Thought for the Day, 27 July 2007

Abdal Hakim Murad

Fat, it seems, is a fundamentalist issue. Too many religious hardliners are eating too much. A recent survey of the American population has shown that fundamentalists are far more likely than mainline believers to be clinically overweight. And it's not only an American Baptist problem - far from it. Ask any British Muslim to describe a stereotypical fundamentalist mullah, and nine times out of ten, the preacher's evident calorie intake will form a key part of the description.

Gluttony is of course a deadly sin, and the Prophet of Islam, a man of austere habits, famously tied a flat stone to his waist, because of his constant hunger. Certainly, our image of prophets and saints pretty firmly excludes individuals who are conspicuously well-nourished. Medieval Europeans liked their saints to be supermodel-thin, ideally like characters from an El Greco painting: gaunt, and even skeletal.

So, while embarrassed by the large number of large people in conservative places of worship, people of faith need to raise their voices here. There is a national obesity epidemic, now affecting one in five British adults - and counting. Only yesterday, a new study showed that obesity is socially contagious, in that friends and relatives of overweight people tend to be less worried about their own weight, and hence may end up in the same condition. Genes are by no means the issue: if your best friend becomes obese, you are statistically 57% more likely to go the same way.

We human creatures may not always be young and athletic, but we should always recall that we are made in the image of God, and that how we treat our bodies is in some sense a sacred responsibility. We are learning that we cannot abuse the earth without storing up misfortune for ourselves; and something similar holds good for our bodies as well. Of course, faith teaches us never to judge by appearances, and part of the moral greatness of religion is that it takes our index finger, so willing to point judgmentally at others, and turns it in the direction of ourselves. The problem, then, cannot be overweight people; the problem lies in ourselves.

The world we have shaped is preoccupied with consumption, and with essentially tangible sensations. The wisdom of the traditional religions, which taught that happiness comes through self-restraint, seems alien in today's fast-food culture. But faith, properly understood, is not about the puritanical restriction of human happiness, but about giving people a meaning to their lives, which enables them to act in a balanced and dignified way.

So we need to mobilise the ancient religious dislike of gluttony. And who knows, perhaps in the process, we will find an interesting argument, if not against fundamentalism, then at least against some of its advocates.