Iftar isn’t just eating, it’s synchronisation. Everyone waits. Everyone eats together. It is a rare moment of collective rhythm.

In a world where eating has become solitary and rushed, Ramadan restores something quietly radical: shared time. Iftar is not simply the moment hunger ends but the moment waiting becomes collective. People pause together, watch the same light fade over the horizon, hear the same call to prayer and reach for food at the same time. There is no personalised schedule, no eating on the run. This age-old ritual insists that nourishment is not only physical but spiritual and social, that being fed is being seen.

Modern life runs on customisation. Playlists are curated, news feeds tailored, working hours flexible. Even within households, dinner can be fragmented with one-person reheating leftovers at six, another ordering delivery at nine. Technology has expanded autonomy over time but paradoxically this has quietly eroded simultaneity. We are free, yet we are often alone.

Ramadan disrupts this drift. Fasting is private; no one can fully see another person’s hunger. But the breaking of the fast is shared. The discipline of waiting until sunset imposes a common boundary on the day. Across cities and villages, across continents and time zones, hundreds of millions orient themselves toward the same horizon. The sun, indifferent to productivity metrics, sets when it sets.

The choreography, in that sense, is celestial. The Qur’an speaks of a created order in which “the sun and the moon [move] by precise calculation” and in which heavenly bodies “each swim along in an orbit”. Sunset is not negotiated, it is given. Iftar submits the human schedule to a rhythm older than any calendar app. When the light fades, life pauses.

That pause is countercultural. We live in an age that prizes efficiency. Eating has been reframed as fuel management. Iftar resists that framing. The first date is eaten slowly and water is sipped deliberately. The iftar meal marks not just the end of deprivation but the re-entry into community.

There is something equalising about shared hunger followed by shared relief. The CEO and the cleaner, the young and the old, all feel the same dry mouth at dusk. For a moment, status recedes and biology asserts itself. In that shared vulnerability, empathy can expand.

The sociologist Émile Durkheim described “collective effervescence” as the heightened energy and solidarity that arise when people gather in shared ritual. We tend to associate that electricity with festivals, stadiums or mass demonstrations. Ramadan offers a quieter form. The effervescence is domestic, repetitive, almost mundane. Yet repetition is precisely the point. Community is not sustained by spectacle but by rhythm. The power of iftar lies in its recurrence, evening after evening of returning to the same act, at the same time, with the same intention.

Iftar achieves synchrony without rehearsal. The coordination is simple, wait, watch, break. Yet its effects can ripple outward. Invitations multiply during Ramadan. Mosques host open iftars where strangers sit shoulder to shoulder. Interfaith groups gather around long tables. Colleagues who rarely speak beyond transactional exchanges pass plates across to one another.

Ramadan is not romantic. For many, fasting while working long hours is physically demanding. In places experiencing poverty or conflict, the evening meal may be sparse and that sharpens its meaning. Gratitude is less abstract when hunger has been felt and God is ever beneficent and gracious in extending his favour and bounty to those who are grateful – “if you are grateful, I will surely give you more”.

What the month of Ramadan ultimately reveals is how malleable our relationship to time can be. We tend to treat our schedules as inevitable outcomes of economic systems. But Ramadan demonstrates that millions of people can, collectively and repeatedly, reorder their days around a shared commitment. The clock does not change but our agreement about what matters does.

In an age marked by loneliness and fractured routines, that may be Ramadan’s understated lesson. Community is not built through grand gestures but through repeated and synchronised acts of presence.

To synchronise, even briefly, is to remember that we share time itself.