In a Month of Saturdays...

Picking out of a hat any number of Kuwait-related topics to blog on, I have chosen to write, my good friends, on the defiance of the Kuwaiti legislature (the link is in Arabic by the way) in the face of an executive decree to move the countryto a Friday/Saturday weekend as opposed to the current Thursday/Friday arrangement. Now, I believe that it's good to get a sense of perspective for these things. In this day and age, it might be useful for many of us to remember that there still exist many ways to count a year--Jewish, Hijri, even Bengali and Russian--slightly skewed from the normal Gregorian 3-6-5 full rotation about the Sun business, so I don't necessarily start off from a point of opposition to the Thursday/Friday weekend.


The thinking goes, that by having our weekends on the Thursday/Friday, we allow ourselves the same days of rest as the rest of the world and yet keep a vestige of Islam by ensuring that "our" holy day, conveniently a Friday, is kept sacred. You can see that things can get easily complicated if you're planning a bank transfer, parcel delivery or even an overseas phone call to a country anywhere else in the world, since even in the UAE and Qatar the state bureaucracies have adopted a Friday/Saturday weekend. On the other hand, it might be an idea to think of why we of have a weekend in the first place.

A "weekend" is itself is a patently Western idea, and the fact that the weekend came from Europe says much not only about differing patterns of industrialisation, but also about variations in hermeneutics between Islam and Christianity. The Western Sabbath has its justification in Genesis, where God creates a universe in six days and rests on the Seventh; somehow, this was interpreted very early on to mean that people, too, should rest on a seventh day. Remarkably, the line in Genesis is found nearly verbatim--translations permitting--in the Koran's Story of the Hefer, where:

"God created the Universe in Six Days, and rested on His throne on the Seventh"

(my translation)

but historically, the interpretation of this verse focused only on the anthropomorphism of God in this part of the Koran, and never on the number of days or hours it took God to create the world . It's only trite here to point out that a 7-day week in Genesis and in the Koran fits nicely into the Babylonian precedent to both of them, but I've just done it any way. Never in the history of Islam has a significant personage read the above verse and gone about insisting that we all not work on Friday--that people are now insisting we keep Friday holy is a sign of our self-orientalisation as it were, something which you all know I love to pick on. For the record, the debate between different Muslim attitudes to the anthropomorphism in the Koran is dealt with quite well in Nasr Abu Zaid's
الاتجاه العقلي في التفسير
(this book is not yet availale in English, I think, but I don't mind plugging Nasr Abu Zaid, one of the writers who restored my faith in Arab civilisation).

Indeed, in these days where the "Islamic finance" and the archaic codes of practice for Islamic banking are being promoted as the new elixir of life, we might choose to remember that in the very early days of Islam, the re-opening of markets after prayers were over on Friday was considered an imperative. In the very mercentile belief system of my ancestors--almost all of the great early Muslims were merchants at one point or another in their lives, including the Prophet Mohammed--money is not filthy, nor does dealing with it on the hallowed day involve make one less worthy in the eyes of God.

Ergo, the weekend itself is an example of that most vile of intellectual contraband in the Middle East, the بدعة, the innovation, the corrupting alien concept brought in to un-do the majestic purity of the religion of the desert. Never, in a month of Saturdays must this transgression on my faith be allowed to pass. My suggestion is: Drop the weekends altogether. Let us work like coolies under the sun. In order to amend for previous trespasses on the holy law, I suggest each parliamentarian in Kuwait gets 10 lashes for every Friday he shirked from work at the Assembly.