The Inner Karbala: The Nafs, the Discipline of Appetite, and the Spiritual Intensive of Muḥarram

The two sentences that would not leave me

There are sentences you hear from the minbar in the first nights of Muḥarram that lodge somewhere beneath the ribs and refuse to settle. This year, two of them found each other.

The first I heard roughly as: your most dangerous enemy — the one that can truly cripple you — is your own self. Not Yazīd. Not the army at Karbalāʾ. The self you carry between your two sides.

The second came a few nights later, in a lecture on the etiquette of the nights of mourning: do not overeat, or you will oversleep; and do not oversleep, or it will pull you away from Allah.

On the surface these belong to different genres — one is a teaching about the soul, the other sounds like advice from a grandmother about portion sizes. But sitting in the majlis, it struck me that they are not two teachings at all. They are two halves of one. The first names the adversary. The second hands you a weapon. And the ten days we are living through right now — the slow climb toward ʿĀshūrāʾ — are the season the tradition sets aside, every single year, to take that adversary seriously.

This article is an attempt to follow that thread honestly: to verify what was actually said and by whom, to think carefully about what it means, and then — wearing my other hat, as a clinician — to ask what contemporary psychology has to say in its margins. I want to be precise about that last move. The science here corroborates; it does not validate. The prophetic insight is older, larger, and does not wait on a study to be true. But where the findings echo the tradition, the echo is worth hearing — not least because it can help a struggling client, or a clinician sitting across from a Shīʿī family in the second week of Muḥarram, take the season seriously as well.

A note before we begin: I am writing as a clinician and a student of these texts, not as a jurist or a muḥaddith. Where a narration’s chain is contested, I will say so plainly rather than dress it up. Honesty about our sources is itself a form of reverence.

What was actually narrated

It is worth slowing down here, because how we handle these two sayings tells you everything about whether we are doing taḥqīq (verification) or just decorating a feeling.

The first narration: the self as enemy

The evocative line I first heard — leave your enemy, your own self that is between your two sides — does exist in our literature. ʿAllāmah al-Majlisī records it in Biḥār al-Anwār, in the Book of Faith and Disbelief, in a chapter (we will return to it, because its title is remarkable) on the ranks of the soul. But he takes it from ʿUddat ad-Dāʿī, a devotional manual that, like many such works, often cites narrations without a chain of transmission. As a wording, then, it is mursal — suspended, weak. I would not want to build a whole edifice on it.

The good news is that I do not have to, because the same idea sits on far firmer ground. In al-Kāfī — the most rigorously transmitted of our four books — al-Kulaynī records that the Noble Prophet (ṣ) sent out a military detachment, and when the fighters returned victorious he greeted them with words that must have confused them:

“Welcome to a people who have completed the lesser jihad and still have the greater jihad upon them.”

They asked what could possibly be greater than the war they had just survived. He answered:

“The jihad of the self (jihād an-nafs).”

— al-Kulaynī, al-Kāfī, vol. 5, Kitāb al-Jihād, ch. 3, ḥ. 3 · graded muwaththaq

This narration comes through as-Sakūnī, a transmitter whose reports are generally graded muwaththaq — reliable — in our tradition, though one other narrator in the chain (an-Nawfalī) is debated among the experts in rijāl. I would describe it, carefully, as a reliable narration whose content is in any case corroborated many times over. Imām ʿAlī (ʿa) compresses the same teaching into an aphorism: “deterring the soul from its vain desire is the greater jihad” (al-Āmidī, Ghurar al-Ḥikam, no. 79).

So the teaching is secure even if one particular sentence is not. Our worst enemy is not arrayed against us in a field. It is the nafs — the appetite-driven self — and the Prophet (ṣ) called the struggle against it greater than the struggle of the sword.

The second narration: the discipline of eating and sleep

Here I have to be even more careful, because the precise, elegant sentence I heard — overeat and you oversleep; oversleep and you drift from Allah — I could not locate as a single, chained ḥadīth from the Prophet (ṣ). The closest famous cognate in the wider Islamic tradition (“two things harden the heart: too much food and too much sleep”) turns out to be a saying of al-Fuḍayl ibn ʿIyāḍ, an early ascetic of the second generation — wisdom, certainly, but not prophetic ḥadīth, and graded weak when it has been chained to the Prophet (ṣ) at all.

This does not mean the teaching is unfounded. It means the sentence I heard is a homiletic synthesis — the minbar’s way of compressing a cluster of authentic narrations into one memorable line. And those narrations are real. The tightest of them, which pairs eating and sleep exactly as my lecturer did, comes from al-Khiṣāl of Shaykh aṣ-Ṣadūq, where Imām aṣ-Ṣādiq (ʿa) is reported to have said:

“Three things earn the antipathy of Allah: sleeping [through the day] without having kept vigil at night, laughing without cause, and eating on a full stomach.”

— aṣ-Ṣadūq, al-Khiṣāl, p. 89, no. 25

Around it stands a whole corpus on the spiritual cost of overindulgence. The Noble Prophet (ṣ) is reported to have warned:

“Beware of excessive food, for it poisons the heart with hardness, slows the limbs toward obedience, and deafens the soul to counsel.”

— al-Majlisī, Biḥār al-Anwār, vol. 77, p. 182, no. 10

And:

“The light of inner knowledge comes through hunger, and distance from Allah comes through satiety; so do not eat to your fill, lest the light of recognition be extinguished from your hearts.”

— al-Majlisī, Biḥār al-Anwār, vol. 67, ch. 45, ḥ. 20

Imām ʿAlī (ʿa) is as blunt as ever: “when the stomach is filled even with what is permitted, the heart goes blind to goodness,” and “overeating is the greatest aid to acts of disobedience” (Ghurar al-Ḥikam, nos. 4139, 9922). On the sleep side, Imām aṣ-Ṣādiq (ʿa) is reported to have said simply that “Allah despises excessive sleep and excessive idleness” (Biḥār al-Anwār, vol. 76, p. 180, no. 10).

Notice what the tradition is and is not saying. It does not fetishize deprivation. In the same breath that it praises hunger, the Miʿrāj narration has the Prophet (ṣ) ask what hunger yields, and the answer is “wisdom, protection of the heart, and nearness to Me” (Biḥār al-Anwār, vol. 77, p. 22, no. 6). The point is never starvation; it is moderation as a tool of wakefulness. A body kept slightly hungry and slightly under-rested is a body that has not been allowed to fall asleep at the wheel of its own life. The sentence I heard in the majlis was a true sentence — just a folk-compression of a sound idea, not a quotation. I think it is better for a reader to know that than to be handed a polished fake.

Knowing the enemy: the ranks of the nafs

To fight an enemy you have to know its nature, and the Qurʾān gives the nafs a strikingly developmental portrait — not as a fixed thing you are, but as a set of states the soul moves between.

At its most dangerous, it is an-nafs al-ammāra bi’s-sūʾ — the self that commands evil. Even Prophet Yūsuf (ʿa), at the height of his vindication, refuses to flatter himself: “I do not absolve my own self; indeed the soul is a persistent enjoiner of evil, except for those on whom my Lord has mercy” (Q 12:53). This is the self that wants what it wants now: the second helping, the extra hour of sleep, the comfort, the safety, the wage.

Then there is an-nafs al-lawwāma — the self-reproaching soul, by which Allah swears an oath in the opening of Sūrat al-Qiyāmah (Q 75:2). This is the self that has begun to fight back: the part of you that feels the sting after the third snooze, the quiet internal accusation that something was let slip. In clinical language we might recognise the dawning of metacognition — the capacity to watch your own impulses rather than simply obey them. The tradition got there first, and gave it a richer name: muḥāsabah, the soul calling itself to account.

And finally an-nafs al-muṭmaʾinna — the soul at peace, addressed in Sūrat al-Fajr with words every Shīʿī heart hears at a graveside: “O soul at peace, return to your Lord, well-pleased and pleasing to Him” (Q 89:27–30). Sūrat ash-Shams holds the whole arc in two verses: by the soul “and the One who proportioned it, then inspired it to its corruption and its God-consciousness — he has succeeded who purifies it (zakkāhā), and he has failed who corrupts it (dassāhā)” (Q 91:7–10).

I want to underline that these are states, not a staircase you climb once and leave behind. The same person can be ammāra before fajr and muṭmaʾinna by the time the sun is up — and back again by ʿaṣr. This is precisely why the tradition does not treat jihād an-nafs as a one-time conversion but as a daily discipline, with daily tools. Which brings us back to the second narration.

The weapon in your hand: appetite and sleep as frontline tactics

Here is the detail that made me sit up in the majlis, and that I only confirmed afterward in the text. The chapter of Biḥār al-Anwār that carries the “your enemy is your self” narration is titled — in al-Majlisī’s own arrangement — something close to: the ranks of the soul, and not relying upon it, and the meaning of the greater jihad, and the self-reckoning and fighting it, and the prohibition of over-indulging in pleasures and foods.

Why these two — eating and sleep — of all the appetites? Because they are the two that never take a day off. You can avoid most temptations by avoiding their occasions. You cannot avoid eating and sleeping; you must do both, every day, and so the only available discipline is measure. They are the training ground precisely because they are unavoidable. The Prophet’s image is agricultural and merciless: “do not kill the hearts with too much food and drink; the heart dies as a plant dies when it is given too much water” (Biḥār al-Anwār, vol. 67, ch. 45, ḥ. 20b). Over-watering looks like generosity. It is drowning.

There is also a bodily logic the tradition keeps pointing at. A heavy stomach makes the limbs “slow toward obedience”; satiety “extinguishes the light of recognition.” Excess sleep is named beside daytime idleness as something Allah dislikes. The picture is consistent: the over-fed, over-slept body is a dull instrument. It can still move, but it cannot stay awake in the deeper sense — alert, present, responsive to the call. And as we will see, this is not only a spiritual metaphor. The body really does behave this way.

But before the science, the heart of the matter. Because the tradition does not leave this struggle as an abstraction. Once a year, it shows us what a fully awakened self looks like — and what a fully enslaved one looks like — on a single field, in a single dawn.

Karbala: the inner war made visible

I want to step carefully here, because it is easy to say something that sounds profound and is actually a distortion. Karbalāʾ is first and last a divine tragedy — a sacrifice that stands at the centre of our faith, an act whose meaning is cosmic before it is ever psychological. Nothing in what follows should be heard as turning ʿĀshūrāʾ into a self-improvement exercise, or as suggesting that Imām al-Ḥusayn’s companions earned their station as a technique. The arrow runs the other way: the inner state the tradition prescribes was, on the tenth of Muḥarram, made fully visible in human beings. Karbalāʾ does not illustrate jihād an-nafs because it is small. Jihād an-nafs becomes intelligible to us because Karbalāʾ is so large.

With that said, look at the two camps through the lens of the nafs, and something clarifies.

On one side stood men and women who had, by every account, mastered the self that is between the two sides. This is precisely why they could give that self up. You cannot lay down what still owns you. The companions of al-Ḥusayn (ʿa) had so thoroughly won the greater jihad that the lesser one — the sword, the certain death — held no veto over them. Their freedom from the nafs al-ammāra was not a slogan; it was the precondition of everything they did that morning.

On the other side stood an army that was, in the most literal sense, enslaved. And we do not have to infer this — al-Ḥusayn (ʿa) himself diagnosed it. On the road to Karbalāʾ he is reported to have said words preserved in Tuḥaf al-ʿUqūl:

“People are slaves of the world, and religion is but a lick on their tongues; they keep it as long as their livelihoods are served, but when they are tested by trial, the religious grow few.”

— Ibn Shuʿba al-Ḥarrānī, Tuḥaf al-ʿUqūl; also al-Majlisī, Biḥār al-Anwār, vol. 44, p. 374

Read that as a clinical formulation and it is devastating. The opposing host did not need to carry a settled hatred of the Ahlul Bayt in their hearts to do what they did; for most, the engine was simpler, and no less damning. Their nafs had been bought — by the wage, by fear of Ibn Ziyād, by the mortgage on a comfortable life. To name that price is not to soften their crime: in our tradition they are remembered as enemies of the Ahlul Bayt, named and cursed in the ziyārah, and their bondage to the world is precisely what damns them, not what excuses them. Their religion was real enough to lick but not real enough to die for, because the self that wanted to keep eating and keep sleeping and keep living had never been disciplined into submission. They had lost the greater jihad years before they ever drew a sword in the lesser one. Karbalāʾ simply revealed the result.

So when the tradition says the nafs is your worst enemy, Karbalāʾ is the proof at scale. The same appetite that makes a man take a second helping he does not need is, fully grown and fully fed, the appetite that puts him in Yazīd’s army for a salary. It is one enemy, wearing different sizes.

The night the bodies disciplined themselves

And here the second narration — the one about food and sleep — comes back, because of how al-Ḥusayn’s camp spent the final night.

The historians record that on the eve of ʿĀshūrāʾ, the Imām (ʿa) asked Ibn Saʿd’s army for a single night’s delay. He spent it, with his companions, awake. The maqtal literature — al-Mufīd in al-Irshād, aṭ-Ṭabarī, and others — preserves an image that has never left the Shīʿī imagination: the camp that night “had a hum like the humming of bees,” the whole company bent in prayer, supplication, and dhikr through the dark hours before they were killed.

Sit with the physiology of that for a moment. These were people facing certain death at dawn — exhausted, thirsty, grieving. Every appetite in the body would have been screaming for the oblivion of sleep. And they spent the night in vigil. The discipline that the narrations describe in miniature — do not let the body over-sleep; do not let satiety extinguish the light — was, on that night, lived to its absolute limit. The body, which wants nothing more than to shut down, was held open and awake so that the heart could be present to its Lord in its final hours.

This is the deepest reason, I think, that our mourning takes the bodily form it does. We do not commemorate Karbalāʾ from an armchair. We stand. We keep the night. We deny the body its comfort — its food, its sleep, its routine — for ten days. The body is disciplined so that the heart can wake up. The mātam, the vigils, the fasting and the foregoing: these are not theatrics layered on top of grief. They are the very same jihād an-nafs the Prophet (ṣ) called greater, practised communally, on a fixed calendar, in the slipstream of the greatest example our tradition possesses.

Muḥarram as the annual intensive

Every serious discipline needs a season of concentrated practice — a retreat, a training camp, a time set apart when the ordinary rules are suspended and the work is done at higher intensity than the rest of the year could sustain. For the struggle against the nafs, Muḥarram is that season, and the ten days to ʿĀshūrāʾ are its peak.

Think about what the first ten days actually ask of the body. The schedule changes. Sleep is cut short for night majālis. Eating becomes irregular, often reduced; many keep the fast of ʿĀshūrāʾ or abstain through the day until after ʿaṣr. The comforts of routine — entertainment, music, the small indulgences that pad ordinary life — are set down. Grief is not avoided but deliberately approached, night after night, until the heart that had gone numb under the year’s satiety begins to feel again.

Every one of those is a move in the greater jihad. The tradition is not asking us to suffer for its own sake; it is using the unavoidable appetites — food and sleep, the very two the narrations name — as the levers by which a dulled heart is pried back open. By the night of ʿĀshūrāʾ, the observant body has been kept hungry, kept awake, kept grieving, kept in the company of others doing the same — and something in the nafs has loosened its grip. That is not an accident of culture. It is, I would argue, the whole design.

It is worth saying clearly, because it cuts against a modern instinct: the goal of all this is not to feel bad. It is to feel truly. The dulling we are fighting — the satiety that blinds the heart to goodness — is the real misery, even when it is comfortable. Muḥarram’s discipline is in the service of a heart that can once again be moved, can once again weep for what deserves tears, can once again say labbayk and mean it.

What the science says in the margins

Now I change hats. Everything above stands on its own; it needs no laboratory. But I am also a clinician, and I notice that when I read the contemporary literature on appetite, sleep, and self-regulation, I keep hearing faint echoes of the narrations. I want to report those echoes honestly — including where they are mixed or weak — because corroboration that hides its own limits is just validation wearing a lab coat.

The eating narration and the “food coma”

The tradition says a full stomach dulls the heart and slows the limbs toward obedience. Modern physiology has a humbler version of the same observation: postprandial somnolence, the well-documented dip in alertness and sustained attention after eating, especially after large and high-carbohydrate meals. One proposed mechanism is genuinely striking in this context: orexin, a neuropeptide that keeps us awake and alert, is suppressed by rising blood glucose — so the very neurons that hold us in wakeful presence quiet down as the meal is digested.

The honest limitation: the afternoon dip is partly circadian — it shows up even when people skip lunch — so the meal is not the whole story, and none of this maps neatly onto the heart’s “recognition” in any spiritual sense. But the directional echo is real. Eat heavily and the body becomes, measurably, a duller instrument for a while. The narrations noticed this fourteen centuries before we could measure orexin.

The sleep narration and emotional presence

The tradition treats sleep as something to be measured — neither neglected nor indulged. Sleep science has arrived at a surprisingly similar shape.

On the side of too little: in a now-classic study, Yoo, Walker, and colleagues showed with fMRI that a single night of sleep deprivation produces a “prefrontal–amygdala disconnect” — the rational, regulating prefrontal cortex loses its top-down grip on the emotional amygdala, so reactions become larger and less governed (Yoo et al., 2007). Sleep, in other words, is part of the machinery of emotional presence; lose it and the self becomes more reactive, less reflective. (The caveat matters: this is about deprivation, the opposite of the over-sleep the ḥadīth targets — so I use it only to establish that sleep regulates affect at all.)

On the side of too much — which is the narration’s actual concern — the epidemiology is consistent and a little eerie. Across large meta-analyses, the relationship between sleep duration and both depression and mortality is U-shaped: risk is lowest around seven hours and rises at both ends. Long sleep (beyond roughly eight to nine hours) is associated with higher rates of depression and worse health outcomes, not better.

The limitation here is important and I will not soften it: these are observational studies, and long sleep is very plausibly a marker of an underlying problem — depression, inflammation, illness — rather than its cause. So the data do not prove that oversleeping pulls a person from Allah. What they show is gentler and still worth hearing: across millions of people, both deprivation and excess track with a duller, lower mood and worse outcomes, and the healthy state is the disciplined middle. That is the shape the tradition drew.

The nafs and the science of self-regulation

The largest echo is conceptual. What the tradition calls jihād an-nafs, contemporary psychology studies — in a far thinner register — as self-regulation: the capacity to inhibit an impulse in the service of a longer-range value. There is a substantial literature treating self-control as something like a trainable capacity, strengthened by deliberate practice.

Religious fasting has been an obvious test bed, and here the evidence is genuinely mixed — which I find clarifying rather than disappointing. Some studies of Ramaḍān find improvements in inhibitory control over the month, though the gains are moderated by a person’s baseline self-control. Others find that acute fasting can impair certain cognitive-control tasks in the short term (Salari Rad et al., 2023). The picture is not tidy. And that untidiness is exactly why the honest word is corroboration, not validation: if the science were unanimous I might be tempted to lean on it; because it is mixed, I am reminded that the tradition’s claim — that disciplining appetite trains the soul — is not a finding I am borrowing from a journal. It is a prior commitment that the journals, at most, gesture toward.

In the clinic: Muḥarram as behavioural activation toward the sacred

Let me bring this all the way down to the consulting room, because the framework has real clinical legs.

One of the most robustly evidence-based treatments for depression is behavioural activation. Its core insight is counter-intuitive and, I think, deeply consonant with the tradition: you do not wait to feel like acting before you act. You schedule the meaningful action first — get out of bed, attend the gathering, do the values-aligned thing — and the mood and motivation reorganise afterward. Change the behaviour, and the inner world follows. It is an “outside-in” therapy in a culture obsessed with working “inside-out.”

Now look again at what Muḥarram asks. It does not ask you to feel devout and then act. It hands you a fixed external structure — be at the majlis tonight, keep the vigil, mark the fast, set down the indulgence — and trusts that the disciplined body will, over ten days, wake the heart. This is the tradition’s own version of behavioural activation, except the value it activates toward is not merely “a meaningful life” but the sacred itself. I have started, in my own notes, to call it behavioural activation toward the sacred: a communal, calendared, body-first practice that moves a person whose heart has gone flat back into contact with what matters most.

For a clinician, this reframing is useful in two directions.

That last point deserves its own line, because it is where Islamic-psychological writing most often goes wrong: a struggling person is not a weak soldier in the greater jihad. Sometimes the most God-conscious thing a person can do in Muḥarram is eat the meal, take the medication, and sleep the full night their body needs. The discipline serves the heart; it never overrides the body’s real needs or a clinician’s real care.

A closing thought from the two narrations

If the frameworks help, two of ours sit quietly underneath all this — the Tree Logic Model of Nafs Development, which reads the soul’s growth from root to fruit, and the Fitrah Restoration lens, which sees this whole struggle as a return to the primordial disposition Allah set in us rather than the manufacture of something new. I will not force them here; I only note that the season’s work is, in their language, less about becoming someone and more about uncovering the self at peace that was always meant to be there beneath the appetites.

Which brings me back to where I started, in the majlis, with two sentences that would not leave me. I think now they were never two. The first told me who the enemy is: not the world, not Yazīd, but the appetite-driven self I carry between my own two sides. The second told me where the front line runs: not in some grand spiritual gesture, but at the dinner table and the alarm clock, in the small daily measure of how much I feed and how much I sleep. And Muḥarram — these exact ten days — is when the whole community goes to that front line together, in the footsteps of the people who held it perfectly, on a night that hummed like bees.

The greater jihad is not waiting for us at Karbalāʾ. It is waiting for us tonight, at the second helping we do not need and the vigil we would rather skip. May Allah make us, this ʿĀshūrāʾ, a little more awake.

And Allah knows best.

Frequently Asked Questions

Notes and References

A note on attribution: this essay deliberately flags where a narration’s chain is weak or where a popular saying is a later synthesis rather than a prophetic ḥadīth. Islamic sources are drawn from Shīʿī collections; the clinical literature is offered as corroboration, not validation, with limitations stated in the body.

Islamic sources

1. al-Kulaynī, al-Kāfī, vol. 5, Kitāb al-Jihād, ch. 3, ḥadīth 3 (the “greater jihad / jihād an-nafs” narration, via as-Sakūnī; graded muwaththaq, with an-Nawfalī in the chain debated). Content corroborated in Biḥār al-Anwār, vol. 67, ch. 45.
2. al-Āmidī, Ghurar al-Ḥikam wa Durar al-Kalim, no. 79 (“deterring the soul from vain desire is the greater jihad”); also nos. 4139, 9922, 659 on satiety and obedience.
3. al-Majlisī, Biḥār al-Anwār, vol. 67, Kitāb al-Īmān wa’l-Kufr, ch. 45 (ranks of the soul, the greater jihad, self-reckoning, and restraint of food); incl. ḥ. 1 (the ʿUddat ad-Dāʿī “leave your enemy” wording — mursal / weak, cited illustratively) and ḥ. 20–20b on satiety.
4. aṣ-Ṣadūq, al-Khiṣāl, p. 89, no. 25 (three things Allah dislikes — pairs eating and sleep).
5. al-Majlisī, Biḥār al-Anwār, vol. 76, p. 180, no. 10 (excessive sleep and idleness); vol. 77, p. 182, no. 10 (excessive food); vol. 77, p. 22, no. 6 (the Miʿrāj narration on hunger).
6. Ibn Shuʿba al-Ḥarrānī, Tuḥaf al-ʿUqūl; also al-Majlisī, Biḥār al-Anwār, vol. 44, p. 374 (“people are slaves of the world…”).
7. al-Mufīd, al-Irshād; aṭ-Ṭabarī, Tārīkh (the eve-of-ʿĀshūrāʾ vigil, “a hum like the humming of bees”).
8. Qurʾān 12:53; 75:2; 89:27–30; 91:7–10 (the ranks of the nafs).

Clinical sources (corroborative)

1. Yoo, S. S., Gujar, N., Hu, P., Jolesz, F. A., & Walker, M. P. (2007). The human emotional brain without sleep — a prefrontal amygdala disconnect. Current Biology, 17(20), R877–R878.
2. Dose-response meta-analyses on sleep duration and depression / mortality (e.g., Journal of the American Heart Association, 2017; Sleep Medicine Reviews, 2017). U-shaped associations; observational — likely confounding and reverse causation (long sleep as a marker of illness).
3. Literature on postprandial somnolence and the post-lunch dip; orexin suppression by glucose (Burdakov and colleagues). The dip is partly circadian and multifactorial.
4. Salari Rad, M., Ansarinia, M., & Shafir, E. (2023). Temporary self-deprivation can impair cognitive control: evidence from the Ramadan fast. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Cf. mixed findings on Ramaḍān and inhibitory control moderated by trait self-control (Religion, Brain & Behavior, 2025).
5. Strength (“muscle”) model of self-control (Baumeister and colleagues); behavioural activation as an evidence-based treatment for depression (Jacobson; Dimidjian; Ekers et al.).

This article is educational and reflective; it is not medical advice, a fatwā, or a substitute for professional care. For decisions about fasting, sleep, or any practice that affects your health, consult both a qualified physician and a trusted scholar.