Page 218 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

10 Synchronizing Watches: The State,

the Consumer, and Sacred Time

in Ramadan Television

Walter Armbrust

There is another group who fasts like everyone else, but who are as far as
can be from understanding the point of fasting, or the virtues of Ramadan.
Either they sleep during the day, or they sin with an ugly word, harsh with-
drawal from society, a criminal gaze, or uncouth thoughts. At night they
gather in places of pleasure and amusement, and indeed, of sin and obscenity.
Gluttonously they eat every manner of food, ¤lling their bellies. For them
Ramadan is the month of good eating, ¤ne drink, long nights in bars, and
partaking in all sorts of entertainment.
—Hasan al-Banna, circa 1940 1
And now, after you’ve been keeping yourself all day from everything bad,
please allow me to join you from now until dawn so that we can watch to-
gether everything that is provocative and contemptible, as we make you for-
get the merits of the fasting that you’ve done with God’s permission. Now, a
silly commercial interlude followed by the popular program, “What the Stars
Do from the Time They Wake Up until the Time They Go to Sleep.”
—Cartoon television hostess “Sonya,” 2002

As the above quotation from Hasan al-Banna’s sermon indicates, a perceived
failure to correctly observe the Ramadan fast can be an occasion for censure.
Al-Banna’s understanding of Islam is not necessarily normative, but his disap-
proval of covering Ramadan excess with a ¤g leaf of fasting comes close to a
broad consensus among Muslims that in contemporary societies the meaning
of the Ramadan ritual is structured by self-denial. “Sonya,” a red-haired imag-
ined television hostess drawn by cartoonist Muhammad Sami (2002) approxi-
mately sixty years after al-Banna’s sermon, makes the same point: nominal
observance of the Ramadan fast during daytime does not license bad behavior
at night. In his heyday al-Banna cast bad behavior as gluttony in the ®eshpots
of the big city. The more contemporary “Sonya” associates bad behavior in-
triguingly with mass media—“watching everything that is provocative and con-