Answer
In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
All praise and thanks are due to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon His Messenger.
In this fatwa:
- While fasting the month of Ramadan, we must resolve in our minds firmly that we are fasting the days of Ramadan as an act of worship.
- It is unnecessary to state the intention to fast in Ramadan in words. If, however, anyone does so, we cannot consider his action sinful.
Responding to your question, Sheikh Ahmad Kutty, a senior lecturer and an Islamic scholar at the Islamic Institute of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, states:
Significance of intention for acts of worship
Niyyah (intention) is an extremely crucial and integral aspect of worship in Islam; this is true of prayer, fasting, zakah and hajj. It also applies to all of acts of devotion that we perform.
For any act of worship, having an intention means:
- First, to cleanse and purify our motivation—or, to put it differently, to make sure that we do what we do purely for the sake of Allah and not for any other worldly purpose or aim.
- Second, it is essential that we formulate the intention in our minds to do the specific act of worship for the sake of Allah.
How to formulate the intention to fast in Ramadan
Therefore, while fasting the month of Ramadan, we must resolve in our minds firmly that we are fasting the days of Ramadan as an act of worship, and so long as we have done so in our minds, we have fulfilled the intention requirement.
It is unnecessary to state the above intention for Ramadan fasting in words. If, however, anyone does so, we cannot consider his action sinful.
Should we make the intention to fast every day?
As for whether one must formulate the intention to fast every single day, this is a controversial issue among scholars. One group insists it must be done every day before dawn, while another group states that it is sufficient for one to formulate the intention to fast the entire month of Ramadan in the beginning.
There is no need for us to be extremely rigid on this issue. Everyone who wakes up for the Suhur (pre-dawn meal) has already made up his or her mind to fast, but the safest way to go about such matters is to formulate the intention every day. By doing so, we make sure that our acts of worship are not simply mechanical chores but deliberate acts of worship.
Almighty Allah knows best.