Page 232 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

Of course, the parallel between Christmas and Ramadan lies primarily with the
linking of morality to commercialism, and in the centrality of media to this
process of linkage. In the case of Ramadan, a ritual of communal solidarity and
religious merit is clearly expressed in scripture. Of course, whether contempo-
rary calls for a stricter adherence to scripture is a return to tradition or an ex-
pression of modernity is a familiar question. To some extent the existence of a
profane Other makes the articulation of a puri¤ed Ramadan easier. It may be
simpler to promote a vision of what Ramadan is when there are such blatant
and omnipresent examples of what it is not. All the same, it seems likely that
the coupling of materialism with moral value is intensifying. In effect, a reli-
gious holiday blurs into a ritual of mass consumption. In mass-mediated public
culture the religious obligation of fasting during the month of Ramadan has
become the twin of the holiday Ramadan. Ramadan the holiday is associated
with Ramadan the period of ritual fasting. The two are not exactly the same,
but it is becoming increasingly dif¤cult to pull them apart.

Notes

1. The passage in the ¤rst epigraph to the chapter is available from a 1970s publica-
tion of al-Banna’s sermons (al-Banna n.d.). Al-Banna died in 1949; hence the state-
ment must be from the 1930s or 1940s. The second epigraph, a quote from “Sonya,”
the cartoon hostess drawn by cartoonist Muhammad Sami, is from the “For Islam”
website, http://www.forislam.com/ar/main/modules.php?op=modload&name=My
eGallery&¤le=index&do=showpic&pid=27&orderby=hitsD (accessed August 10, 2002).
2. The Fawazir Ramadan program ceased production around 2001. In 2003 (1424
a.h.) an attempt to revive it under the direction of veteran ¤lmmaker Muhammad Khan
met with little success.
3. This is consistent with a widespread tendency in many Muslim societies for
Ramadan to be a focal point for cultural politics (Adelkhah and Georgeon 2000). The
program is classically hegemonic in the sense that it expresses “dispersed and fragmented
historical forces” ideologically as “an organic and relational whole, embodied in institu-
tions and apparatuses, which welds together a historical bloc around a number of basic
articulatory principles” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 67).
4. Contextualizations of Ramadan fasting can be found in Antoun 1968; Bakhtiar
1995; Buitelaar 1993; Fallers 1974; Wagtendonk 1968; and Yamani 1987.
5. Available online at http://sunnah.org/ibadaat/fasting/fast.html. As-Sunna Foun-
dation of America (accessed December 8, 1999).
6. Not all shifting of work to the nonfasting nighttime hours is caused by un-
acknowledged attempts to avoid the fast. Daytime work schedules must be truncated
simply to give employees time to get home through traf¤c jams of increasingly epic pro-
portions. This means that work that cannot be delayed until after Ramadan must often
be done at night. For example, when I was asked in 2003 to contribute an article on my
impressions of Ramadan to the weekly magazine Sabah al-Khayr I was asked to come to
the of¤ce at 10:00 p.m., well after the day’s fast had been broken. The magazine was a
beehive of activity—virtually everyone was working at night. Nonetheless the following

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