Ramadan

Riverbend's "Baghdad Burning" has a superb account of the beginning of Ramadan as observed in her middle class family. Her emphasis on the social richness of the Ramadan evening would be a fine place to start accustoming non-Muslims to Islam as lived.

The most active part of the whole day is the quarter of an hour directly before breaking the fast… the whole family is often in a flurry of action, with someone setting the table, someone carrying the food, someone giving orders about where to put everything… and everyone impatient with hunger. The last five minutes before you hear the call for prayer signifying the end of the fast are always the most difficult. Every second of those last five minutes passes with the heaviness of an hour… you can literally see every one strain to hear the sound of the call for prayer echoing through the Baghdad streets. And then it is finally time for futtoor… and we begin to eat with relish. The platter of rice that seemed ridiculously small 15 minutes ago, is now ‘too much’ and no one eats as much as they had hoped they were going to eat- everyone is exhausted with simply contemplating the food, the choices and the possibilities. After futtoor, the smokers fall upon their cigarettes with an enthusiasm only other smokers can appreciate. We watch them taking puff after puff with a contentment that even screaming kids, and loud televisions cannot taint.

Let's compare Zawiya ...

Comments

[Bryan Alexander]

There's something about blogs, I think, which makes accounts of daily life especially accessible. Blogs are contingent, rarely autonomous, but emerging in the gaps and play of a sequence of digital documents, themselves rhetorically embedded in the originator's' lifeworld. The usual (but not exclusive) tenor of informality heightens this, creating a dual aura of immediacy and incompletion. In this way, blogs suggest and draw on the serial format. I wonder how Iraqi blogs draw on Iraqi and nearby Islamic cultures for referents on this score?