Ramadan and covid-19

Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba, Spain (Photo: PND, 2018).

There are obsessions that are gratifying to practice once a year, some doing so by writing an anti-bullfighting column, in my case speaking against the current of Muslims in Ramadan. It turns out that there are around two million citizens of the Muslim religion in Spain who celebrate Ramadan from 24 April, the lunar month of the Islamic calendar with whose name we identify fasting, which is actually the religious precept and one of the five pillars of Islam.

Ramadan is probably the greatest festive time for a Muslim; it commemorates the revelation of the Koran to Mohammed and the practical result consists of a sum of spirituality, social relations linked to food and altered timetables, ingredients present in every great festival of any culture, this year marked by the illness that has been called the COVID-19, caused by a coronavirus, and the confinement to home that has resulted.

From the community's point of view, this Ramadan began with the death of Riay Tatari, the president of the Islamic Commission of Spain for several decades, a Spaniard of Syrian origin who arrived in this country in the seventies to study medicine and stayed here, representing and speaking to Muslims for years with the Administration and imam of the mosque in the Tetuan district of Madrid. The heartfelt farewells published, even by representatives of other faiths, and the memory of the writer of an old interview, confirm the uniqueness of the person and the appreciation he aroused.

As it is not too well known, since it provides information to mention that in Spain for the first time this very striking bar of two million Muslims has been surpassed, but in this column I think I do not need spectacular headlines and besides the calculation is an estimate, in our country religious denomination does not appear among the census data (the source is the annual report under the name "Demographic Study of the Muslim population", elaborated by the Union of Islamic Communities of Spain -UCIDE-).

It may be surprising that the first nationality among the Muslims in Spain is Spanish, closely followed by Moroccan (each one with more than 800,000 followers); at a great distance, with a little less than 100,000, citizens with the nationality of Pakistan, Senegal and Algeria. That there are many nationalized immigrants among the collective is another of the very real and very ignored realities of our country, because they are as Spanish as the rest, for example, when they come to voting.

The municipalities with the highest number of Muslim fellow citizens are Barcelona, Ceuta, Madrid and Melilla, followed by El Ejido (Almeria) and Murcia. Nor is it common to know that the countries with the highest number of Muslims are Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Iran, Turkey and Egypt, the first Arab country on the list. It is difficult to speak of 1.8 billion people as a homogeneous whole, even more difficult to extrapolate the Saudi version of Islam or any other to the whole. And so far the information.

Multiculturalism and religious diversity in Spain are a reality that is not visible, or not very visible. Here, the public display of non-Catholic festivities has not triumphed, as is the case in France or at least in French cinema, which is still a declaration of intent; neither do our prime ministers think that breaking the harira fast on the evening of one of the days of Ramadan brings them anything, as they usually do for Canada at any time and in the United States in democratic times.

This year, in order to illustrate the faith in a spectacular way, the image of Mecca or the Vatican without the faithful gives these great religious centers the appearance of an empty shopping centre, from which it could be deduced that the divinity is a human creation or at least depends on the public.

COVID-19 has brought significant innovations. One of the most surprising has been in this great world health crisis that religion is disappearing, not in its spiritual and personal facet for those who have faith, but in its not small part of cultural and social representation; even charitable. And even the social aspect of Catholic Easter, the pilgrimage of El Rocío, Corpus Christi and Ramadan, have been overcome with a moody gesture, but without great religious agitation, in clear contrast to the multitude of people who carry on their public celebrations. We have discovered with the quarantine forced by the COVID-19 that it is possible to live without taking the car every day, without doing eight weekly purchases, without sport-shows and without public manifestations of religion, all of which has elements of modernity.

The chronicles tell that the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, apart from marking the birth of seismology, provoked a tremendous reaction to rationally demonstrate the existence of the Christian God, knocking out the staff by such a show of divine anger. It also had an enlightened and philosophical response. None of this we have yet seen as a consequence of the coronavirus.

Illustration courtesy of Casa Árabe.

Ramadan is a very appropriate time to talk about cultural diversity, immigration and integration, escaping its usual media connection with violence, and perhaps that's why it's not often you find this festival and its followers in the media. Muslim and peaceful are two words that do not seem to marry well from the point of view of info-entertainment, even though we have already been aware for at least five years that the greatest problem of political violence in Europe and North America comes from the violent extreme right, not from radicalized followers of Allah. Let's acknowledge the efforts made to bring Ramadan to the forefront of the ‘Informe Semanal’, for having dedicated a report (from Rabat); some half pages have been added in some newspapers, but not much.

In the drawer of unclassifiable events in this column, it should be noted that the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs made the gesture of publishing on Twitter "Happy #Ramadan to all our Muslim friends! In its atypical beginning this year, we greet the thousands of citizens who are celebrating from today, in #Spain and the world, this central period of their faith"; a tweet that was answered by not a few Internet users with pictures of ham sandwiches.

Another topic only mentioned here that suggests Ramadan is that among the groups that have been applauded in anger during the last few weeks (a custom that has been reduced) we have little memory of the fact that in many parts of Spain the workers in agriculture are mainly foreigners, and there will also be a lot of Muslims there. Do we consider them to be heroes? It doesn't seem so.

The equivalent of bleach and hydroalcoholic sanitizing gels against ignorance and racism, is still information and culture. Continuing with foreign initiatives, which they call public diplomacy, against all odds, so to speak, Casa Árabe celebrates Ramadan Nights with a special online programme; from Casa África they continue to offer content and to the minute the evolution of the coronavirus on the continent (despite alarmism, in our southern neighbours and the Arab world the pandemic is not spreading as might be suspected, science will explain it to us in the medium term); and from Casa Mediterráneo, as they are also making an effort to encourage confinement.

"Norway 8th century. A spaceship crashes near a Viking village", reads the synopsis of a film broadcast in these times of coronavirus. Is there anyone who can give more in ten words?

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Original text in Spanish. Translation is courtesy of Atalayar magazine, a journalistic bridge between shores and cultures where this articule was also published.