Ramadan is a full lunar month of no food, drink, smoking, or sex from first light to sunset — and because the Islamic calendar is lunar, it migrates through the seasons, so a lifetime includes both easy winter fasts and brutal summer ones. Exemptions are explicit and generous: the ill, the traveling, the pregnant, the nursing, the menstruating, the elderly, with makeup days or feeding the poor in place. The stated aim is taqwa, God-consciousness, and Muslims describe the communal dimension — the whole society on the same schedule — as inseparable from the experience.