Some quotes:
Here in Dubai, the region's supermall, commercialism has taken on a life of its own as almost everything has been dressed in the cloak of Ramadan, from consumer goods to cars. Malls are open till the early morning, and the nights rock away at dinner parties in desert tents.Is it inevitable that major religious seasons become secularized/commercialized - whatever the religion? The dates of many Christian holiday were chosen with the intention of displacing pagan celebrations on those dates. Now, without anyone's concious intention secular culture is overlaying religious seasons like the pre-Christmas season of Advent of the Christian faith, and Ramadan of the Muslim faith. These religious seasons create the focal points which seed their own displacement.
. . .
Sheik Ahmed Abdelaziz Haddad, the grand mufti of the Islamic Affairs Department in Dubai, puts it even more succinctly. "The problem isn't that people are trading and doing business," he said. "It's that people have taken this month to be a month of shopping."
. . .
A shopping mall here even features a Ramadan display with an uncanny resemblance to a Nativity scene, complete with moving camels, a village elder reading stories and a desert scene.
. . .
For advertisers Ramadan is like a 30-day Super Bowl weekend, when TV channels broadcast their best programming and competitors jostle for market share. Some brands spend as much as half of their advertising budget in this month alone.
UPDATE: More evidence that consumption goes up during Ramadan rather than down.
JBC: http://emirateseconomist.blogspot.com
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3 comments:
Mechanical camels in Ibn Battuta mall will be the overriding image for me of Ramadan 2005.
[Oo - the image verifcation is "labni" - that's nearly Arabic!!]
The creation of a commercial Christmas happened in the United States in the 1820s, at a time when the U.S. was just emerging as a commercial power. (For evidence, see Stephen Nissenbaum, _The Battle for Christmas_, Vintage, 1997). Does this era in the UAE offer a parallel to that? Of course, the rest of the Arab world has been using Ramadan for decades as a commercial opportunity, but does the commercial scene in Dubai take it, as they do everything else, to a higher level?
My mind boggled on my first visit to the City Centre Mall in January 2002. It was all decked out for Valentines Day. As in St. Valentine. The level of commercial frenzy over the event, by buyers and sellers, exceeds what I've ever seen in the US.
The authorities frown upon it very seriously, but Valentines Day is a big event in Saudi Arabia where your special someone expects you to remember them on Valentines Day by dropping a pile of cash on a nonnecessity like flowers or diamonds. Personally, I favor consumer durables, but not everyone in my life agrees.
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