Ramadan

End of discussion, in the U.S. anyway. As Newsweek’s pithy “Conventional Wisdom” column put it: “Forget talk of a Ramadan ceasefire. They fast and fight all the time.”

The debate over a Ramadan bombing halt, however brief, highlighted both the unusual lengths to which the U.S. might have to go to keep its tenuous coalition together, as well as the pitfalls of fighting terrorist organizations instead of state-run armies, with whom official ceasefires can be negotiated.

But Middle East experts suggest the issues surrounding Ramadan, like so many Islamic cultural questions that have arisen since Sept. 11, have been badly misunderstood by American policymakers and the general public, as the Muslim and Western worlds continue to talk past each other.

The question was never whether Muslims fight during Ramadan. Clearly, history is filled with examples when they did. Mohammed himself led men into battle during the sacred month. What’s worth asking is how Ramadan bombings will be received inside already anti-Western Muslim countries during their holiest month of the year, and at a time of heightened religious fervor.

Most important, how will that reaction affect regimes in the Islamic world? Already nervous about widespread opposition in the streets to the bombings, governments allied with the U.S. will almost certainly face increased hostility at home during Ramadan. Currently the coalition holds its collective breath on Fridays, when conservative mullahs in Pakistan urge the devout to make the Muslim holy day one of protest, testing the government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf with anti-U.S. demonstrations on a weekly basis.

During Ramadan, though, mosques will be filled every day, and Musharraf, along with other Muslim leaders, will face a month of Fridays. During the lunar month, millions of Muslims will pour into mosques on a daily basis, gather for nighttime festivities and experience a renewed sense of community as they go from home to home for family reunion-style dinners each sundown. And what’s likely to be the No. 1 topic of conversation inside the mosques, during the festivals and around those dinner tables during Ramadan? Afghanistan.

It’s no accident that Pakistan’s Musharraf, perhaps the most visible supporter among Muslim leaders of America’s military campaign, was the leading figure beseeching the United States to halt its bombing campaign during Ramadan, to no avail.

“Musharraf knows he’ll be under such intense pressure once Ramadan starts,” says Akbar Ahmed, chairman of the Islamic studies department at American University.

“The silent majority is still sitting on the fence,” Pakistani editor and political commentator Najam Sethi told the Baltimore Sun last week. “But at some point, their emotions will be frayed and they may jump in and protest. With the onset of Ramadan, Musharraf will be put to the test.”

Secure in their decision to continue the bombing, American officials may not be giving these social and cultural dynamics much thought, but their Arab and Muslim counterparts certainly are.

“The danger of public opinion is what’s most important for the Arab governments,” says Chris Toensing, editor of the Middle East Report. Serious public opinion fallout could cripple America’s coalition to fight terrorism in the future.

And there is a real chance that because of the way Ramadan alters the rhythms of life in the Muslim community, that public opinion, already firmly opposed to the bombing, could harden into something more dangerous as moderate positions are abandoned.

“The whole pace of life changes during Ramadan,” explains Jillian Schwedler, assistant professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland. “There is so much downtime when you’re fasting there’s more time to talk about politics. That’s the most important element of this, how the social interaction changes. Will it matter? Maybe, maybe not. That’s the wild card.”

Militarily, there’s a clear consensus that a monthlong bombing halt would not be feasible. “It’s got to continue,” says retired Army Gen. William Nash, now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “At the same time we need to show respect for the Islamic religion and make clear this is war against terrorism and not a war on a religion. You manifest that respect by saying it, and by being very careful in your selection of targets.”

To manifest respect, though, there needs to be trust, which is nearly nonexistent in the Arab and Muslim world, and a key reason why Ramadan looms so large.

Seen through Arab and Muslim eyes, the weeks since Sept. 11 have offered examples of unrelenting disrespect: the mounting number of civilians killed by errant American bombs, a hampered humanitarian relief effort, Afghan refugees chased from their mud huts as winter approaches, continued violence in Palestine, unsubstantiated suggestions from the White House that Muslims may be responsible for the anthrax attacks in America and more than 1,000 people detained in the U.S. in connection with the Sept. 11 attack (many of them Arab or Muslim, including one Pakistani who died in custody). Against that backdrop, there is so little good will toward America among Muslims overseas that the Ramadan question has taken on a life of its own.

“It’s not about Ramadan itself,” says Michael Sells, a professor of religion at Haverford College, and an expert on Arabic literature. “It’s about the power of the symbol and how it’s used and attached to other factors. If there were trust [between Muslims and the West] it wouldn’t be as dangerous an issue.”

“It’s becoming very complicated,” says American University’s Akbar Ahmed, referring to the collateral issues upsetting Muslims about the bombing campaign. “The strands are too many now. Muslims were horrified and outraged by the Sept. 11 attacks. But there is now a disconnect with what’s happening in Afghanistan, with women and children in villages being bombed, forced to the Pakistan border to escape.”

He says with the onset of the holy month, when Muslim “feelings are excitable, that disgust might translate into widespread anger and fury. It’s very volatile right now. It’s like a volcanic rumbling at a subterranean level.”

Ramadan is the ninth month of the Muslim’s lunar calendar, the time during which it’s believed the prophet Mohammed, in 610 A.D., received the first revelations of the Quran from Allah through the Angel Gabriel. (It is to Muslims what the receiving of the Ten Commandments from Mount Sinai is to the Jews and Christians.)

Often referred to as the springtime of the Islamic year, Ramadan is a time for daytime fasting, worship, quiet contemplation, charity and thanksgiving. Ramadan ends this year on Dec. 17 with the traditional Eid al-Fitr, or the Festival of Breaking the Fast, the second highest holy day for Muslims each year.

Ramadan is similar to the Catholic season of Lent, says Sells at Haverford College. “But it’s immeasurably more powerful socially. It has an extraordinary way of giving a sense of community through family and the general society.”

It’s that deep sense of an extended Muslim community, felt so acutely during Ramadan, that may stir passions this year. “There is a genuine sense that people in the Muslim world want their brothers and sisters in Afghanistan to be able to celebrate the holy month,” says As’ad Abukhalil, associate professor of political science at Cal State Stanislaus, and author of the upcoming book “Bin Laden and the Taliban.”

He notes, “Muslim sentiment is turning overwhelmingly against the war, and governments are getting scared. They’re worried about crowds that will gather and exchange information during Ramadan.”

Adding to Ramadan troubles for the regimes is the fact that during the holy month, governments have traditionally loosened their grip on the population, however briefly, by allowing more public assemblies and often releasing some prisoners as a sign of good will.

But this year governments will likely have to do the opposite, curbing large public gatherings for fear they might grow into unruly antiwar demonstrations. And since the regimes are, in theory, supporting America’s war on terrorism, the demonstrations could become anti-government rallies.

“Governments are in a bind,” says Abukhalil. For their own protection, “they need to oppress and repress, but they can’t go as far as they’d like during Ramadan. They’ll need to show some restraint.”

Also, mosques, sure to be crowded throughout Ramadan with faithful witnessing oral readings of the entire Quran, serve as the lone meeting location throughout the Arab world that governments cannot control.

“In Muslim countries, the mosque is the one place no dictator can forbid you from going. They can forbid public assembly. But for one month people are gathering in groups and socializing and talking, and no leader can prohibit that,” says Charles Kimball, chairman of the Religion Department at Wake Forest University.

That’s not to say that Ramadan represents a fuse that will automatically ignite the region. “My gut tells me it will matter, but it won’t radically change things,” says Schwedler.

“If the bombing operation continues during Ramadan I wouldn’t expect a wave of revolution in the Islamic world,” notes Toensing at the Middle East Report. “But the level of protest would rise, as would government repression of those protesters. And government rhetoric against the campaign would become sharper in tone.”

British Prime Minster Tony Blair received a preview of that sharper tone last Wednesday. Traveling to Damascus to visit Syrian President Bashar Assad, Blair stood beside Assad at a joint appearance as the Middle East president telegraphed his impatience with the campaign, telling reporters, “We cannot accept what we see on the screen every day; hundreds of innocent [Afghan] civilians dying.”

It’s a Muslim theme that may grow louder as Nov. 17 quickly approaches.

“That image was shown nonstop,” recalls Chris Toensing, editor of the Middle East Report, who was living in Egypt at the time. “The damage was done as far as public opinion.”

The image has been quickly forgotten by the West, but lingers on with many Muslims and Arabs. Is it any wonder then that so much distrust has built up over the last decade between the two cultures? The photograph of the sacrilegious bomb offers a shorthand explanation of why the American-led war on terrorism is being viewed so skeptically by many Arabs — and why Arab rulers, even if they despise Osama bin Laden, cannot embrace the cause too openly.

American allies such as Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Russia have all rushed forward to support the military strikes taking place in Afghanistan, but crucial leaders from the Arab world have remained conspicuously quiet. Regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Syria, among others, are all anxious for their own political reasons to snuff out bin Laden’s terrorist network, as well as to cozy up to Washington. But they must first test the waters of public opinion. And the gap between the politics of the streets and the politics of government in the Middle East is often vast.

“We don’t think much about Arab public opinion,” notes Ali Abunimah, vice president of the Arab-American Action Network. That’s because, he says, the region is dominated by authoritarian and totalitarian rulers who have no interest in allowing polls to take public snapshots of the populous.

With no true democracies among the Arab nations, public opinion cannot directly change state policy. Governments, however, ignore the will of the people at their own risk. “The regimes are autocratic, but that doesn’t mean they’re stable,” notes Abunimah. “They need to pay very close attention to public opinion.”

If Arab or Muslim opinion turns sharply against the war effort, (or “this so-called war” as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld labeled it Sunday), governments may have no choice but to pull back or soften their support.

“That’s the real joker in the deck,” says Toensing. “How far will governments in the region be willing to stick their necks out for the United States?”

Similar concerns were raised 10 years ago during the Gulf War. Skeptics suggested an Islamic backlash at home could mushroom and threaten the stability of moderate Arab regimes that chose to cooperate with America. Instead, the coalition held together and the war itself proved to be a brief one.

But events since Operation Desert Storm have only hardened Arab distrust of the United States. Among the growing list of grievances, Toensing points to continued sanctions against the people of Iraq. Many Muslims, he says, blame widespread Iraqi malnutrition on the sanctions. The 1998 missile attacks on a Sudan pharmaceutical factory ordered by President Clinton further inflamed passions — many Muslims (and many non-Muslims) say there’s little proof to support the claim that the factory was used by bin Laden for creating chemical weapons.

Aside from the “Happy Ramadan” photo from Operation Desert Fox, the continuous U.S. and British patrolling of the No Fly Zone in northern and southern Iraq is another irritant. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein claims more than 1,000 people have been killed by the strikes. The U.S. and Britain dispute those numbers, but the charge carries resonance with many Muslims.

Combined with what many consider to be America’s broken promise from the Gulf War to pressure Israel to negotiate a peace settlement, the accumulation of incidents means “there is a lot more cynicism this time around,” says Abunimah. “They’re asking, ‘Do you really mean it?’”

Toensing agrees: “The level of trust [among the local population] towards the United States is virtually nil. And the level of trust towards their own governments isn’t much higher.”

That distrust will likely increase if civilian casualties mount from the missile strikes.

“I have no idea how much collateral damage the coalition could withstand, but there is probably pressure being exerted by Arab nations on the United States to limit the bombing to the furthest extent possible,” says Toensing. “Fear of casualties will definitely limit the United States’ military options.” And if the United States broadens the attacks to include terrorist targets in other Arab nations, “it loses all of its Muslim allies,” warns John Voll, professor of Islamic history at Georgetown University.

Meanwhile, the Powell Doctrine, named after Secretary of State Colin Powell, which states American military is used only when its full power can be unleashed, has also been shelved. That’s because unlimited bombing would virtually level the Afghan capitol of Kabul, incite further unrest among the masses in the region, and knock more allies out of the coalition.

With public opinion so important, protests throughout the Arab region in coming days will be watched carefully as a measure of public sentiment. But be warned, Middle East street theater is not always what it appears to be.

“Egypt actually would welcome some level of popular dissent to show its courage, its worth to the United States,” notes Vickie Langohr, assistant professor of political science at Holy Cross College.

She’s referring to the time-honored tradition among Arab regimes of using pictures of civil unrest at home to prove to the United States that the government’s hands are tied, and that Washington should be grateful for all that the regime is doing for them.

Notes Toensing, “Maximum cynicism is justified.”