{"id":26,"date":"2013-07-20T10:42:03","date_gmt":"2013-07-20T10:42:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/maghrebi-voices.swarthmore.edu\/?p=26"},"modified":"2024-04-19T19:24:16","modified_gmt":"2024-04-19T19:24:16","slug":"ftur-and-ramadan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maghrebi-voices.swarthmore.edu\/?p=26","title":{"rendered":"F’tur and Ramadan"},"content":{"rendered":"

It seems a long time ago, now, but our first meal in Morocco, the day we arrived, was f\u2019tur or if\u2019tar, the traditional breaking of the Ramadan fast.\u00a0 Kevin Smith, the \u00a0generous colleague who \u00a0loaned us his house while he and his family were away, walked us through the process.\u00a0 First we waited for the magic hour of the Isha prayer to arrive (the 5th<\/sup> prayer of the day, 7:38 p.m. or thereabouts); then we wandered into town and found a table at a restaurant where we sat and waited some more, this time in company with everyone at the surrounding tables, for the actual call to prayer.\u00a0 A waiter brought us a platter of dates, candied pastries,<\/p>\n

\"IMG_0107\"<\/a><\/p>\n

and boiled eggs to sprinkle with cumin and salt, even before the call to prayer sounded.\u00a0\"IMG_0108\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We stared at the waiting food, talking but also listening hard through the talk.\u00a0 With the call to prayer, dates began to vanish at tables all around the restaurant; egg-shells were cracked and peeled almost in unison.<\/p>\n

\"SONY<\/p>\n

After this kind of first course, the waiter brought us fried flatbread (rghaif or milhoui) and a kind of spongy bread (bghrir) to drizzle with honey, and harira (spicy lentil soup with a mutton base, so we had vegetarian “potage” instead).\"SONY\u00a0 \u00a0\"SONY<\/a><\/p>\n

Delicious!<\/p>\n

Even this first meal emphasized for me the communal aspect of Ramadan in Morocco.\u00a0 How different it must feel to be Muslim in the United States, fasting in community, surely, with other Muslims, but not with an entire country behind you.\u00a0 So here’s a geeky thought for you: Canadian Benedict Anderson famously claimed that nations are imagined communities constructed by (for instance) being able to imagine everyone else reading the same newspaper at the same moment. \u00a0But how much more powerful a communal experience this simultaneous meal creates! \u00a0Ramadan seems to me to be defined by both fasting and f\u2019tur; both the fast and its conclusion incorporate\u2014communally embody\u2014a kind of social unanimity. \u00a0I can’t imagine having this same experience of communal identity in the United States. \u00a0Except maybe at Thanksgiving!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It seems a long time ago, now, but our first meal in Morocco, the day we arrived, was f\u2019tur or if\u2019tar, the traditional breaking of the Ramadan fast.\u00a0 Kevin Smith, the \u00a0generous colleague who \u00a0loaned us his house while he and his family were away, walked us through the process.\u00a0 First we waited for the … Continue reading F’tur and Ramadan<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[8,2],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4JDdJ-q","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maghrebi-voices.swarthmore.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maghrebi-voices.swarthmore.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maghrebi-voices.swarthmore.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maghrebi-voices.swarthmore.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maghrebi-voices.swarthmore.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/maghrebi-voices.swarthmore.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76,"href":"https:\/\/maghrebi-voices.swarthmore.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions\/76"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maghrebi-voices.swarthmore.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maghrebi-voices.swarthmore.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maghrebi-voices.swarthmore.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}