Eid ul-Fitr, the Muslim Christmas?

Occasionally (perhaps a little misleadingly) abbreviated as “the Eid” and better known as the “Hari Raya” to Muslims in Southeast Asia, the three-day festival marking the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, is a time of, as much as it is possible in the Islamic world, gaudy commercialism.  With a four-day weekend, many jump on long-distance buses and reunite with their families in their hometowns and celebrate the end of fasting with a big family feast and many exchanges of gifts.

…Sounds uncannily like the situation for your typical Christmas and Chinese New Year traditions.  And besides Hari Raya’s emphasis on paying homage to ancestral graves and seek forgiveness, even the customs of the three-day festivities are quite similar in content to their Oriental and Western festive counterparts.  Big meals, gift exchanges, handing money to little ones, sacrificing everything else for temporary familial unity…the list goes on and on.

And maybe not surprisingly, in the modern context of global capitalism, the Eid’s economic significance is also coming to bear more and more resemblance to Chinese New Year and Christmas.  A visit to the large modern shopping malls dotted around Kuala Lumpur can easily prove the point.  Muslim families, many of them dressed in traditional Malay ethnic clothing, are popping up in droves after their religiously required visits to graves and relatives.

And interestingly (and to quite some extent, comically) enough, those dressed in traditional clothing are visiting your typical non-Muslim outlet selling everything from cheap Chinese electronics to Japanese fashion to high-end Swiss watches.  Gift-giving for Hari Raya seemed to have lost all Islamic requirements.  Non-Muslim wares are quickly and happily snapped up by Muslim families keen to impress their distant relatives and prove family unity through displays of materialism.

Of course, that is not to say the Islamic element of the Eid is completely lost here in this wealthy (in fact, the wealthiest non-oil producing) Islamic state.  Even foreign brands are displaying Islamic motifs on their storefronts and pasting large signs wishing Muslim shopping a happy Hari Raya.  Some malls even put up traditional Malay village dance performances indoors, much to the delight of the digital camera-touting Muslim and non-Muslim audience alike.

Yet, below the shallow physical signs of adherence to traditional values and customs, the rapid encroachment of global capitalist commercial interest in this traditional Muslim festival is pretty much obvious to everyone, including hard-line Muslims.  Some can say with certain optimism that this sight is the triumph of liberal internationalist values, in which everyone can partake in fulfilling one’s desires for higher standard of living through consumption of goods arriving from across the world via free trade.

But the sight also should draw a certain amount of worry.  Just like many argue for Christmas, Eid’s commercialization is quickly making the festivities a pure economic arrangement devoid of the original religious symbolism.  Just as many Christian fundamentalists will lament the situation of people looking forward to Christmas simply for the gifts and food, without noting the proper reason for celebrating it in the first place, many Muslim fundamentalists are angered by exactly the same for the Eid.

One needs to remember that despite the relative wealth and modernization of Malaysia, it is still a country where sharia police prowl the streets looking and punishing ordinary Muslims for “indent behavior,” alcohol consumption, and non-fasting during Ramadan.  So far they have been turning a blind eye to Muslims happily buying up foreign goods for their Hari Raya gifts…but if this consumerism continues unabated, who know? The rules can always change….