Ramadhan returns to winter

I turned nine years old during Ramadhan. The fast had already begun, so we waited, and a date cake came out after iftar. In the warm light of our home by the sea, my mother watched me with the particular expression she reserved for moments she intended to remember. She told me I was made for great things. She said it the way she said everything important, as though it were simply fact, already settled, requiring only time to reveal itself. Her belief in the future was total and it was a gift. It did not occur to either of us, sitting in the cool evening air of that mid-nineties winter, to question the world the future would arrive in.

Thirty years later, I am fasting in Ramadhan on my birthday again. The holy month has completed one of its long, slow loops and returned to these short days and mild evenings that in Oman pass for winter. I am now the age my mother was on that night. I sit with that symmetry often this week, and what I feel is not distance from her but closeness. She was not wrong to believe what she believed. Every generation lives inside the assumptions of its time, and hers were reasonable, even generous. The world had always recovered. The seasons had always returned. Why would they not continue to do so?

Ramadhan has returned to the same seasonal window it occupied thirty years ago, and in that sense the calendar offers a kind of continuity: the same cool air, the same winter darkness before Suhoor, the same mercy of a shorter fast. Beneath that continuity, though, something has shifted in ways that only become visible when you hold the two moments side by side.

The past week has made this plain. A major analysis drawing on Nasa temperature records going back to 1880 found that the rate of warming has accelerated sharply over the past three decades, precisely the span Ramadhan has taken to return to winter.

The years 2023, 2024, and 2025 were consecutively the warmest ever recorded, each exceeding what previous trends had predicted. January 2026 ranked among the five warmest Januaries in measured history. Elsewhere this week, red flood alerts swept across France, the western United States is locked in a snow drought unlike anything in living memory, and a new study found that while warming accelerates, the rate at which ecosystems can adapt has slowed by a third since the 1970s. The world is changing faster than the world can keep up with itself.

My mother gave me everything a parent could give: love, certainty, and a confidence in the future so complete it felt like an inheritance. The assumptions she passed on were not failures of imagination. They were the assumptions of someone who had never been shown a reason to think differently, which is simply what it meant to be alive at that particular moment in history. I was born at the moment those assumptions began, slowly, to become visible as assumptions. She could not have known. Neither could I, sitting at that Iftar table, waiting for cake.

This Ramadhan is mild and forgiving. The evenings are gentle, the pre-dawn hour carries a stillness that makes waking feel close to a gift, and I receive the mercy of this season with gratitude that is genuine and unguarded. A winter fast is a kindness. I hold it alongside everything else this week has carried, the warming records, the flooded rivers, the disrupted seasons, and I think of my mother telling me I was made for great things. I still believe her. I just understand now that the things have changed.