Getting ahead of the Ramadan curve

Eighth in a series

What a difference a week makes. As recently as Oct. 24, this writer took part in a think-tank teleconference on – remember? – “post-Taliban Afghanistan.” It all seemed so glibly easy and automatic: a few more bombs, one or two commando raids, increased Pushtun defections, several imminent Northern Alliance victories, and maybe there’d be no Taliban by Halloween. No more ghostly Osama. Time to bring the king!

Not, it seems, so fast. Already events have conspired to make this short story longer than many expected. Now two new factors will further complicate the war: winter and Ramadan.

Folks in Maine know about winter: Things move slower, people hunker down, less gets done despite central heating and snowplows. It’s even more that way in low-tech Afghanistan. Hibernation is hard on war, especially hard on the attackers, on the side that needs to take initiative. We’re that side. Winter’s against us. And the Taliban, it appears, now have more food in the pantry, more acorns squirreled away, than our Pentagon nut counters initially supposed. (Too cold for work, winter in peacetime Afghanistan used to be the time for leisure activities such as buzakshi. Regular readers of this column will recall that great Afghan equestrian game … and also the key lesson associated with it: “Never start a buzkashi you can’t control.”)

Ramadan is a fact of religion rather than meteorology, but its impact within the Muslim world is no less fundamental. If Islam, as Afghan Muslims say, amounts to a kind of True Light, Ramadan serves as an annual prism in which the light of belief and practice is powerfully condensed. Result: an Islam more clear and more pure than otherwise visible. Or, to stick with optics but shift perspective, Ramadan is like a lens through which all experience, no matter how mundane at other times, now “looks” religious. Whatever you do – or is done to you – has Islamic coloration.

Part of this intensity is physiologically based. For a solid lunar month – 28 or 29 days depending on when, exactly, the new moon appears – Muslims abstain from food, drink, and sexual activity between dawn and dusk. Traditionally these two moments are signaled by the firing of a cannon. Between them lie the hours of abstinence which non-Muslims often assume represents sacrifice. True, but my Afghan friends also phrase it as an opportunity for more frequent remembrance of God. Here’s Mohammed Akbar, a peasant farmer, from my field notes in Kunduz province a quarter century ago: “During the days Ramadan [or Ramazan as Afghans pronounce it] whenever I feel thirsty or hungry or desirous of my wife, I turn my mind and think instead of God. Suffering helps remembrance.”

Dispensations exist for small children, for menstruating, pregnant or nursing women, for travelers on arduous journeys, for the sick or gravely injured. I tried to fast in northern Afghanistan in 1977. The first several days were difficult – nonstop food fantasies. Then, for a week or so, I felt more emptiness than hunger. That segment was almost pleasant, but the final two weeks found me edgy, nervous, and quick to judge. I and others in “my village,” as anthropologists possessively put it, were wearing down. What kept us up was a remarkable sense of togetherness, of shared duress. “Hanooz roza migiri?” they’d ask me. “Are you still fasting?” I’d nod and smile with mock grimness. “You’re with us,” they’d reply. “God willing, you’ll soon be a Muslim.”

In only one other Afghan situation have I observed those grim smiles and felt that extraordinary camaraderie: in the 1980s jihad (holy war) against the “infidel” Soviets. The only difference: During the holy war, there was no mockery. The grim smiles were for real. I was glad to be included among them … and very glad not to be on the other side.

Muslims live in an ambience of sacred history. Skeptical of innovation, Islamic doctrine is rooted events fourteen centuries old. Ramadan is older still, a month of fast and truce in pre-Islamic Arabia. Its etymology – “great heat” – suggests a summer origin in the pre-Muslim solar calendar. Islam appropriated the month and slotted it into its sacred lunar cycle. Like all other events in the 354-day lunar year, Ramadan moves “forward” 11 days annually in our solar calendar. Last year it started on November 28. This year Ramadan begins on Nov. 17. Next year, six days after Halloween. What ghosts will be with us then?

We now start to hear talk on what is and is not permissible, from the Muslim standpoint, during this holiest of months. Let’s try to get ahead of the Ramadan curve.

Despite Ramadan’s associations with truce and exhortations to prayer, warfare is not technically forbidden, especially when in a righteous cause and against a mighty foe. Badr, the most famous of five battles in the now idealized time of Mohammed, occurred during the month of Ramadan. The forces of Islam, numbering only 300, defeated a much larger army. Their going to war in the most sacred month was legitimized and energized by a special revelation from God (Allah) to the Prophet: “I am with you. Give firmness to the believers. I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers. Smite ye all their fingers-tips off them. This because they contended against Allah and His Apostle.” Muslims, as we are learning, are not afraid to “smite.” If they die in holy combat, the Islamic concept of martyrdom (shahadat) guarantees direct access to Paradise. Some Muslim say that the rewards for martyrdom during Ramadan are a thousand times greater than at any other time.

Will the Taliban make all possible rhetorical use of Ramadan? Yes.

Will the Taliban suspend military activities during Ramadan? No.

How then should we, the side which has saddled itself with the burden of initiative, proceed? Ramadan is still two weeks away. As such, recalling Ambassador Neumann, “It’s too early to characterize the situation,” not only in Afghanistan but elsewhere in what Washington is correct in calling a worldwide war. But let’s stick to Afghanistan. What options should we have in mind vis-a-vis Ramadan? We will hear these discussed by non-Muslim politicians and pundits. What do Muslims themselves think on the topic? What do they, with their sense of sacred history, feel?

Most – not all, but most – of my Muslim friends support our effort to rid Islam and the world of bin Laden and al-Qaida. Both Afghans and others are much more ambivalent about our bombing of Afghanistan. They are especially concerned – some angered, some infuriated – at the prospect of our bombing during Ramadan. Muslims everywhere, whether friends or enemies, remember the Battle of Badr.

Those who are most anti-Taliban and most supportive of U.S. objectives suggest the following U.S. action during Ramadan:

1. Continue with military activity but limit airstrikes to Taliban frontlines and facilities. No attacks on Afghan cities. No attacks during the hours which surround dawn and dusk when Muslim practice includes special prayers and meals. (No blasphemous confusion of U.S. bombs

with traditional Ramadan dusk/dawn cannons.)

2. Increase ground activities to make sure that the Taliban do not take advantage of our daily cease-fires.

3. Do not bomb on the 27th night of Ramadan, the so-called “Night of Power” when the Prophet first received divine revelation, i.e. the Holy Qoran.

4. Declare a cease-fire – or in some way signal special respect for Islam – beginning two hours before the sunset on the last day of Ramadan and continuing until the fourth day of the sacred celebration (Eid-ul-Fitr) which follows.

5. Increase dramatically the delivery of food (edible food) throughout Afghanistan.

Do these ideas seem wimpy? Overly respectful of belief and practice which, in turn, seem overly medieval? If so, remember two things. First, Ramadan is not Lent in which many Christians “give up” things. Second, the Taliban, for their part, are willing to give up a good deal more than, say, eating chocolate ice cream or watching Oprah.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world.