However, someone may say: The effective cause for the fasting person’s fast being invalidated by eating and drinking is not nourishment alone; rather, it is nourishment together with the enjoyment of eating and drinking. Thus, the effective cause consists of two components:

First: eating and drinking.

Second: the enjoyment of eating and drinking, for enjoying food and drink is something souls naturally desire. Evidence for this is that if a sick person is nourished by injections for two or three days, you will find him intensely longing for food and drink, even though he is being nourished.

If it is said: Your assertion that the effective cause consists of two components, and so forth, is contradicted by the fact that nasal medication breaks the fast, even though it involves no enjoyment of eating and drinking—the answer is that the nose is a customary passage through which the body may be nourished, and so it is treated like what enters through the mouth.

On this basis, we say that an enema does not invalidate the fast at all, even if the body is nourished by it through the small intestine.

Thus, the sounder view in this issue is, without qualification, the view of Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah; no weight should be given to what some contemporary scholars have said.

Among the injections commonly known today are those placed in the anus during severe fever. There are also those inserted into the anus in order to determine a patient’s temperature, and the like. None of this invalidates the fast.

We also have an important principle for the student of knowledge: when we are uncertain whether something invalidates the fast or not, the basic presumption is that the fast remains valid. Therefore, we do not dare to invalidate an act of worship performed for Allah except on the basis of clear evidence that will be a proof for us before Allah, the Mighty and Majestic.