Episcopalian Ramadan

One of the great joys of travel, if you’re a certain kind of person, is discovering how many places are still basically okay when you pull out a cigar and start to smoke it. I don’t mean indoors, of course — I’m not a savage — but it’s a real joy to ask a waiter at an outdoor cafe in Tangier, as I did a year or so ago, if it’s okay to smoke.

“Smoking, c’est permis?” I asked. I have no idea if that’s how you’re supposed to say it, but I was instantly understood. The waiter shrugged as if to say, oui monsieur.

“Même les cigares?” I clarified. (And if you speak French better than I do, which is no big accomplishment, and there’s a better way to put it, I’m not interested. I get by just fine cobbling together strings of nous connected by the simplest verb tense I can recall.)

The waiter shrugged again, as if to say, Yes of course please stop asking idiotic questions.

So I sat at a popular and storied outdoor cafe and drank mint tea — it’s hard to find a real drink on the first night of Ramadan — and watched the people and noticed them not noticing me, or the plume of cigar smoke rising above my head. I puffed away without hearing dramatic, over-the-top coughing in my direction or shout-whispered conversations about that jerk over there. Morocco, it turns out, is a delightfully civilized place.

What I saw was the old town of Tangier slowly come to life after the first full day of fasting. Observant Muslims — and sometimes just those who want to get-along-and-go-along — fast each day during the month of Ramadan, which this year runs from March 10th to April 9th, although in Morocco it began officially on March 12th, which no one could explain to me in a satisfactory or consistent way. Morocco just does things the Morocco way, I guess.

The first day is the hardest, I was told. And you could see that pretty clearly in the late afternoon, as I watched the same neighbors who had greeted each other (and me) with happy smiles and hearty handclasps succumb to hunger-related irritability and snappish tempers. Two guys got into one of those what did you say to me? No, WHAT did you say to ME? arguments that might have ended up in a shoving and grappling match had their friends not intervened. The whole neighborhood was, as they say, hangry, which the Oxford English Dictionary describes as being “bad-tempered or irritable as a result of hunger.”

A few hours later, after a meal and some water — the truly observant abstain from water, too — the street was calm and quiet, and the former combatants were convivial and belly-full. Someone was playing a guitar, someone was leaning against a centuries-old wall gossiping with a neighbor, and I’m pretty sure two of the crankiest young men were squinched close together at a nearby table, watching a soccer match on an iPhone.

I watched it all, wreathed in blue smoke, and did what travelers have done for centuries. I smiled condescendingly at the locals, chuckled at their odd ways, and refused to see any connection between the behavior of the citizens of the casbah in Tangier on the first day of Ramadan and me, even though I have given up cigar smoking for Episcopal Ramadan, otherwise known as Lent, and it’s made me really crabby and a giant pain in the ass to everyone around me, especially around 4PM when I usually light one up.

Attentive readers will no doubt have noticed the issue here. So, for the record, yes I gave up cigars for Lent and yes, here I was smoking a cigar in Tangier. The only excuse I can offer is that the cigar I was smoking is technically illegal in the United States, and that’s where I made my Lenten commitment, so if you think about it, what I promised to give up for Lent were the cigars that were available to me at Close of Business on Ash Wednesday, when Lenten contracts are inked by the parties involved. That’s a pathetic attempt, I admit, to weasel out of a pretty minor commitment. But what’s important is that no one knew, as I reduced a fine Cuban cigar to a pillar of ash, that I was currently violating an oath I made to God. Which is not the case when it comes to Ramadan. In Tangier, in Ramadan when you eat during the day, everyone notices. And if you’re somehow cheerful and easygoing in the afternoon, the whole neighborhood is suspicious.

Episcopal Ramadan is a lot sneakier and a lot easier to wiggle out of. Which is why I won’t be converting anytime soon, even though cigar smoking on the terrace is a real temptation.