Social science studies on Ramadan

"Understanding the meaning of a great social ritual whole requires discovering how the beliefs and values that a society epitomizes are put to work in its daily life. This is especially true for Islam, whose central revelation is a Law believed to be necessary and sufficient for the proper conduct of human affairs. Anthropologists have very little to contribute to research on the 'great tradition' of Islam, but they have a great deal to contribute to an understanding of how this tradition is lived in the daily affairs of contemporary Muslim communities."

These words are from the concluding sentences of an anthropological study on Ramadan by L. A. Fallers and Margaret Fallers, an anthropologist couple who came to Turkey from the University of Chicago in the late 1960s. When the Chicago couple came to Turkey and chose as their subject of study the Ramadan rituals in Turkey and their meanings within Turkish society, they were no doubt received as rather odd by their sociologist and anthropologist colleagues in Turkey. The last thing anyone doing sociology in Turkey in those years could look at would be religion, and what is more, taking an interest in the rituals of Ramadan could be wasting time on an extremely unimportant subject. Moreover, since in those years people were generally identified with the subjects they were interested in, taking an interest in Ramadan directly meant being written down as a reactionary (irtica). Yet for sociologists in particular, religion was in any case a set of empty beliefs about to depart this world any moment now.

True, Durkheim (The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life), who did not believe in religion, and even believed that religion was ultimately a superstition fabricated by the human mind with a certain logic, but who thought it had an important and indispensable function in society, had been translated (by Hüseyin Cahid) and read back in the 1910s, but in those years that translation had been buried in history in Ottoman letters. Those who could read did so in French or English, but even there religion did not attract much interest. In an academy where those interested in Russian language and literature were considered communists and those who studied the Arabic language reactionaries, studying religion was quite risky as well. A very valuable sociologist recounted that when he wanted to learn Arabic in that period, a friend warned him that it would be misunderstood.

In such a period, the anthropologist couple who came to Turkey found the relations in Turkey between religion and economy, education, society, mentality and politics quite interesting and attended to them. That Turkey's structure of religion and mentality was found so interesting by foreigners must have caused considerable astonishment among their young colleagues in Turkey who befriended them.

Yet for the Fallers couple, an anthropology or a sociology that overlooked the rituals of Ramadan in particular would be seriously deficient. In their view, the Ramadan rituals contained all the elements of a quite powerful institutional structure shaping the worlds of mind and meaning in Turkish society.

After the extremely rigid secularizing policies that had been experienced, the Ramadan rituals' being so influential, so powerfully, in the mental and lived world of the whole townspeople should have been, for a sociologist and anthropologist, one of the entrance gates to understanding a society.

The Fallers couple spent a six-month period, which included the month of Ramadan of 1969, in an Aegean town. That year the month of Ramadan fell at the end of November and in December, that is, in precisely the month before the Christian Christmas. This coincidence inevitably led the Fallers couple to make a comparison of the processes by which Ramadan and Advent are perceived and lived and form a culture in their own societies. Advent, the name of the period covering the four Sundays or weeks before Christmas, means in Latin things like "coming, arrival." What is awaited here is the coming of Jesus Christ into the world. At the end of this four-week Advent period, Christians have prepared for Christmas.

While making one-to-one comparisons on the basis of the month of Ramadan, which by the nature of lunar months travels around the whole year, having fallen that year in the same period, the Fallers couple say that they were aware that this on the one hand provides an occasion for different cultures to understand one another but on the other hand may be misleading.

For "Anthropologists, too, perceive the world through the categories of their own culture. Of course, their training, an important aspect of which consists in making explicit the implicit cultural categories, gives them some freedom from being bound to a particular culture, the ability to discipline and manipulate the categories through which they perceive other societies, but it is certainly a mistake to think that this process can be complete, especially in the study of religion and ideology. Whatever their personal commitments, most Western social anthropologists have ideas about religion that are, in a sense, conditioned by a cultural environment that is Christian or Jewish (or both)."

This warning is valid for all social scientists studying another culture, but still, making these comparisons is not entirely unnecessary or useless.

While comparing Ramadan with Advent, the Fallers couple also recount that they constantly heard, especially from the Muslims with whom they had a chance to converse, about the encounter between the matter of the corrupted Gospels and the Qur'an not a letter of which has changed. How Christians can believe at once in 4 Gospels that are corrupted and therefore fabricated is always seen as an incomprehensible matter by all Muslims.

"Man is likened to man, and book to book. That a more fruitful comparison could be made between man and book has rarely been accepted." Indeed, according to Christians, what corresponds to the Qur'an is not the Gospel but the person of Jesus himself. The Gospels are records kept by respected authors about his life and words, who may well be mistaken. In fact, on this occasion we can understand that what the Qur'an calls "corruption" also needs to be corrected and given a more accurate explanation.

The Fallers couple's 1969 study under the title "Notes on an Advent Ramadan" is the experience of an interesting Christian social scientist encountering Islam. But it is also, as far as I know, the first social science study conducted on Ramadan.

In Turkey, perhaps studies in the sociology of religion were being done in that period, if only a few, and mostly within the faculties of theology, as theoretical studies rather than sociological studies. But there were no studies focusing on Ramadan, on its power to build patterns of mentality and its dimensions as habitus, on its social functions and consequences. There still are not enough.