After prayer the second obligatory duty which every Muslim is required toper- form is that of fasting during the month of Ramadan. The word sawm which has been used in the Holy Qur'an and the Hadith for fasting means" to abstain" ; thus a horse that abstains from moving about or from eating the fodder is said to be sa'im. In the technical language sawm signifies fasting or abstaining from food and drink and sexual intercourse from the dim beginning of dawn till sunset.

Fasting as an institution for the purification of the soul is common to all Divine religions. The writer of the article on" Fasting" in the Encyclopadia Britannica states that" it would be difficult to name any religious system of any description in which it is wholly unrecognized." This institution was well established among the Jews and the Christians.

The records of the Hadith bear ample testimony to the fact that fasting was a common religious practice among the pre-Islamic Arabs too, and they used to observe fast on the tenth of Muharram because it was on this very day that Allah saved Moses and his companions from the clutches of the Pharaoh who was drowned in the sea along with his army. The Arabs and other people too were familiar with fasting as an act of penitence or of propitiation or a preparatory rite before some act of sacramental eating or an initiation or a mourning ceremony.

In Islam fasting is primarily an institution for a spiritual discipline and selfcontrol. It is in fact an exercise in religious devotion in the form of cheerful and willing renunciation, for a definite period, of all the appetites of flesh lawful in themselves (the unlawful ones being ruled out of course). The Qur'an says: