Would Ramadhan ruin the pleasures of a stiff drink?

Or rather, would a good stiff drink ruin your Ramadhan? Khaled Diab writes eloquently (as always) about mixing fasting with alcohol during the holy month of Ramadhan at The Guardian. Here’s a teaser:

In Europe, Ramadan creeps up on you with none of the fanfare associated with the fasting season in the Muslim world, where it is a unique time of year. It is a month of fasting and feasting, frugalness and greed, night turning into day, spirituality and commercialism. When it started this year, we’d arranged, by chance, to go out for drinks with some friends, where we, blasphemously, drank an impromptu seasonal toast.

While the majority of people go without food or drink from dawn to dusk, some Muslims suffer a special kind of thirst. For those who drink alcohol, the holy month can be a very dry spell.

Many do this voluntarily, much like Christians give up certain so-called bad habits for Lent. One Bosnian woman describes people who practice this temporary abstention as being “Muslims on batteries“. In Bosnia, the majority of Muslims still drink alcohol, despite the growing religiosity of society there since the traumas of the Balkans conflict in the 1990s.

Read the rest here. Ignore the many comments that follow.

I’m going to take a brief break from blogging here for a few days to write on a research proposal and spending Eid Mubarak with my boyfriend on which also happens to be his first day of work!! Happy Eid al-fitr/Selamat Hari Raya, everyone!