The Ramadan Diet

شهر رمضان الذي أنزل فيه القرآن

هدى للناس وبينات من الهدى والفرقان

فمن شهد منكم الشهر فليصومه

"The month of Ramadan, wherein the Koran
was sent down to be a guidance to the people,

and as clear signs of the Guidance and the Salvation.
So let those of you, who are present at the month,
fast it." (Sura al-Baqarah, Ayah 185)

For those of you who care, I'm taking the English from A.J. Arberry's translation of the Koran and the Arabic from the Quran that came with my cell phone. It's been more useful than you would have thought. When my father gave me the phone (which he'd bought for himself) and I noted with glee the electronic version of the Qu'ran it included, Papa's only respose was "Yeah, I tried to delete it, but it wouldn't let me." My father, religion's biggest fan.

I realize I wrote "Koran" in three different ways in that previous paragraph. I'm going to have to figure out a standardized transliteration. I think I'll go with "Qur'an" because it's the most complicated and foreign-looking.

This verse is on a big framed poster right outside of my door. I think it would be difficult to overestimate the importance of this month in the Muslim year. Dr. Khadija, my professor for "The Cultural and Social Context of Childhood in Islam" or what I've taken to calling "Parenting for Muslims", tells me this is because a Muslim's connection go Allah is stronger during this month than any other time. The days of fasting and the nights of prayer allow almost uninterrupted thought of Allah, and the lack of food purifies the spirit and makes it more worthy of that connection. The lack of food also allows Muslims to experience the plight of the poor on a more immediate basis, and it is during Ramadan that the largest charitable donations occur.

Of course, much like Easter in the United States, there is a 'secular' (or what we would call secular) aspect to this holiday as well. First off, everybody stays up all night and fasts all day, so very little gets done. Classes are half as long and the school day is from 10-3 instead of the normal 8-4. Secondly I have it on good authority that the absolute best television of the whole year starts during Ramadan. So far it's helped my Arabic immeasurably - there are a number of historical dramas which air during Ramadan where the actors speak in فصحة (fusha), the classical Arabic of the Qu'ran, of written Arabic today, and the Arabic I learned in college. This is significantly easier to understand than the dialects people actually speak, at least for me. But by far the highlight of this year's Ramadan schedule is an Egyptian dubbing of The Simpsons called, roughly, "Al- Shamshoon". It is apparently well-accepted that the Egyptian dialect of Arabic is much better at comedy than any other dialect, and according to the girls down the hall from me the show is an unmitigated success. Maybe next year my Arabic will be good enough to understand it.

And now I move to the difficulty of the current situation. Since everybody in the universe, according to the Saudi government, ought to be fasting, serving food during the day is totally illegal. This is hypothetically okay. Fasting isn't so bad - I used to do it accidentally all the time. But I need food with my twice-daily antibiotics (for my toe), and staying up until suhoor at 3 or 4 in the morning is really not a viable option for me if I want to do anything useful the next day. Of course, nobody else is doing anything useful in the daytime, so given time I will hopefully turn my schedule around enough to stay up for the major meal, but for the last few days I've chosen a different alternative - semi-starvation. They snuck me food in the mornings, but that consisted of literally nothing but bread. I would go out to get food myself, but at the moment my mobility is limited by my toe. After two days of this I ended up asking Dr. Faten (one of the administrators and a woman who has been more than generous) if she would help me get some apples (for quick-intake glucose) and some noodes I could cook in the kitchenette down the hall. I think this must have also precipitated additional attention to my diet, because people have been very worried about me today. Abla Maha just came up to ask me to come downstairs and eat, and once I got down there insisted on helping me heap food upon my plate. "We have fruit! You want fruit?" (all of this in arabic). "Sweets! We have sweets!" "you should have something else to drink."

It reminded me of my first (and only, so far) experience going out "on my own" in a car with a college driver. Because I'm using college transportation, the oh-so-paranoid women who run the residence prefer that I take a "guard" out, presumably to prove to the world that I am chaperoned and also, I guess, as a secondary concern for my safety. Luckily the guard that they chose for me was a woman, Tayyiba, who has been nice to me regularly. She's Ethiopian, and her English is much worse than my Arabic, so I had good fun trying to communicate with her. We went to Jarir (the bookstore) and Danube (the supermarket) and the whole time she kept trying to carry my posessions for me, as a typical maid would do. I was having none of this, because she was only there because I insisted on going out and I wasn't going to buy that much anyway and besides, I don't do well with people serving me when I can do it on my own. So eventually this devolved into a loud, albeit jovial, argument in the middle of the supermarket. Imagine it: two women, one COMPLETELY covered head-to-toe in black, the other with blond hair fully unveiled, having a tug-of-war over a bag full of laundry detergent. She was shouting "Hua thaqeel! Hua thaqeel!" ("It's heavy! It's heavy!") as she tried to grab it from me, and I was shouting "Moo thaqeel! Moo thaqeel!" (It's not heavy! It's not heavy!) just as vehemently. We attracted quite a bit of attention, but at least we were both entertained. This is the sort of argument I find myself having regularly. People who want to take care of me just won't give up. It's embarrassing. I find myself longing for America's well-oiled machine, where I can get lost at will and if I miss a meal or three nobody will care.

Then again, starving to death during Ramadan seems like an ironic way to go. I suppose I have to let them take care of me at least to the extent that I stay alive.

And on an entertaining note from today's Arab News, my typical dinner reading-material, remember to feed your children.