Breaking the Fast

Just as the Christian Lent produced the custom of Mardi gras, so the Moslem fast of Ramadan, ninth and holiest month of the lunar calendar,* has long led to peculiar accommodations in Islamic countries. For 29 or 30 days every year, the devout, who must abstain from food, drink, tobacco and sex from dawn to sundown, make up for it by overindulging and undersleeping during the hours of darkness. When Ramadan, on its 32-year migration through the solar calendar, happens to fall in summer, many a weary Moslem gives up, sleeps the whole fasting day through. Tempers grow short, and politics and propaganda a little sharper.

Little work gets done in Ramadan.

Tunisia's modern-minded President Habib Bourguiba, a Moslem himself, regards Ramadan as so much cultural excess baggage. He has already officially abolished the veil in Tunisia and introduced European notions of marriage and divorce in place of Islamic laws, in which women have little or no rights. Then he set to work on Ramadan, a custom which he believes helps hold Islamic countries in "stagnation, weakness and decadence." Last year in Ramadan he imposed midnight curfew on coffeehouses and other soots where revelers congregated until dawn.

Last week Bourguiba went all the way.

Before a political meeting in a Tunis movie house, he called Ramadan, with its positive requirements of prayers and meditation, a religiously "beautiful custom" that in practice too often is a "pretext that paralyzes our activity." He shocked his hearers by urging them not to fast during Ramadan, which begins Feb. 29. As a clinching argument, Bourguiba recalled that even Mohammed, when inconveniently overtaken by Ramadan on his march to Mecca, counseled his soldiers: "Break the fast, and you will be stronger to confront the enemy." Today's enemy for Tunisia, said Bourguiba, is the "humiliating backward condition of our country." It remained to be seen whether progressive-minded President Bourguiba, for all his political strength, could break a custom of centuries.

* Commemorating Allah's revelation of the Koran to Prophet Mohammed.

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