Power, money, booze: Christians can learn a lot from Ramadan

Our Muslim brothers are currently observing the fast in the holy month of Ramadan. In the last six years it has not been easy to be a Muslim in the world, what with the “war against international terrorism”. Matters have not been helped in Uganda by the July 11 World Cup Finals night terrorist bombs Kampala in which nearly 80 people were killed.

The Somali Islamic militant group Al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for the attacks. For all the hostile and mixed, and vehemently supportive sentiments about Islam, I think that Islam exists in its most progressive and secular form in Africa - or to be specific, Sub-Sahara Africa (how I hate that distinction).

Let me explain. Some time back, I visited Dar-es-Salaam, capital of Tanzania, during Ramadan. Club and bar owners were in tears, because, they said, nearly half of their best clients were not showing. “Why”, I asked. “They are observing Ramadan,” I was told at two restaurants/clubs that we went to that night.

Though they might not wield much political power in all countries, Muslims in many parts of Africa tend to be comparatively better off, and the secular ones are famous for being levelheaded and sensible. Though it is against most strands of Islamic teaching, they drink alcohol, party, and are valued customers in the flesh market.

In Tanzania, in particular, all stereotypes of Muslims usually fall flat on their faces. Which is not to say the extremist version doesn’t exist, even outside the Islamic countries in northern Africa. It does. However, its effect has been more social – and even laudatory, in some instances.

We have said this before, and we shall repeat it. In African countries that were colonised by a European power, Islam was discouraged - and often persecuted. Muslims were denied education, and discriminated against in public jobs. They drifted to the more tolerant urban areas where they became artisans, taxi drivers, and small traders.
The fact that Muslims are largely urban creatures in most of East Africa, for example, and because of the ablutions that Islam requires them to undergo, the unintended result is that Muslim households in Eastern Africa have generally a higher standard of living than Christian and “pagan” ones. They are more likely to have piped water, latrines or flush toilets, than Christian homes.

Because they are largely urban, the many children from their many wives were integrated in the modern urban economy much faster than the many children of Christian polygamists in the villages, who became trapped in the peasant economy, fighting each other over increasingly fragmented pieces of lands and dabbling in witchcraft to help them win their wars.

The Muslims, therefore, as a percentage of their population, have been able to grow healthier numbers than Christians because the child mortality rates in their households are far lower; and they have accumulated more capital (it’s no accident that the best footballers from Africa in the European leagues are mostly Muslims).
A Muslim woman is more likely than a Christian one to be a stay-at-home mum on the orders of Haji. It is unjust, but on the flip side it means that on the whole, in a time when the pressures of a modern life where both partners work means that often the children get neglected, there are quite many burqa-wearing Hajatis at home keeping an eye on the children.

The sight of Muslim extremists in northern Nigeria and the Al Shabaab in Somalia, sentencing “adulterous” women to be stoned to death, or chopping off the hands of pickpockets will revolt many, but this strict approach to discipline has also ensured that Muslim children, on the whole, tend to stay on the straight and narrow and finish school, on average, than Christian ones.

A Haji friend of mine in Kampala, very middle class and travelled, did something that perhaps mostly Muslim fathers will do. His boy was being big-headed at school, and jumping the school fence to go and carouse in the neighbourhood. He donned his kanzu (tunic), got a few of his muscular relatives, laid out a couple of straight canes in the boot, and set out to the school. His relatives cornered the stubborn fellow, and hauled him before the assembly – in the face of weak protestations from the headmaster – and whacked the twit on the buttocks thoroughly. Suffice it to say the lad finished high school at the top of his class, and is now at a prestigious Asian university.

Christian parents wouldn’t do that, because they are “westernised”, and watch all these soaps and sitcoms where teenagers bang doors in the face of their parents, leave their clothes and socks strewn on the floor of their rooms for their long-suffering mothers to pick and clean up. Soon they accept a lot of that as “normal”.
The Haji, meanwhile, is watching Arab satellite soaps where the kids jump to rapt attention when the exhausted Sheik returns home from doing Allah’s work.

So, Christians need to learn the virtue of doing a Ramadan. After spending 11 months eating unholy meats, and drowning in wine and beer, surely we should be able to take one month, just one, to fast and clean purify our systems.

Happy Ramadan.

cobbo@nation.co.ke