Of running and Ramadan

Anyone who knows me will not be surprised that my number one anxiety prior to leaving for Morocco was exercise, specifically running. Depriving myself of oxygen for an hour every day is what keeps me sane, but I had no idea how Moroccans would feel about a red-faced foreigner puffing up and down their streets. Several friends who had spent time in the country observed that reactions would vary from city to city, that cosmopolitan Rabat would be a more accepting environment than conservative Fes, where I would be safe but certainly a spectacle. So it was with some trepidation that I packed my running shoes into my carry-on suitcase -- right next to a set of yoga videos, my back-up plan should running prove intolerable.

We (the other fourteen grantees and I) arrived in Rabat, after flying into Casablanca, on Monday around noon, and, given that I'm a morning exerciser and that my body was laboring under the impression that it was five in the a.m. and that it was in the mid-eighties with 85% humidity, I decided to give myself a day off. The next morning, though, the moment had come to test the waters.

It was great. Sixty minutes, one catcall. The next morning, along a street overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, the same. No one even really looked at me twice, including groups of loitering young men.

But that was Rabat, right? Surely Fes would be a different story. We arrived here yesterday, after two full days of orientation and rubbing shoulders with U.S. embassy officers and local academics, and this morning I silenced my inner humidity wimp to strap on the "gold python"-schemed Asics that in a burst of online shopping gusto I had deemed an intelligent purchase. (I thought they'd be kitschy and funny; they're actually just ugly.)

Again, minimal heckling -- just a single, propositional "bonjour." In fact, I almost felt more uncomfortable passing the women here than the men. Unlike many women in Rabat, most Fesi females wear a headscarf in public and dress in long sleeves and long pants or skirts. I bought the running shorts I've been wearing specifically because they're longer than my normal ones, but even so, I had a sense of offending their modest sensibilities. Maybe I was imagining things.

At any rate, I am reserving full judgment on my bright-looking running future until the end of Ramadan in some ten days. Ramadan is the month of the Islamic, lunar-based calendar in which Muslims believe God to have revealed the Qur'an to Mohammed, and in recognition of its significance, they are supposed to fast during it every year, from daybreak to sundown. The degree to which Muslims observe this custom varies from country to country and locale to locale, I believe; in Morocco, it is very much ingrained into the social, as well as the religious, sphere, meaning that virtually everyone fasts. Even if you are not for some reason, you would never dream of eating or drinking in public. So, then, we have arrived toward the end of this time in which people are refraining during the daylight hours from the ingestion of any substance, whether that be food, water or cigarette smoke, as well as from sexual relations, and theoretically doing so with a spirit of general restraint and self-purification. Could such mindfulness explain the happy running circumstances I've encountered thus far? Probably not.

As a lecturer told us today, there is a hadith (a saying of the prophet Mohammed) that basically tells Muslims that if they are going to be grouchy and mean and maybe sinful during Ramadan -- and I would put cat-calling into some kind of related category -- then they'd be better off not fasting at all. However, according the our lecturer, it is fairly typically for people to pay little heed to this injunction.

Perhaps a better theory than respectfulness by Ramadan is that there are simply less people out on the streets in the morning right now. In order to cope with the daytime deprivation of food and liquid, what people do is eat multiple times during the night. First there is the iftar, or breaking of the fast, at sundown, which is around six-thirty or seven these days. (Imagine the years when Ramadan falls during the long, hot days of summer... death.) We have been able to attend several of these since we arrived; they are a light affair, beginning with dates and followed up with a salty soup called harira and various sweet breads and other sugary concoctions. After the iftar, families might watch some TV (apparently the Moroccan budget is such that the only time of the year in which it's financially possible to produce local sitcoms is Ramadan), attend the evening prayer and either watch more TV or hang out in cafes with friends. At eleven or midnight, they eat dinner, then maybe catch a little shut-eye before another meal and more prayers at daybreak (even earlier than sunrise -- around four in the morning). It's no surprise, then, that with so little nighttime snoozing, most people sleep late and many shops observe special Ramadan hours, from nine to three or four. Hence fewer people out and about.

Hence less heckling of the sweaty American? We'll have to wait and see.