Ramadan Jonesin' at KFC

Ramadan is the month-long observance of Islam's holy month. It entails, among other requirements, absolute abstention from food, sex, and impure thoughts during daylight hours (children, the elderly, pregnant and menstruating women and long-distance travelers are generally excused). All bets aren't quite off when the sun goes down, but a modest degree of revelry is expected at maghrib, or sunset, following what, by then, would be the day's fourth prayer. Have a seat: It's time for Iftar, dusk's fast-breaking meal (breakfast, in other worlds).

Although Ramadan this year ended on Oct. 12, this item from the Star, a Jordanian newspaper, is worth a look for its calorifically rich stereotype-busting content:

Over a decade ago, it may have seemed strange to see a traditionally family-centered, home-oriented meal of Iftar eaten in a Western, modern, fast food restaurant during the holy month of Ramadan. However, today, tradition has met modernity, as it is becoming increasingly common to witness waves of Jordanians rush into corporate fast food restaurants such as Burger King, Pizza Hut or KFC straight from work in order to break a long day fasting. The fact that so many Jordanians today are replacing mansaf and rice with hamburgers and fries goes to show that times are changing; at one time more than eyebrow would have been raised to score displeasure. In fact, for many, it is now considered just as normal to break fast with a date pie from McDonald’s as it is to sit with friends and family in the comfort of one’s home and gather around to bite into fresh dates purchased from the local market that day. This current reality raises the question: Is this trend a step away from tradition and a dismissal of home and family values, or is the nearest Subway simply a clean, tasty, and relatively inexpensive venue that just happens to be a different setting for the same values and traditions of Ramadan that would likewise be honored at home?

American fast-food chains have been cropping up all over the Arab and Muslim world since the early 1990s. As always, three things have made their success: location, location, location. Take the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Mecca, right next to the Mecca Hilton, three hundred feet from the holy mosque, the Mecca of Meccas during Ramadan (the mosque, that is, if not quite KFC). As Eric Schlosser noted in his delicious "Fast Food Nation" (Houghton Mifflin, 2001), that very restaurant "set new sales records for the chain, earning $200,000 in a single week during Ramadan" in 1994. (Maybe it wasn't U.S. troops garrisoned in Saudi Arabia that was getting under Osama's thinnish skin so much as the "Chicken Variety Buckets" ready for the faithfuls' diving right after those draining circuits around the mosque's Kaaba, even though KFC makes sure to have a line for women and another for men, when ordering).

McDonald's has been so successful in the Arab world that the company parceled off the Web portal for the region to an Arab world of sorts. Egypt had its first McDonald's in 1994. It has more than 50 now. Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan: they're all scarfing down those Big Macs. (In 2000, McDonald's in Saudi Arabia, combining the sacred and the profane as only American companies can, ran an advertising campaign during Ramadan that pledged to donate 26 cents from the price of each purchased burger to Palestinian children's hospitals. A similar promotion today would no doubt be interpreted by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as "providing material support to terrorists."

This is not quite a joke, and not even one inspired by the grim post-9/11 era. The prejudices were flying even in 2000. When Time magazine got hold of the story about the 26 cents--normally an occasion for recognition, celebration, listing among the "100 Greatest Acts of Corporate Responsibility--it slapped this tasteless, tendentious headline on it: "Official Sandwich of the Intifada?" There are, by the way, three McDonald's restaurants in Mecca, two of them with drive-through windows.