By Abdul Basith MA, TwoCircles.net,
Malappuram: Earlier each middle class home in the region would organise an Iftar party, whereby they would invite all their neighbours whether they are poor or rich. The hosts took care to invite practicing Muslims, poor and needy, women and kids in the neighbourhood irrespective of their social status and taking into consideration their ‘deen’ and ‘taqwa’, in the sheer hope of Almighty’s reward.
Earlier the ladies from the neighbourhood would start making Iftar dishes from the very early morning. Each woman would take up the task of making a particular dish in which they are specifically good at. The others would help her in that and those Iftar dishes thus made had the sweetness of innocent love and the guests right in their heart felt the warmth of real life relations. Such intimacies, comradeship, friendships among the host and the guests were an ideal social nature of Iftar parties in Malabar. There were no guest and hosts as such, because the guests too were part of hosting the party.
All such comradeship and intimacies between the women in the neighbourhood have been lost now because of the latest trend of giving Iftar party contracts to catering services which would deliver Iftar dishes to the household close to Maghrib and even serve it to the guests whereby the hosts and guests will be entitled to the task of socialising in between for name sake.
The families not dependant on the catering companies too don’t want the neighbourhood women in their home early in the day making these dishes because most native and foreign Iftar dishes are now available at Iftar stalls of Bakeries. The poor women in the neighbourhood would only be entitled for cleaning duties and will get confined to the kitchen or backyards of the house. She is not a guest anymore! She will have to clean the vessels, table and floor. She is just an onlooker of the party from the backyards of the house and will have to satisfy her hunger with whatever is left over.
The nuclear families find it ideal to even arrange the Iftar party at a nearby restaurant providing Iftar buffet so as to keep their house tidy and because they find it a hindrance to their family’s privacy.
So now with catering companies to help out, the middle class households have turned rather too diplomatic. They are not dependant on the neighbourhood women to prepare Iftar dishes. So now these Iftar parties have the unique feature of discarding the poor and inviting the rich. Now it is the wealth and influences that matter and not the spirit and divinity of Ramadan within. Iftar parties are meant to ensure business relations, political influences and even marriage proposals. Unlike the earlier Iftar meets food gets wasted in vast amounts because more than fulfilling the necessities of the stomach such Iftar meets fulfil the needs of pride and reputation.
The guests invited for these Iftar meets don’t even know the spirit of Ramzan or the nobleness in keeping fast. A diplomatic Iftar invitee earlier even raised a question like “can’t you please keep the Iftar party by around 3 PM so that later by around 7 PM I could attend the drink party at Police club!”
We have seen greats like Morarji Desai, who earlier when he was a cabinet minister was not ready to attend the Iftar party organised by Sanjeev Neelam Reddy [before he was the President] as he felt, “How can I attend an Iftar party when I haven’t kept the fast”. Nobody keeps such moralities now.
Politics and secularism through Iftar parties
Ramadan has been a month to revive political relations as well. Mulayam Singh who cut the Congress to size in the UP elections meeting Sonia Gandhi on a normal day will be a hot topic in the media and there will be whole lot of speculations on what they would have discussed, and how it would affect the Indian politics. So attending Iftar parties for settling the top political issues has been a far safer way for these politicians. Thus Iftar meets were fortunate enough to host the top political discussions and decisions, which overturned the very nature of Indian politics.
The other surprising trend in Kerala is that the Muslim political party – IUML, AP Abubacker Musalyar’s Sunni faction, Samastha Sunni faction, both Salafi factions [KNM and Madavoor] would all arrange Iftar parties for religious and political leaders. One thing they do in common is that they would invite an RSS/BJP leader to the Iftar party but take care to keep away Jamaat Islami [JIH] and Popular Front [PFI] leaders by alleging religious fundamentalism and terrorism over them.
Next time when JIH held an Iftar party they invited RSS/BJP leaders but not PFI leaders. Iftar parties have been thus stages for such secular pretensions of a few Muslim political and religious factions in Kerala. They don’t have enough faith in their own secular values and are thus forced to compromise with the religious fundamentalism and extremism put forward by RSS/BJP but try to build a secular image by keeping away “religious fundamentalists and terrorists” within the Muslim community.