Ramadan is now more than halfway through and although I am not Muslim and therefore not fasting it still affects everyone who lives in Bahrain, no matter what religion they are. With no restaurants or cafés or even fast food joints open during the day, and not being allowed to eat and drink in public, it requires subtle planning if you are in need of lunch.
If you have the misfortune to work in an open plan office such as a call centre then you cannot eat or drink at your desk. In fact working in any environment where you are making telephone calls all day, must be very difficult for those fasting. Go on try and talk all day without water. Not only is it very difficult it also puts a lot of strain on your vocal chords. There are many other jobs for which fasting is an additional stress and this is reflected in the local laws which reduce the working hours for fasting Muslims, and employers have to factor in the reduced productivity in their annual budgets.
This is not so in the West. If you are working in a factory or a building site in the UK you will have a certain number of operations to perform each day or a certain number of bricks to lay. These targets will not be reduced because it is Ramadan, and as the UK is a secular country, there are no laws that can be called on to do so. Muslims in Western countries have to fast in an environment where they have to work as hard as any other day while all around them their colleagues are drinking and eating. And while Iftar in Bahrain will be at about 6.30pm tonight, in my hometown in Scotland the sun does not set until almost 10pm.
British Muslims have got it far harder, but you know what, they don’t see it that way. They do not have laws to protect them from temptation, they do not have laws to reduce their work and they have to fast for about 18 hours a day. But they do not complain, whinge or moan they just get on with it quietly and with such little fuss that most of the time their colleagues do not even notice.
I was speaking to a work colleague the other day who is based in London and she was telling me about fasting. She does not bother getting up to eat at 4am but at 6am, and makes the children breakfast before sending them to school. She works in our HR office from 9am to 5pm, and when she gets home has to make dinner. Iftar for her is about 9.30pm. She then has her one meal of the day and goes to bed. And when I asked her if it was hard she said “not really, it’s just something you have to do, you get used to it”.
Now that’s real dedication.