The blessed month of Ramadan is here again. Hundreds of millions of Muslims will fast for a month. They will abstain from eating or drinking from dawn to dusk. They will stand for hours in prayers each night to remember their Lord and express their gratitude to Him, seek His forgiveness and aspire to come closer to Him. The month of Ramadan is easily the World's largest and longest spiritual festival. Muslims strive hard in this month to re-sew the torn fabric of human spirituality even as political and material impulses asunder it.
Before it came to be known as the month of Fasting, the companions of the Prophet knew Ramadan as a month of the Quran, the last and ever lasting divine guidance to humanity. "The month of Ramadan in which was revealed the Quran, a guidance for mankind and clear proofs for the guidance and the Criterion (between right and wrong). So, whoever of you sights the month, he/she must observe fasts that month and whoever is ill or on a journey, the same number (of days which one did not observe fasts must be made up) from other days. Allah intends for you ease, and he does not want to make things difficult for you. He wants that you must complete the same number of days and that you must glorify Allah for having guided you so that you may be grateful to Him." (2:184).
In Islam, believers, worship as a lifestyle, and the notion of the mosque as a community center, are inseparable. They originate from each other, needing one another for their proper functioning and continued existence. The mosque is as old as man on the earth, because the truth (Islam) is also as old. The first man and at the same time prophet, Adam, built the first mosques on the earth. The first mosques built were the al-Masjid al-Haram in Makkah and the al-Masjid al-Aqsa in Jerusalem. The interlude separating the two ancient mosques was forty years.