COMMUNITY

Travel Writers: Ramadan to a non-Muslim by Mark Bergsma

Location: Morocco, North Africa

Ramadan, the ninth month on the lunar calendar is Muslims holiest time of year for the 1.2 billion followers. A time when all nourishment, drink, tobacco and sex is put aside until the fast is broken at 5.30 p.m. with a call from the mosque tower. People are then, and only then, allowed to eat and drink.

For one month according to the Islamic calendar, the Muslim people are not asked, but required by law to practice this, after all the word Islam means submission. Non- Muslims are not required to partake in this, but are almost forced to do the ritual.

Me, an obvious non-Muslim finds it hard to do my day-to-day routine because of the Ramadan day-to-day routine. Restaurants do not open until 5:30 p.m. I guess it is somewhat of a holiday for the storeowners as well. After all, if 98% of the population are Muslim what are the chances the rest of the 2% are going to shop in their store?

During the day, merchants clamor and reach for the tourist dollar, but as dusk approaches faith rules all. You are rushed out of a store, or not even let in when it nears 5:30 p.m. You get the point when you are greeted at the door by a hand shaking in your face at 5:30, the time to break the fast and eat haiara, a lentil soup. The usual line, given at the doors, in broken English is, "forgive me it Ramadan." You can almost see the tiredness in the persons' eyes due to the fasting.

This time usually makes people pure by not allowing anger, but then what this practice makes one person, makes other people something else. Ramadan makes and creates less patience and more frustration, and as an outsider I really noticed this.

Men and children sell watches and sunglasses to a captive audience of people while they wait for their bus to leave the yard. The entrepreneurs are roughly pushed aside so a hungry and ill-tempered man can get to his seat. In the same bus yard you can guarantee to see some kind of scuffle. Twenty sets of eyes will gaze out the bus windows to look at two men with arms
locked and yelling mere inches from one another's nose. One will unlock his arm from the other and put out a haphazardly swing -- but it rarely comes to physical contact.

In cities where every conceivable form of transport exists -- from being on foot or donkeys pulling wooden carts made of car axles and disregarded timber, cars, trucks and buses take up every square inch try in a futile attempt to get ahead of the guy next to them. These same streets that were once a flowing sea is now a rock solid mass of metal, flesh and animal all
trying to make it home by 5:30 p.m. Traffic accidents increase dramatically during this time and by the honking of horns, the yelling of people, the inching forward of cars when there is no room, it is easily understood why this happens.

Then something strange happens. I see vehicles carrying hungry and impatient people to their homes, women rush down the streets with bags of food in hand, then all the frustration and annoyance seems to stop with a whaling of a voice. High atop the mosques of the city from a man-made fabricated loud speaker there is a call that sounds like a song, but just is a humming sound.

It is now 5:30 p.m. and kids drop their game of marbles and skipping to scoot home. Storeowners close the rolling steel doors to their shops, giving up the possibility that someone will buy a shirt. Moped riders weave and dodge housewives, children and men walk in a fast pace with smiles now on their faces. It's now 5:40 p.m. and all is quiet on the streets with only but a few people on the street that once numbered in the hundreds. Walking through the eerily empty streets and past the buildings you can hear just a clanking of spoons against bowls from the open windows.

As a non-Muslim I have always wondered what Muslims think of this practice and one day I heard out loud the thoughts of the billions of Muslim followers when Omar said, "this fasting thing is a crazy thing."


Text © Mark Bergsma 2001