Ramadan Breach!

Ramadan Kareem my fellow infidels. Unless you have been living under a rock, or perhaps living in a non-Muslim democracy, you have surely noticed that it is now the holy month of Ramadan.

I thought of doing some research and writing an in-depth post about the religious significance of Ramadan but you can all use Wikipedia for that. I’m going to talk about what Ramadan means for me, an atheist living in an Islamic country experiencing Ramadan for the first time.

First up, my limited knowledge of Ramadan; It is a holy month for Muslims in which they cannot eat, drink or smoke during daylight hours. That’s a bit simplistic though, actually they cannot do those things from morning prayer (4am ish) until the sunset prayer (6:30pm ish). The exact times of these events are based upon sightings of the moon or something.

Notice the word sighting there? That means that it is not based on the phase of the moon, or the length of the day or anything, but on when someone sights the moon. Phases etc can nowadays be predicted millennia in advance, but that doesn’t apply here due to it being a sighting. So, I’m guessing, a dust-storm could delay things for a day or so. This is why religious holidays in the UAE are just sort of pencilled in. Ramadan is scheduled for a certain period, but the ends of it can actually vary by a few days.

From talking to locals or long time residence here the basic Ramadan routine goes like this: Fast all day until the sunset prayer, then proceed to gorge yourself, smoke tonnes of sheesha and party with friends and family all through the night. Then, after the 4am prayer, you hit the sack and hope you’ve eaten enough to last until 6:30pm without dying.

The irony is that in this month of ‘fasting’ most people put on weight. They are basically turning the day upside-down and adding half a dozen feasts into the equation. There have been a lot of articles in the local rags about how to prepare healthy food for Ramadan, presumably to try and counteract this porking up (pardon my inappropriate language).

As you may well imagine, this temporary lifestyle change may affect the working life of a hard working Muslim, and it does. But most if not all businesses adopt special hours throughout Ramadan. My work has made working hours 10-3 for Muslims. It was initially thought that this applied to all of us, until my very Australian boss said the probably quite insensitive phrase ‘pigs arse it does’. So it’s normal hours for me I’m afraid.

So while 10-3 might seem pretty easy to most people, it doesn’t take into account the fact that these people are up until 4am every night. So, from what I am told, the attendance record gradually slips throughout the month and you would be a fool to rely on a Muslim to be at his desk this month should you need something done. It’s pretty much the equivalent of trying to get something done in the last week before Christmas. Most people are away and the ones that are there have clocked off mentally anyway.

What does this mean for Senor Westerner? Well since the locals are fasting during the day it is obviously insensitive for us to be scoffing down food in their presence, so we retreat to the lunchroom and try to keep the door closed. This led to the hilarious situation today where we were eating our lunch in the lunchroom and the office boy (that is his title unfortunately) who happens to be Muslim opened the door and my very loud colleague yelled “Ramadan Breach, Ramadan Breach!”

So for us it is no coffee, water or food in the office. We have to confine ourselves to the lunchroom for those guilty pleasures. Also no smoking (as I can imagine the torture of seeing someone puffing away if you were not able to) so we have to hide away when we need a quick durry.

Finally I will explain Ramadan to you through the ten year-old eyes of a colleague of mine’s son. His dad asked him what Ramadan was like for him at school and he said “It’s awesome. All the Muslim kids are really tired so I can finally kick their arse when we play soccer.”