Muslim Ramadan or Christian Lent?

By Roberto de Mattei   |   26 March 2025

In Corriere della Sera of 13 March 2025, we read a report from England by the journalist Luigi Ippolito, who writes:

“In London, Ramadan seems to have supplanted Lent: this year the two periods of fasting and penance practically coincide, but all the attention appears to be focused on the Muslim observance. In the big supermarkets there are advertisements announcing, ‘Are you ready for Ramadan?’ Harrods, on its website, proposes dinners for the iftar, the banquet after sunset that breaks the fast; fast food chains offer discounts; hairdressers stay open late to accommodate Muslim customers.”

It doesn’t end there: in the British capital, “Ramadan Lights” have been turned on in Coventry Street, while in smack-central Leicester Square there is an interactive light installation that is meant to symbolise the “spirit of Ramadan”.

European Islamisation is thus advancing undisturbed, like a silent wave. On the one hand, there are calls to remove Christmas crèches or carols from schools, so as not to ruffle the sensibilities of non-Catholics, but no one would dream of asking for the removal of Ramadan lights.

The ostentation of Ramadan by Muslims helps us understand its difference to our Lent, which does not need lights, because it is an interior spirit. Islam instead presents itself as a ritual religion, which limits itself to demanding of its members the respect of what are called the five pillars: the verbal affirmation of monotheism; the recitation of prescribed prayers; the trip to Mecca at least once in a lifetime; ritual almsgiving; and, the best-known, the fast of Ramadan.

Once these external obligations have been met, Muslims are free to immerse themselves in pleasure. The fast of Ramadan is not penance; it is ritualism. One fasts for eight hours and then eats as one pleases in the following eight hours. This would be inconceivable for a Christian, who during Lent is not asked to observe simple rites, but to live in a spirit of penance. This is why Jesus condemns the attitude of the Pharisees, who scrupulously observed the ritual prescriptions imposed by the law, but whose hearts were far from God.

In Islam, there is no spirit of penance because there is no spirit of sacrifice. And there is no spirit of sacrifice because Islam disregards, indeed rejects, that sacrifice of the Cross which St Paul calls “scandal for the Jews, foolishness for the pagans” (1 Cor 1:23).

Islam can be defined as a “religion of pleasure”: not only because it disregards sacrifice, but because it replaces the Christian concept of eternal happiness in Paradise with that of eternal pleasure, of infinite voluptuousness. The Muslim paradise chiefly envisions the joys of the senses: exquisite banquets accompanied by fine wines; carnal joys with ever-virgins at the disposal of the Elect.

Pope Pius II, in a famous letter written in 1461 to Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, admonished him with these words: in eternal life “our happiness corresponds to the part nobler than the body, the soul; yours to the baser, the body. Our happiness is intellectual, yours material. … Ours is common to the angels and to God himself, yours to pigs and brute animals”.

Precisely because of this hedonism, Islam can exert an attraction on the secularised youth of the West. Young Westerners, like all men, aspire to the sacred, to the absolute, but they are corrupted by relativism, incapable of sacrifice. Islam offers them a religion that presents a surrogate of the sacred, without asking for any real sacrifice. But the key to the success of Islam also lies in the financial support it receives from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which unites 57 Muslim countries, and from some of the richest nations on earth, like Saudi Arabia.

For this reason, we found it disturbing that, on 11 March, the delegations of the United States and Ukraine should have met to discuss the possibility of peace in none other than Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The photographs and videos show, between the two delegations at the negotiating table (almost like two ghosts at the feast, as it were), the representatives of Saudi Arabia, a country that finances the expansion of Islam in the world.

Islam is a totalitarian religion that aims to conquer the world, and Saudi Arabia, after having invested in mosques for decades, is now investing in Western universities in order to change their ideas. We have previously discussed this in Corrispondenza Romana.

In the United States, a vast protest on behalf of the terrorists of Hamas has involved prestigious universities, like the University of California, Harvard, Yale and Columbia. One of the reasons for this alignment with the watchwords of radical Islam by a substantial part of students and professors of American universities lies in the fact that the main American universities receive massive funding from Islamic sources, in particular from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Emirates. This money flows to all types of American private and public schools. In America, as in Europe, the funding is not unconditional but is linked to the creation of study centres, degree courses and master’s degrees dedicated to the promotion of Islamic culture, and to the hiring of professors favourable to the religion of Allah, which is practised in mosques built in the immediate vicinity of the universities.

The celebration of Ramadan is an expression of this culture, antithetical to that of the West and Christianity. And the resistance to this anti-Christian offensive cannot be reduced to the control, however necessary, of immigration, but is above all cultural and spiritual.

It is not too late. Against the Islam that attacks us, let us make our own the words that Pius II addressed to the Muslim sultan. The pope reminded the “conqueror” that it has happened in history that a small Christian army has managed to rout the much stronger Ottoman army, thanks only to extraordinary help from God. This has never happened for Islam. Islam can win with the force of numbers, weapons or money, but it does not have on its side the miracle, the intervention of God, who at any moment is capable of overturning what seem to be the irreversible destinies of history.