RAMADAN

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4529, 28 January 1942, Page 6

RAMADAN

CARNIVAL IN CAIRO MOSLEM FASTING MONTH (By “Askarri.”)' Ramadan is the great fasting month of the Moslems. During Ramadan, every Mahometan fasts from dawn to dusk or, according to the Koran, while a white thread can be distinguished from a black. The first week of Ramadan inspires the faithful to great enthusiasm of the spirit, but complete impotency of the flesh. It reduces the housewife to tears. If breakfast has

not appeared by lunch time it simply means that Aehmed, the cook, is spending the morning in prayer, or recovering from a day’s fast followed by a night’s gorge. An hour before sunset Cairo awakes from the afternoon siesta and the streets are filled with the clatter of wooden sandals, the weird cries of the hawkers, and the chatter of the women and girls as they hurry and buy the family’s evening bowl of beans. At all the food shops and on street barrows are huge iron pots from which vendors ladle a brown mess which can be described as more savory than sanitary. BREAKING FAST At dusk the breaking of the fast is signalled by the firing of guns, and he who travels takes no risks but carries a parcel of food with him. Many

a follower of the Prophet can be seen with a watch in one hand, a cake of bread in the other, and both ears cocked for the sound of the signal gun. I saw one backslider with a flat loaf of bread in the pocket of his gown surreptitiously lifting the gown and taking bites from the bread. To the casual observer he was innocently wiping his nose, but neither Allah nor I were deceived. We both knew that his nose had never been wiped since he was born. When the gun sounds the streets empty like magic, and, till dawn, the rich eat as much as they can hold and the poor eat as little as will keep them alive.

Whatever the Prophet’s reason for setting a month of fasting, it must act as a useful social stabiliser. The hungry fellahin can reflect that the rich pasha is hungry too—and feels it more. After all, starving for a

month because you want to is a different thing from starving for the other eleven because you have to. ‘ CAIRO’S CHRISTMAS CAROLS Ramadan is a month of ceremony and general upset. Even the Nile feels the urge and celebrates by coming down in a turbulent chocolate-coloured hood. This year, as a special feature, Cairo had a shower of rain. At night troupes of children tour the streets with lanterns and sing the equivalent of Christmas carols. The less said of, or heard of, the singing the better, but the myraids of toy lanterns bobbing along the blacked-out streets make an attractive scene. The King prays in turn at different mosques and sets an example in giving to the poor the wherewithal to break their fast.

But Ramadan is over and we are in the throes of the concluding feast of Bairam. For two days Cairo has looked like something between a corroboree, a bullfight and the Melbourne Cup. They told me that it was the custom of the people to spend the day in the public parks and gardens, so a friend and I arranged to meet at the Zoo at 10 o’clock. Half the population of Cairo had apparently decided to do likewise. We took two hours, three trams and a dash of Australian initiative to get two miles. The thousand people we passed clustered at tram stops along the route probably either walked on to the Zoo or home to tea. There were plenty of trams, but they were all branching off in another direction and running empty. Cairo trams seem to regard passengers merely as a nuisance and a source of delay. A SARTORIAL NIGHTMARE We reached the Zoo at midday and found the 50-acre park a streaming jabbering mass of humans clad in garments of every possible shape and color. If was a sartorial nightmare—a lunatics’ fancy dress parade—a day when the poorest family collected every garment in the place, every ornament, borrowed more and wore the lot. Some, in their enthusiasm, had washed the more accessible areas of their persons, but most had got dressed the day before and left it at that. We travelled on a tram with a youth in a flowing blue-striped gown, a tweed overcoat, a scarf, a pool of perspiration and a riding whip. The girls of the better classes have a wonderful dress sense, but the fellahin women had shed their workaday rags for long shapeless creations that would have made Joseph’s coat of many colours look sombre. Hundreds of girls who had padded about barefooted for 364 days celebrated this one with leather shoes. They limped about for a couple of hours and then carried the shoes in their hands. VIEW OF THE ZOO We take our pleasures sadly by comparison. To-day the atmosphere was delightfully spontaneous—and liable to combustion. Every time the hippo climbed up on the bank and opened his cavern of a mouth there was a stampede toward the cage. If someone blocked the view you dragged him or her clear. If he or she remonstrated you slapped his or her face. By that time a hundred bystanders were gathered and in full voice. The law was represented by an army of keepers, police and Egyptian soldiers, and I had one close-up of law and order in full blast. An argument arose in front of a monkey cage and after a term of clawing and shouting a policeman pushed forward, got a grip of the gown of the chief offender and dragged him clear of the crowd. More policemen arrived, shouldered the original captor aside and dragged the shouting victim back again. For ten minutes a dozen policemen arrested him from each other and by the time a hundred officials and citizens had arrested eath other the affair seemed to reach a deadlock and they all went back to the monkeys.

I met an Egyptian I knew, and we walked round together. The giraffe fascinated him and I ventured the old gag about the giraffe with a sore throat and the centipede with corns. “But why do these animals have such sicknesses?” he asked solemnly. I eventually succeeded in explaining that it was a joke in my country and observed that the giraffe was, in any case, a strange animal. “It is also a very stupid animal,” my friend declared. “When men try to shoot it, it buries its head in the sand where it lives.”

It was a great day and the people saw it through to the finish. When the closing bell sounded 10,000 people emptied out on to the street and milled about wondering what to do next. Their arrival had been spread over half the day, but now they all wanted to get home at once. The trams were all going the wrong way. Scores of flat-topped donkey carts set off for outlying villages, packed with women and children. An odd tram staggered along with people perched all over it. The rest merely churned about and talked fortissimo. A hundred little Mahommeds and Abduls were lost. A hundred hysterical women rushed about looking for little. Fatima and losing the other half dozen meanwhile. Groups of girls and women argued at the top of their voices then rolled up their draggled draperies to their waists, clutched their treasured shoes in their hands and limped homeward.