The Sin Room

Ramadan started last Wednesday. As if this place weren't strange enough already...

During Ramadan, observant Muslims fast. No food or drink from sunup to sundown. (They now use technology to calculate the actual timing but up to just a few years ago, the timing of the start and end of fasting was based on whether a black thread and a white thread held up to the sky could be distinguished from each other.) Smoking isn't allowed during the day either. That's of course not mentioned in the Quran, but hey, we shouldn't quibble if Islam wants to make some things up as it goes.

During Ramadan in Aramco, Muslims work from 7am to 1pm. They roll in late and drift out early. By noon, most are at home sleeping until sundown when the feasting begins. They eat and party and socialize most of the night. I've been told that even the men that don't usually wear thobes end up wearing them by the end of Ramadan because they gain so much weight. Yeah, in urban areas, that whole fasting thing has largely become an excuse for excessive consumption.

I mention "in Aramco" because outside of Aramco, most Saudis don't go to work at all. For an entire month. Most stores don't bother opening unless they have non-Saudi staff (doesn't matter if those non-Saudis are Muslim or not, their Saudi bosses may require them to work). Some stores, particularly restaurants, are open only at night, usually from 9pm to 1am or so.

The commissary is still open and some of the big grocery stores in town that cater to expats are open. But all of the coffee and snack kiosks that litter Aramco offices are shut down, refrigerated cases unplugged and dark, counters bare.

We non-Muslims are not allowed to eat or drink in public during Ramadan. In Saudi Arabia, we can in fact be put in jail immediately if we eat or drink in public during the day. This includes drinking water in your car, chewing gum, etc. We can buy food at the stores but we aren't supposed to eat it.

In order to deal with this, Aramco allows "Ramadan rooms", euphemistically called "sin rooms", to be set up in each area. Our coffee and tea supplies are moved from the common areas to the sin rooms. The sin rooms are usually an unoccupied office (perhaps an office of someone out on repat) or a storeroom. The doors must remain shut at all times. We are supposed to only eat and drink in those rooms.

Our sin room notice. Tess didn't send out the normal group email but had to manually select all of the non-Saudi employees (by definition, all Saudis are Muslims).

The end result is that expats spend most of the morning in the sin room chatting and gossiping and get enormous amounts of work done after 1pm. People bring in baked goods (I brought brownies this morning). The westernized Saudi managers join us (and, gasp, drink coffee right along with us) but only if there are no mutawas lurking around to tell on them. The joke is that expats look forward to Ramadan because it gives us a chance to catch up on a year's worth of news from our coworkers.

Most of us eat furtively in our offices, sneaking bottles of water from the sin room and bags of food from home. A lot of people sneak their coffee back to their offices, carefully shutting their office doors behind them so nobody can walk in unannounced. Mutawas are everywhere.

I've heard stories from old hands about westernized Saudis running for the sin room with mutawas hot on their tail. In the old days when smoking was allowed in offices, people would have to stuff towels, jackets, even maps under the door to prevent the smoke from leaking out into the hall.

There is even the story of the young mutawa who discovered that all of the VPs regularly go up on the roof of the Tower building to smoke and drink coffee. This young man was incensed at their disobedience so one day he locked the door of the stairwell when they were all up there. He never should have bragged about it. That guy is probably still a grade code 10.

Ramadan. Just another unique experience here in the Magic Kingdom.

Dates are traditionally eaten at sundown to break the fast. I'll close this post with a really nice recipe for yummy date treats.