Dogwash

So I'm getting my daily fix of CiF, irredeemable masochist that I am, and reading Mehdi "The Moderate Muslim Intellectual" Hasan's piece on the rigours of Ramadan. This year, of course, Ramadan falls in high summer and Mehdi is having a bit of a hard time of it, getting up to eat and drink before the oh-so early dawn and stuffing his face in the knowledge that it will be late evening before he can eat again.

The reaction below the line is not entirely sympathetic. Some of the comment is the usual tedious sneering about sky fairies and imaginary friends from people desperate to demonstrate their righteous liberal rational credentials — I'm an atheist myself as it happens but I don't feel the desperate need to loudly declare my lack of faith in insulting and condescending language at every opportunity, like some tosser perpetually finding excuses to show off his Black mates to remind everybody how non-racist he is.

A couple of commenters, however, raise an interesting point. Mehdi's difficulties this year stem from the co-incidence of the highly peripatetic month of Ramadan with the long days of the northern summer. While the practice of religious fasting in some form or other predates Islam, both in Christianity and Judaism, it is prescribed by Allah:

In the Qur'an, God proclaims that "fasting has been written down (as obligatory) upon you, as it was upon those before you".

(Wikipedia). While Mo may not have been aware of the long days of the temperate and arctic summer when taking holy dictation, Allah the all-knowing most certainly was. Which suggests two possible conclusions,

1. Allah is a cruel prankster revelling in the suffering of His followers.

or

2. Allah never intended Islam to spread beyond the subtropical and tropical regions where days are of much the same length throughout the year and daylight fasting is merely a testing discipline.


Nice little problem you've got there, chaps, however you slice it. Pardon me while I watch from the sidelines, occasionally taking a swig from a bottle of binge and dipping into my packet of organic roast pork-flavour kettle chips hand fried in Tromsø by flaxen-haired Nordic virgins.