morning Mass on Ash Wednesday and wore the ash mark on their foreheads for the rest of the day. Now it makes less demands, hardly drawing public notice.
The change in Lenten practice in the West reflects a recurrent tidal change in religious