Word: ramadan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
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...