Straight Talk
Fast times
Once again the holy month of Ramadan is upon us. The first day of fasting will commence either today or tomorrow depending on the keenness of the eye-sight and vigilance of our very own "moon-sighting committee" -- in fact by the time you are reading this, the decision will have been announced long ago.
It is an endearing quirk of our country that we still have in place such a marvelously archaic and anachronistic institution as a "moon-sighting committee" (admit it, even the name calls to mind antiquity and conjures up a pleasing picture of a motley collection of stooped, white-bearded and white-clad old men, hobbling on canes and peering anxiously through thick black-framed spectacles into the hazy night sky), rather than have the question answered by science, as it is in most other countries these days.
I also find it amusing and almost uniquely Bangladeshi that every year imaginative and outlandish rumours swirl with respect to the chicanery and double-dealing that allegedly surrounds the process.
Whether the gossip and innuendo is true or not, I have no way of saying (surely this is merely another example of our national fetish for conspiracy theories, no?), but I do like the fact that this is such an article of faith among the general public, that we take it for granted that such a thing might even be possible, if not probable. Is nothing sacred!
This year the entire nation has been awaiting the arrival of the month of Ramadan with some trepidation. Prices reached a 36-year high in July, with point-to-point inflation above ten per cent and inflation in food prices crossing thirteen per cent, and it has long been anticipated that prices will rise even more steeply during Ramadan, as they always do, due to increased aggregate demand for food.
Indeed, such has been the apprehension that the finance adviser recently had to go on record stating that the interim government would remain extra-vigilant and do everything in its power to ensure that prices do not sky-rocket out of control in the upcoming month.
I have to say that I find it ironic that aggregate food consumption tends to go up during the month of Ramadan. I understand that entertaining during Ramadan is something we all look forward to, and that even the most humble of homes delights in putting out as much of a spread as is affordable, and inviting friends, relations, and neighbours to partake with them.
It is natural that people would want tasty and perhaps not so common items with which to break their fasts, and no one would begrudge us our festive iftar parties that are so much a part of the Ramadan landscape here, but when the amount of food consumed at iftar and sehri exceeds the amount foregone during the day, surely, the emphasis has been misplaced. Indeed, many people, if not most, even actually put on weight during Ramadan, such is the bounty of the season.
Am I the only person this strikes as passing odd? Ramadan is after all the holy month for Muslims. Unless I am much mistaken, the whole point of the month is that it is meant to be a time of fasting and meditation and reflection that is intended to purify the body and soul and bring Muslims closer to the almighty.
The other eleven months of the year are given to worldly activities (though, of course, a good Muslim is expected to pray five times a day and to keep God in his heart at all times), but the month of Ramadan is the month in which we consecrate ourselves to the worship of the creator and in which our worldly pursuits are supposed to be fully subordinated to the nurturing of our relationship with God.
In addition, fasting is meant to inculcate in Muslims the practices of self-discipline and self-sacrifice and to bring us closer to the less fortunate among us by sharing, albeit in a very minor way, the pangs of hunger and fatigue that is their daily lot in life.
It seems to me that if we are eating more and spending more money than during the rest of the year, then this means that the precise opposite of what is intended is taking place. Perhaps this is something we will want to keep in mind this year, with prices already sky-high and Ramadan coinciding with the monga (seasonal food shortage) in the north of the country.
By all means, people should not feel constrained from feeding their kith and kin, even generously, and we do not want the bottom to drop out of the market due to people sitting on their wallets, but perhaps this year, more than in times past, a sense of proportion is called for.
In fact, it is not just food, Ramadan ushers in a season of conspicuous consumption, analogous to the days leading up to Christmas in other parts of the world. It is a boom-time for retailers here and elsewhere in the Muslim world, and, again, I don't begrudge our shop-keepers and store-owners who have come to depend on this one month as being crucial to their bottom lines, and the economy in Bangladesh is in fact benefited considerably from this surge in consumption.
But this Ramadan, which comes at such a watershed moment for us in Bangladesh, when the country is sailing in uncharted waters, and when the state of the economy, the polity, the society, even the country itself, is so precarious, let us perhaps use this month of reflection and contemplation to truly reflect on where each one of us is going as a person and where we are all going as a nation.
Perhaps this year is a good year to try to introduce a new paradigm for the month of Ramadan and what it means to us, to think about how the way in which we celebrate the month can tell us and others something about ourselves, and to endeavour to use this month to bring us closer to mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual purity, and to give us the inner fortitude necessary to deal with and overcome the challenges of an uncertain future.
Zafar Sobhan is Assistant Editor, The Daily Star.
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