The Twelve Months of Ramadan

On a particularly damp Christmas Eve in London, I found myself nursing a pint of Mr Young’s (are we now to call it Mr Wells’?) finest at an over-lit, over-priced and rather less-than-sexy wooden pub in Wimbledon Village. Into pint number more-than-two, my weary companion finally cottoned on that I wasn’t going to move on quickly to the restaurant, and so remarked, why for I don’t understand, on the juxtaposition of Eid Al Adha so close to Christmas this year.

Islamic history can be a touchy subject at the best of times, and the slightly tipsy state I was in wasn’t going to make things any easier, but, like a dutiful faqih educating the benighted infidels of this piss-drenched city, I began to explain how this was well and truly a coincidence; no, like a coincidence that could only happen every three and a half decades or so. While in my current state of existential indecisiveness about the big questions in life means it is unlikely that I will appreciate this cosmic coming about at anything other than face value, the very fact of the constant change in the Islamic months—making Ramadan appear during the long summer days one year, and the bitter cold of winter in another—is worth studying in its own right.

It was on the Prophet Mohammed’s fateful last trip to Mecca, better known for the injunction to treat Arab and non-Arab alike as they were in the eyes of God, that the good man of Quraysh declared that there should be only 12 months. In fact, Islam goes one further: “For God”, the Koran tells us, “there can only be 12 months”. If the injunction had remained within the more contestable hadith tradition, then, like many others, it might have found itself on the dusty shelf of unused Islamic rules. Finding its way into the canonical Othmani text, however, its finality has been sealed.

But wait! I can hear you think, what has the number of months got to do with the way they’re arranged? Well, as I explained to my by now more confused friend at the pub, the pre-Islamic Arabs used the same type of calendar then in use throughout the region, counting months by lunar cycles, but substituting a thirteenth month every seventh year in order to bring the 12-month cycles in line with the rotations about the Sun. While the months did of course fall on different points in the solar cycle, they stayed in the same season of the year, at least. By doing away with the crucial thirteenth month, we are now in the rather bizarre pickle of wherea month called Rabi’ (in the “Islamic” calendar), meaning Spring, could be in August, or December, and only rarely during the actual Spring. This is a rather difficult thing to explain to an 11-year-old.

Of course, the obvious motivation behind the calendar shift, or so it seems to me, is to do away with the then-important class of oracles, magicians astrologers and sooth-sayers, who monopolised the understanding of celestial affairs in those times and posed a serious threat to the burgeoning new religion. Shaker Nabulsi has written about how many of this group shaped Islam from its earliest and can be credited with some of Islam’s tenets; the curious reader is invited to make enquiries.

The problem with undermining the magicians and learned astronomers is that their role had to be taken by a whole cast of completely questionable freaks. How could you synchronise a harvest cycle to your calendar, when the month named under the photo of the busty beauty tells you nothing about whether or not you should sow, harvest or feast? Given Islam’s mercantile bent, it is also hard to square this with the thought of multi-year commercial contracts, surely something of a headache. Of course, while the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia continues, uniquely, to insist on printing official documents and observing official anniversaries according to the Hejri dates, nobody else really bothers. When asked for their birthday, nobody ever says “oh, 25 Ramadan”. You might choose to call it innocuous, another word for a completely useless way to keep dates.


Epilogue:

We ate at the new Limon Shish restaurant closer to Wimbledon station. A satisfactory one course meal—well-seasoned skewer of chicken, very well considered mezze, with some individual character—can be had for around £10. Not quite as good as Patogh, which boasts similar prices, but in the Middle Eastern desert that is the London Borough of Merton, it is a new gem.

As for the calendars, the more attentive of my readers will probably now point out that the Jewish calendar, which, of course, was inspired by the same Babylonian/Assyrian/Chaldean sources as the pre-Islamic Arabic calendar, has continued to thrive to this day. Well I already knew that. Some, perhaps fewer, will point out the funny story about what happened when a Saudi man stuck in Kuwait had his ID card checked by an Iraqi soldier at a checkpoint during the 1990 conflict (“What the hell do you think you are telling me you’re that old?”). I’ve heard it already.

On a final note, to those who take issue with my description of London as “piss-drenched”, I invite you to read the thoroughly enjoyable Clerkenwell Tales by my new-found friend Peter Ackroyd. In it, you can find out that your favourite city and mine has in fact quite a good pedigree of being piss-drenched, going back some centuries.

Good night.


18 ذو الحجة 1428 هجري
27 December 2007

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.

Cleric Tells Woman: Get Yer Tits Out...Or, What Happens When You Apply Logical Rules to an Irrational Religion

Islam gets a bad press some times... not that Islam does not occasionally deserve a bad press, that's another story, but Islam can be genuinely slanted when reported on in the Western press. Any person who is informed on Islam exclusively through the Western press would think that a fatwa can only be a death sentence, or perhaps an injunction not to cook with Danish butter. In fact, a jurisprudent at Al Azhar in Cairo, perhaps the longest-running seminary in the world of Islam, has used his position to issue a fatwa allowing men to suck on the nipples of female co-workers--even better, our man (hey, you knew he was a man, right?), Dr Ezzat Attiyah at the Hadeeth Department of Al Azhar, suggested that a session of nipple-suckling was necessary to legitimise a situation where men and women shared the same physical space without being either intimately related or married (for those Arabic boffins, this is to be muhram, or محرم).


(Unfortunately, I have only found an Arabic version of this story, here. As you can imagine though, this is spreading like wildfire, which means it will move into the English-language press soon enough; maybe I will update this post then.) The ludicrous point behind all of this is that the potentially un-Islamic arrangement of men and women working together can be avoided by getting the women to get their tits out.

Obviously, my first thought was: How do I get the secretary to go along with this? Since I started working in January, I haven't been able to get my eyes off the doey-eyed, chocolate-brown, busty, curvy 20-year-old who hardly smiles. She acts like a bitch who knows she can get away with it in an office with bad air-conditioning and packed to the brim with single, mostly inexperienced young men; she just knows that she can walk in, stop me writing an email to the boss explaining why we're a week behind schedule and ask me to scan a piece of paper because, in her several months of working there, she has had the time to chat on MSN and play solitaire, but hasn't really gotten 'round to working the scanner. Well, I'm a sucker for it; I sort of sit back, ask her what file format she wants the images in, hope she tries to make small talk and just sort of stare at her and drool until she snaps her fingers, stomps the floor and leaves without a thank-you. I figure a little bit of breast-based action is not too much to ask, no?

Now, to be fair, this kind of insane male fantasy-fuelled theology does have its foundations in Islam's principles and practice. According to the Koran itself, a bond born of breast-feeding turns strangers into siblings; a man and woman who are breast-fed by the same woman in childhood are treated as brother and sister, making any marriage between them impermissible. A similar arrangement is in place between the breast-feeder and the breast-fed. Of course, the mere fact that Islam has such embarrassingly personal loopholes says something about the preoccupations of the people who founded the religion. The breast-feeding-of-an-adult does itself have an important precedent when the Prophet Mohammed himself ordered it to solve certain issues arising from the Islamic prohibition against adoption (much on that topic can be found all over the internet; I once received death threats for writing about this on a newsgroup, so I'm going to leave it at that). It follows from a simple exercise in analogous thinking (thinking in analogies, or قياس is something of a high art in Islamic theology, for some obvious reasons of self-inflicted intellectual restriction) that men can suck their colleagues' boobs and be allowed to share a closed-door office because they would effectively be like mother and son (although this fatwa does allow a cop-out: the sucker and the sucked can later be married, how I don't know, this is the kind of thing one learns at Al Azhar, I guess).

In some situations all of this can work itself out amicably, I'm sure. The problem arises with the needless infantilisation, in so many ways, of Muslim societies. Not all the women in the Middle East's workplace will be as coquettish and dominating of the men as the lovely Sec (and yes, she will stay anonymous; it's a small country and people shouldn't know that she plays solitaire all day!). If this kind of thing were to become the orthodoxy, families would see their daughters out of the workplace and back under lock and key at home; after all, at this rate, a fatwa prescribing fellatio between teenage girls and their geometry teachers is just a few years down the line. In the meantime, I am left fantasizing about the colour of Sec's areolas. So while I would love for this to realise itself in my own little world, I think it's obvious for all to see why this fatwa at least must go into organised religion's heaving pile of bad ideas, but let this be a warning to all of you: Never apply a logical standard of reasoning to a whimsical set of mystical beliefs from the middle ages. It just complicates relations in the workplace.


Incidentally, there is a literally example of this working out in the fictional world: You all should read Samarkand by Amin Maalouf.


PS: I completely love it when people comment on the blog postings, but could you be a bit more clear about who you are? Specifically, please don't just "anonymous", put a name, that way I can at least guess.

On Science and Religion

Now that my brother has done the honourable thing and apologised, I feel free to move on to another, more meaningful post. Exhibit A:

An article explaining how "Muslim" scientists/mathematicians were well ahead of the game in terms of creating and, presumably, understanding complex geometric patterns.

The actual information revealed is fascinating and unoffensive; centuries ago, in a place far, far away, a bunch of guys got together and discovered how to use non-repeating patterns to make beautiful designs. In the meantime, it can only be assumed that the artisans had some appreciation for the underlying mathematical properties of the shapes they were making. After all, it was the great polymath Omar Khayyam--very influential in the area of Central Asia mentioned in the above article (read Samarkand by Amin Maalouf)--who was one of the first people to work on studying geometry through mathematical functions (there are translated versions of Khayyam's mathematics available today in at least French and modern Arabic--actually the modern Arabic version, published by the Centre for Arab Unity Studies is useless, much less clear than the medieval Arabic kept as an appendix). Ultimately, however, this in itself is not why the story received so much attention, even being listed on the BBC website. When was the last time you heard the BBC World News anchorwoman mention a story based on mathematics research?

The reason last month's story received the attention it did--outside the corridors of math departments--was the way it could be used to "bridge the cultural divide" in our post-Huntington world. Muslims are bad; they are terrorists... but wait, no, they're not bad because a few hundred years ago some of them did some cool mathematics. Personally, I have no time for the idea that Muslims are bad because I kind of used to be a one in the strict sense, and probably still am one in the vague definition of the word, depending on how fine a line you want to put on it. What I want to gripe with, however, is the idea that any science can be linked to a religion; when was the last time you heard of "Euler, the Christian mathematician" or "Einstein, the Jewish physicist" or even "Heisenberg, that Nazi scientist"?

Perhaps there are benign, even benevolent reasons for using such language: telling Western school children after 9/11 that a few Muslims were intelligent is like telling Nazis that Jews are good for the cultural life of the nation, meant to fight irrational hatred; but then what do you do with the religious jingoists, who want to use these factoids to peddle their tripe? What do you say to the bearded imam who attacks co-educational schooling, proclaiming that a "return to the roots of Islam" would heal our developmental failure-to-launch? What do you say to the Israeli who wants to wipe out the West Bank's university while the Hebrew University of Jerusalem--the recipient of much care from Einstein in its early days--can build on illegally occupied territory?

One of the great ironies of all of this is how it would have jarred with the actual personalities concerned. There is a growing trend in these parts to have "Islamic" hospitals; these, doubtlessly, have some remedial features in that they extend health care to sections of society which otherwise could not afford them (in places like Egypt and Jordan) and allow female patients in particular to feel more relieved about where they will stay while receiving treatment. What makes me chuckle is the way they're usually named after personages who were anything but Islamic at the time; Mohammed ben Abi Bakr Al Razi is one popular choice for the name of an Islamic hospital, yet the man was known for his non-conformity as a Muslim as much as for his medical work back in the day. Another might be Jabr ibn Hayyan, whose work on the use of furnaces--kitab al afran--still merits a mention in textbooks on thermogravimetry. None of these people were particularly pious, and linking their achievements with some kind of religious spirit is quite misleading and disingenuous, and serves nobody in the quest to improve the status of Muslim countries.

You might ask why make such a big deal out of it; surely, it couldn't hurt any young budding Muslim scientist, sitting on a desk in his under-funded public school in his disastrously mismanaged home country, to feel a certain pride in his forebears? Except that it's wrong. If we convince people that the reasons for the past greatness of Islamic civilisation(s) was based on doctrinal faithfulness, instead of the on the ingenuity of individuals, coupled with the economic prosperity and political stability and patronage which allowed them to function, we will have limited to a great extent our ability to plan for the future. The absurd becomes dangerous when wealthy governments in the region sponsor conferences on "the science of the Koran" instead of investing in better lab kits and more modern textbooks. Some times it seems that there is some kind of conspiracy to keep school kids here stupid.

Such diversions from reality also lead us astray from interesting questions about the nature of the differences between religion and science; how confident should Muslims be in applying the diktats of their religion if none of it can be made falsifiable? How certain can anybody be that Islam is a divine religion if it can be shown that there arithmetic inconsistencies in the way wealth is divided?
Nor do these claims of an Islamic science actually help an already confused group of people. Why on Earth should an Uzbekh care that Jabr ibn Hayyan, an Arab, was their co-religionist, when the Persians have their own army of thinkers and now, it seems, the Uzbekhs did too?

People of all religions can find, I'm sure, ways of justifying their superstitious beliefs with science of the past or the future (one fad in the 1990s was to link Hinduism to string theory). Given the disastrous situation Muslims are in at present, however, we can little afford to waste time trying to find the solutions to equations in the metaphysics of the past.