A student of mine calls herself an atheist, and has only fasted once for Ramadan in her 18 or so years, to experience it. She said she felt nothing. And yet, despite her public denouncement of Islam, she still has to pretend to fast, sneak around, out of fear of the police and her family.

I too fasted my first year here, and since then have not. My husband, who does fast for personal reasons and not pressure, made me coffee every morning during Ramadan even though he wouldn’t touch it to his own lips. Sadly, most Moroccans I’ve met don’t share his take.

“I think many of us like the general vibe of the islamic philosophy, the objectives of it. We arent, to be honest, diverted by less important detail….”

I think some countries have a less tense relation between Islam and politics than Morocco—Turkey is an example—and I hope that once the elections happen this year, if the PJD (Islamic party) wins, they will prove to be moderates who want clean government, not people who will “lock up the women” and “ban music” as you say !! I’ll tell you, Moroccans are easygoing people (even when very sincere Muslims) and repression just won’t work in Morocco, I don’t think. Besides, the world has enough extremism on all sides, we don’t need to fan the flames.

Thanks for your hopeful remarks and Happy New Year 2007 !!

this is a common expression, of righteous indignation, that intelligent people like to vote with an political islamic vector.

My point is that we should grow up and have a more nuanced understanding of islamic thought. your fellow concert goers might have already got there.

Together you can nurture a qualitatively better society. Isnt it great that religious people havent switched off their brains? that you can access them and they can access you? no need to be schitzoid.

similar situation in other countries. I think many of ;us; like the general vibe of the islamic philosophy, the objectives of it. We arent, to be honest, diverted by less important detail eg. they are going to lock up the women, they will ban music, they hate fun.

i think people are ‘over that’ mental knot.

oh and by the way, i think there are countries, muslim ones that are much more schitzophrenic than your own!

Or maybe seeing contradictions in our own thought is just too much work. Anyway, nothing overly Moroccan in this. The players may be local: the phenomenon is global.

@Liosliath — My first year in Morocco I observed the fast, though no one made me feel I was obliged to. I even had rebellious friends who broke the fast privately, and tried to pressure me to buy liquor for them! The next two years I didn’t observe it, but I felt a bit bad about that. I have a friend who is borderline alcoholic but who quits each year for Ramadan—not because of pressure, but because for him, the point of Ramadan is a common sacrifice. It’s the one time of year where the rich go hungry just as the poor do! It is a time of social solidarity and reflection. It might be nice if the taboo were broken and some cafes stayed open, but I’d hate for this to happen only as a capitulation to foreign tastes. Morocco is conservative enough that there is real social pressure to observe Ramadan, but I think if you scratch the surface people will admit that insincere fasting counts for nothing. At bottom it has to be voluntary….

On the 15th of December, the preacher of Al-Aqsa Mosque warned that, there are cracks in the southern wall of Al-Aqsa Mosque result of the excavations carried out by Israeli authorities under the Aqsa Mosque the building of the Islamic Waqf, despite warning of the danger of these excavations, the Israeli authorities preventing the Islamic Waqf from reconstruction of the southern wall.

So your impression of complexity and contradiction is indeed the one which most closely resembles our political reality…