I was flipping through On the Manners Relating to Eating at the university bookstore. It is a translation of the that section from Imam al-Ghazali’s Ihya, and was surprised to see that he recommended eating fruits before meals, not after. He based this on the fact that in a Quranic verse in which foods are mentioned, fruits were mentioned first. Al-Ghazali and his contemporaries knew that everything in the Quran has a meaning, including the ordering of words and verses, and that in it is guidance for every aspect of man’s life. They concluded that fruits are mentioned first because it is healthier to eat them before one’s meal, not after.

This reminded me of when I read Fit4Life less than a year ago. While it was full of wrong information and outright lies even, it was a very beneficial book and one thing it made me think of was the order of the food we eat. It argued that fruits only need 15-20 minutes to be digested by the stomach, so if you eat them after a meal which might take up to two hours or more, the fruit is just sitting there wanting to exit your stomach, perhaps even rotting. I dont know how scientific that is, but it makes sense to get it out of the stomach first and let the stomach digest the meal later, at its own pace. That’s why the book recommended eating fruits then waiting about 20 minutes before eating your main meal. However I then read online about old research by a certain scientist who found out that meals are divided in the stomach into separate layers, so that fruit doesn’t have to have left the stomach before the next meal comes in, because each is digested in its own layer. So you only need wait one or two minutes maybe, before your next food intake. But the ordering of fruit before the next meal remains important, so that when it’s done it can leave the stomach.

During Ramadan last week, one of my relatives said that a Cambridge professor was quoted in an article saying that the healthiest way of eating was the one described in the Qur’an- In a verse about what the people of Heaven are fed, fruits are mentioned first. The professor supposedly said that eating fruits first, and then waiting some 30 minutes before your meal, is the healthiest possible way of eating, and that this is how the Qur’an describes the people of Paradise as eating.

The only time Muslims do this nowadays is in Ramadan, in which they break their fast with dates (a fruit), then go pray, then return to have their main meal. Again, you probably do not need to wait a whole 30 minutes, but it might be best. It is the custom, at least in the Arab world, to eat your fruits after the meal, but I have been turning it down whenever someone offered, telling them that I either have it before my meal or two hours later. Here is some simple Qur’anic guidance for better health.

On a sidenote, I have recently watched Al-Ghazali: The Alchemist of Happiness. The film is pretty good, but I feel very uncomfortable watching great spiritual men being portrayed by normal actors because it takes away all of their grandeur. Anthony Quinn was an exception maybe in Lion of the Desert when he played the great sufi warrior Omar al-Mukhtar. But other than that I simply cannot stand to see a normal actor playing the role of a great sufi shaykh, or for example, Imam al-Shafii, about whom the Egyptians have made a new tv series.

Still, the film is not bad and is worth seeing. But if you go to the Extras, the interview about it with shaykh Hamza Yusuf is absolutely great and is a must-see.