Ramadan and Christmas Past

When I was a child, most newspapers had a Religion Section every Saturday, with articles by religious (i.e., Christian) leaders and the timings of Sunday services.

As Christmas approached, the articles in the Religion Section would invariably be about 'the reason for the season,' stern orations to eschew the crass commercialism that had, in degenerate modern times, begun to obscure the religious significance of Christmas.

Over the years, most newspapers dropped the Saturday religious supplements, and the religious leaders learned from King Canute that it is less than sage to sit at water's edge at ebb tide and order the sea to leave one dry, so they finally stopped their Philippics and trusted that, after over-indulging in crass commercialism, a fairly large number of nominal Christians would feel drawn to listen to Christmas hymns for one day out of the year.

In Islamic countries, however, I see the same diatribes from religious leaders ordering Muslims to remember that Ramadan is not about crass commercialism.

As of now, i.e., the fifteenth Islamic century, these Islamic religious leaders have somewhat more success than Christian leaders had in the West in the days of my youth, i.e., the sixteenth Christian century.

The crass commercialism still remains, especially in Dubai, but Muslims tend to turn a bit away from secular concerns toward more spiritual matters for the month.