Pregnancy during Ramadan

First - happy birthday to my wonderful and amazing husband!  Second - there's been a bit of a gap between my last post and this one, mostly because we've been catching up from our whirlwind Midwest trip.  Not much exciting on our end, just trying to get organized around the apartment before the baby makes her grand entrance.  One thing of note since we've returned to Abu Dhabi is the start of Ramadan.  This is a pretty new experience for both of us, so I thought I would share what I've learned in the past few weeks about this religious month.

Ramadan is a holy month of fasting for Muslims.  This is not like fasting as Catholics know fasting - I grew up fasting on Ash Wednesdays and Good Fridays during Lent, which meant abstaining from land meat and eating about half as much as I would during a normal day.  Water is allowed. Ramadan fasting is no consumption of anything (no water, no gum, no mints) from sunrise to sundown in addition abstinence from any generally pleasurable indulgences (smoking, sex, alcohol) during that time.  Once the sun sets, the fast is typically broken with milk, dates, fruits and other light foods and after evening prayer, large celebratory feasts are served.

Living in a Muslim country during Ramadan is interesting.  It is actually prohibited to eat, drink, or smoke in public places, so non-fasting residents of Muslim countries must eat or drink either in the privacy of their homes or behind screened off areas of restaurants.  Work hours are shortened to allow the fasting population extra time for rest and prayer.  Shopping malls and restaurants shift their hours later as business will pick up significantly after sundown.  I also find it interesting that since Ramadan is based on the lunar calendar, the time of year that it occurs changes - every Gregorian year, Ramadan will be 10-12 days earlier than the year before.  For countries near the equator like Indonesia or Malaysia, this doesn't matter much since there are 12 hours of sunlight per day, every day, all year long.  Imagine fasting from sunrise to sundown in a country like...say Norway or in Alaska when Ramadan falls in June!  Iftar (the breaking of fast) and Suhoor (the last meal before fast) would almost be at the same time!  Alternately, imagine a Ramadan in Norway in December where the opposite holds true, and it is a very, very short fast.  Somehow, I don't think the Prophet Mohammed took latitude into consideration when writing down Allah's instructions.

I was curious about how pregnancy was treated among Muslims, and I have yet to find a consistent answer.  Among Catholics, it is pretty clear - pregnant women are exempt from fasting obligations. For Muslims, it's not so cut and dry as various Imams will offer different advice, depending on whether fasting is an impact to the health of the mother or health of the baby.  If the health of the mother is impacted by fasting, the pregnant woman may feed a poor person for each skipped fast. Recent medical studies show that fasting can cause several different issues for newborns, and in these cases, pregnant women are advised to skip fasting and make them up after Ramadan - and this is challenging in all the same ways that it is challenging to be a Muslim in a non-Muslim country during Ramadan.  For this reason, some pregnant Muslim women try to fast intermittently during Ramadan to minimize the number of "make-up" days they have after birth, particularly since fasting while breast feeding is an extra challenge in addition to lack of community support. This seems to contradict medical advice to avoid fasting, so I'm not sure how well this information is dispersed among the community.  In the end, it is a woman's choice, I supposed, how she wants to handle the situation, similarly how I occasionally (gasp) eat sushi. I am very intolerant of being hungry so the concept of being pregnant AND hungry sounds horrible to me.

For me personally, the only major impacts so far to my daily routine are that I have to keep closing my door every time I eat or drink, so it is is closed for 5-10 min every hour, and that a lot of the restaurants near my office that I frequent for lunch are closed.  I work in an office tower within a shopping mall, and some of the sit down options have carry-out available, while others have just closed for daytime food service. The food court has about half the restaurants open with a large walled off section for non-fasting people to eat.  The downside to the giant walled off area is that the smell of grease from fast food has less space to "disperse" so the smell sometimes makes me nauseous.  Fortunately, my favorite food venue Jamba Juice is still open for me to have a smoothie and salad in my office if I so choose!

Another minor impact is that the restaurants that ARE open and typically served alcohol no longer serve until after sundown.  This was actually a bit of a bummer for G's birthday yesterday because we prefer to eat an early dinner, around 6pm or 6:30pm.  The restaurant where we had birthday dinner for G was not serving alcohol until 7:30pm and we didn't want to stay long enough for him to have a margarita, so he had to settle for a margarita-less chimichanga.  #firstworldproblems

Other than that, we've been enjoying the lighter evening traffic (since everyone goes home early) and we plan to try to attend at least one Iftar before the month is over.  Suhoor at our apartment is served at 3am, so we will probably skip out on that one, but as I understand the community Iftars can be a lot of fun.  Hopefully, it will be a blog-worthy adventure!