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Ramadan Lived and Consumed
Ramadan is a month of repentance, the monththe Holy Qur
<
an descended, the month ofthe Night of Power . . . a month of good ArabIslamic days . . . a month of friendly relations,mutual respect, and piety . . . when rich andpoor are equal . . . a month bringing togetherqualities and virtues, more than any othermonth of the year.
—Munir Kayyal,
 Ramadan in the DamascusofOlden Days
For devout Muslims, Ramadan is a time of self-purification. Fasting(
 sawm
) from dawn to dusk is one of the five pillars of Islam. This ap-plies not only to food and drink, but also to tobacco, non-essentialmedications, and sexual relations. Those unable to fast must com-pensate with a donation of food to the poor (
kaffara
) for each daythey omit. Believers must also avoid sinful thoughts, arguments, andmalicious gossip. Ramadan is also a season of heightened almsgiving(
zakat, sadaqa
)—another pillar of the faith. For pious Muslims, theholy month is imbued with profound metaphysical meaning. Yet inSyria and many other Muslim societies Ramadan holds other mean-ings, which, despite their obvious social significance, have receivedscant anthropological attention. Anthropological discussions of Ra-madan center almost exclusively on religious precepts, as if the monthheld only deep religious significance for all its participants (Antoun1968; Fallers 1974; Yamani 1987; Buitelaar 1993). It has becomecustomary for academics to treat Ramadan fasting and feasting asexpressions of popular religiosity and Islamic egalitarianism. Syrians
4
 
agree that fasting is designed to promote empathy for the poor, andfeasts are often donated to the needy. Yet such customs may rein-force, rather than undermine, social hierarchy. In Damascus, prac-tices of identity assertion and boundary construction peak duringthe holy month, when expressions of Damasceneness, and reactionsagainst them, are most publicly and loudly expressed. Representa-tions of Old Damascus feature in a variety of Ramadan consumptivepractices and cultural forms whose various meanings are debated inthe media and in conversation.
Ramadan and Damasceneness
According to Damascenes, the city has a particular associationwith Ramadan. According to Munir Kayyal:
The City of Damascus was unparalleled in traditions distinctive from thoseof their kind in [other] Arabic and Islamic civilizations. These traditionswere not wholly in conflict with what the True Religion (
al-din al-hanif 
)teaches; they were regarded as part of the heritage of the blessed month ofRamadan, and Ramadan without them loses much of its beauty and splen-dor. (1992: 88)
Ramadan remains linked to what are seen as typically Dama-scene practices, extolled by Damascenes and sneered at by others. ADamascene English teacher argues that the very religious, whom sheequates with the poor, fast out of belief, but elite Damascenes fast asa mode of distinction:
All the people of other governorates (
muhafazat 
) [of Syria] consider Dam-ascenes to be the least religious among them. Damascenes link the matterof the appearance of religiosity to nobility (
akabriyyeh
), to the fact that theyare aristocratic (
> 
ariq
), authentically Old Damascene. Since the people whohave come in from other governorates don’t fast, the Damascenes began tofast, and to fast habitually.
1
They do anything that might exhibit this activ-ity. This is what led to the idea of the café, and the idea of eating
iftar 
(thefast-breaking meal) outside the house, in a restaurant. It all becomes pop-ular. For example, now during the last ten days of Ramadan, it becomesdifficult to find a table in any restaurants at
iftar 
time. This [practice] al-lows people to go out for a social occasion and appear religious at the sametime.
Fasting is common among Damascenes who are in other waysnon-observant. It is a way of fitting in for non-Damascenes marriedto Damascenes, or the upwardly mobile seeking status markers. Oneinformant tells of her non-religious Palestinian father beginning tofast only after he married into her mother’s old notable family. Non-
Ramadan Lived and Consumed 95
 
Damascenes consider fasting among non-practicing Muslims hypo-critical. An
>
Alawi friend living in the largely Damascene neighbor-hood of Muhajirin took to eating breakfast on his balcony eachmorning, in defiance of what he saw as Damascene pretentiousness.Another informant, who grew up in the regionally diverse neigh- borhood of Baramkeh, then moved to Muhajirin after marriage,confirms this association of Damasceneness and ostentatious fasting.In
Damascene Talk
(
Hadith Dimashqi 
), Najat Qassab Hasan admits thatsome Damascenes, in keeping with their well-known phrase “every-thing has its place” (
kull shi 
< 
li-halu
), separate occasional religiosityfrom everyday practice, fasting with great piety, then drinking alco-hol again as soon as the month ends (1988: 194–195). Public dis-plays of Ramadan “customs and traditions” are linked to Dama-sceneness in the minds of Damascenes and non-Damascenes alike.Reinvented traditions offer Damascenes opportunities to displaylocal identity and to consume conspicuously. As among Muslimselsewhere, food consumption reaches its height during Ramadan.For several weeks before the month begins, food stores display itemsto be consumed at the
iftar 
table, such as
qamr al-din
(apricot lea-ther), tamarind, and
>
araq sus
(licorice root), which are used to makefast-breaking beverages. An “organized” (
murattibeh
) Damascenehousewife stocks up on these and other non-perishable provisions(
muneh
) as early as possible. “They
 still 
stockpile, even now,” re-marked a journalist from Hama, who sees this activity as evidence ofDamascene backwardness and miserliness. Yet prices rise consider-ably as the month approaches. Iman Abdul Rahim, director of Inter-national Relations at the Ministry of Tourism, tells this story of pre-Ramadan grocery shopping:
The funny thing is that it’s obvious that the month of Ramadan is themonth of fasting. People are supposed to eat less. But people eat more,consumption multiplies, and everything becomes more expensive. Twodays ago I was talking to my greengrocer. Lemons were 50 SP [$1], cu-cumbers were 40, as were zucchini, and the eggplant I bought for
maqlubeh
2
was 60. All this is a lot. I told him, “Ramadan hasn’t even begunyet,” and he replied “Happy holidays” (
kull saneh wa inti salimeh
).
Food eaten during Ramadan is the best and most elaborate of theyear. The government has tried to stem the tide of rising consump-tion by regulating the amount of luxury foods—such as meat andnuts—that can be shown in television advertisements, so as not totaunt the poor with images of items completely out of their reach.Yet the relaxation of importation laws in the early 1990s has flooded
96
A New Old Damascus 
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MuslimVoices

This article was made available as part of the Voices and Visions Project of Indiana University. www.muslimvoices.org

reply11 / 03 / 2009
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