Page 219 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

temptible” following a “silly commercial interlude”—suggesting powerful in-
stitutional backing rather than individual deviance. Paradoxically television,
the state-dominated institutional basis for promoting excessive consumption
during the nonfasting hours of Ramadan, is also a vehicle for promoting piety.
To some extent excessive behavior and proper ritual observance de¤ne each
other contrastively. But the two are also used together to construct an appar-
ent con®uence between the interests of the state, business, and religion. The
daily change in social status between fasting and nonfasting de¤nes the ritual,
but it is also an opportunity for the state to act as master of the ceremony. Fur-
thermore, the programming of the commercials mentioned by the ¤ctional
“Sonya”—hadha al-fasil min al-i"lanat (this interlude of advertisements)—is a
crucial part of the process.
This essay examines the orchestration of time during Ramadan in the con-
text of an Egyptian television program broadcast at the time called Fawazir
Ramadan. Fawazir means riddles (the singular is fazzura). The program posed
a riddle each night of the month of Ramadan. The riddle was not just stated but
was performed in lavish song-and-dance routines broadcast roughly an hour
after the iftar—the breaking of the fast just after sundown. Fawazir Ramadan
2
is no longer produced every year. It is now a semi-moribund production lost in
an ever larger sea of holiday programming. But for years the Fawazir Ramadan
program was an important component in a complex of practices that promote
an association of corporate-sponsored materialism with morality. Although the
program itself has been superseded, the association of morality with material-
ism, of which it was a powerful example for decades, is stronger than ever. By
associating morality with materialism the program did not legitimate materi-
alism. It did, however, put the state in the position of orchestrating the relation-
3
ship between the two. My essay examines this association through the lens of
a single episode of Fawazir Ramadan, the sequence of programming in which
it is embedded, and its interaction with the ritual character of Ramadan.
Plainly Fawazir Ramadan was not an “Islamic” program in terms of its con-
tent. It was not, and did not pretend to be, representative of Islam in any formal
sense. The program was, however, geared to the Islamic calendar and certainly
affected the way many people approached Ramadan. In Egypt and elsewhere
much media attention is given to the “lighter” nonreligious accompaniments to
Ramadan. By contrast, most direct commentary on Ramadan, in books, web
sites, and, indeed, state-sponsored television discourse, takes the form of sober
examinations of “the meaning of fasting.” Aside from considerations of such
matters as how to fast, the conditions under which one can be excepted from
fasting, and what can potentially invalidate a fast, the emphasis in direct dis-
course on Ramadan focuses on values: piety, humility, uniformity of the Islamic
community, sincerity, and struggle in the Way of God. In other words, in direct
religious discourse the central element of the ritual, fasting, is constructed by
4
self-denial. But self-denial itself is not the point. In contemporary literature on
Ramadan fasting is not meant to be an extreme form of asceticism, nor is it
meant to be a simple reversal of normal activities—one is not supposed to sim-

208 Walter Armbrust