The Sugar Holiday

Sunday marked the start of the Ramazan Bayrami (“Ramadan Holiday”), or Eid al-Fitr: a three-day celebration marking the end of Ramazan where Muslims the world over make up for a month of fasting and being nice by gorging themselves and being a little too festive.

Whether a Turk has fasted or not, a three-day national holiday is cause enough for celebration. Unless of course, the lunar calendar shifts the holiday forward that year and two of those three days come on a weekend in which case you curse the moon and go back to work.

After an Eid prayer at the mosque, the average Turk has a big breakfast, puts on their best clothes and gets in the family car for the customary traffic accident. Most people spend their Eid visiting relatives or going on vacation, both of which seem to require driving and ignorance of physics.

But Turkish Eid is more than just driving into other cars; when people do finally get to their relatives (the older the relative the better), children get a chance to wish them holiday greetings and the elderly get a chance to bribe their grandchildren with money or candy (hence why the holiday is also called “the Holiday of Sweets”).

In fact, children will visit neighbors, shopkeepers and anybody else that looks employed and offer their holiday greeting services in exchange for candy until the streets are filled with holiday cheer and tiny outstretched hands. Meanwhile, the adults are preparing big feasts for the family, giving to charity and shopping (even extremely un-Muslim IKEA released “A very Mubarak Eid” brochure). In a way, Eid is somewhere between the Muslim version of “Halloween,” the Muslim version of “Christmas,” and whatever Western holiday has a lot of car wrecks… possibly “Happy Hour.”

And if you are ever in Turkey during Eid and some children come up to wish you a happy Bayram, give them your money and candy as quickly as possible. Stalling on the side of the road is the surefire way to get their parents to drive into you.

The Ramazan Ads

Ramazan is one of the most important religious observances in Islam which is why, much like Christmas, advertisers have managed to milk every last drop of sentiment possible.

Turkish commercials are rarely risqué, usually showing young people goofing around or housewives accosted on the street about their detergent preferences, but the possibility the product might lead to sex is never entirely dismissed (why else would you need clean sheets?). Such is not the case with Ramazan ads, which instead follow a specific formula as far removed from sex as Santa Claus.

So… Christmas is about a fat man and his harem?

This formula is set in stone and must abide by at least two or more of the conventions listed below:

Family dinner

The most important part of the Ramazan fast is the part when you can eat again, and so all ads incorporate food, even if they are pitching flavored food-like substances.

Notice the most important part is not the food itself but how iftar dinners bring together families, coworkers and friends. The message here is, “People might come together for the feast, but they get along because of the product. Any other product leads to fighting and might give grandpa a heart attack.”

Bonus theme: If a table is being prepared at home, it is important to have the women do everything. This is part of a national policy to lower the standard for male domesticity to the point where Turkish women orgasm if they ever see a man setting a table.

Inter-generational love

Ramazan is a month of family togetherness, and the easiest way to relate that on film is by making young and old people interact. Ideally, a photogenic child should be doing something adorable enough to soften up a stern grandparent.

Having children and seniors enjoying each other’s company serves to reinforce the idea that your product is magic.

Mosques

You should put a mosque in the background (or at least a cardboard cutout), to remind viewers this is a Ramazan ad and not just someone accosting a housewife in her kitchen about her margarine preferences.

This ad is nearly thirty years old, proof that Ramazan advertising is a time-honored tradition that hasn’t changed since the ancient times or at least the 1970s.

Shared tradition

If one feasting family sells your product, then multiple families should sell even more. Spread these families out over various locations and you’re implying we are really all one big family united by shared belief and a commercial product.

Bonus theme: If your ad requires you to shoot in locations like Manhattan that don’t have picturesque mosques strewn around, you can substitute Middle Eastern melodies instead. In fact, most Ramazan commercials will feature gentle Middle Eastern music as an ad with techno or metal would most likely break your fast prematurely.

Being nice

Ramazan is about being nice: nice to family, nice to neighbors, nice to strangers. If your ad cannot attain a level of saccharine reserved for children’s educational programs and Hello Kitty products, it might be considered too edgy for Ramazan.

The baby spends the whole ad surprised over his father not honking, his brother helping the grandparents with groceries and just generally how nice everyone is. Towards the end he “wishes everyone behaved like they do this month,” which offers a tragic glimpse into the living hell he must witness during the other 11 months.

The more themes you combine, the more your product will sell. If you come up with an ad where adorable twin boys help an elderly man into a mosque amidst Middle-eastern music then ran home as their grandmother brought plates to the family dinner table, you could even sell sand in the desert and people would buy it.

And for those who might say that there is no room for commerce in religious affairs, they seem to forget Mohammed was a merchant long before he talked to God.

The Holy Month

“Ramadan is the month during which the Quran was revealed, providing guidance for the people, clear teachings, and the statute book. Those of you who witness this month shall fast therein.” – (Qur’an, 2:185)

Ramazan (Turkish for Ramadan) starts today, kicking off a month of fasting and religious sentiment where even white Turks remember they are Muslims.

Fasting during the month of Ramazan is a fundamental tenet of Islam where a person must abstain from food, beverages, cigarettes and sex from sunrise to sunset, all while reminding everyone they aren’t eating, drinking, smoking or having sex from sunrise to sunset. Typically, one wakes up before dawn for breakfast (sahur) then resumes their regular daily activities until a feast at sunset (iftar).

Fasting during Ramazan is compulsory in Islam, but in Turkey where religion is not obligatory, the month has developed into something that would both disappoint the devout in other Muslim countries while still remaining “exotic” enough to creep out Europeans.

Sin-postponement

In Turkey alcohol and sex are legal, even though the Qur’an places them somewhere around theft and Christianity as things to never do.

Just looking at this picture during Ramazan makes angels cry

Many Turks carry on with their sin-filled lives, though most try to be a bit more discreet and respectful as it is considered poor taste to have fun near someone being religious.

Regardless of whether they fast or not, most try to curb their vices during the month or at least get as many out of the way beforehand. It is not uncommon for someone to solicit a prostitute in preparation for a month without pornography or binge-drink to make up for a month of being nice to your family. Ramazan is all about sacrifice.

Ramazan Drummers

Dawn is really early (4.30am this Ramazan) and fasters have to wake up a couple hours earlier to eat their sahur breakfast. As roosters are notoriously inept at religious affairs, the Muslim world evolved the Ramazan drummer: males volunteering to wander the streets beating drums waking up faster and non-faster alike, then dropping by homes during the day asking for tips.

Surprisingly, grown men beating drums outside your window seemed redundant after the invention of the alarm clock and many districts have banned the practice and some concerned citizens have even began shooting them. Turkish Ramazan drumming is a tradition that might not stick around once every home has an alarm clock, or once we kill all the drummers.

Fast-breakers

Fasters are very concerned that something might accidentally invalidate their fasts and so the government maintains a comprehensive FAQ asking such questions as whether one can have “wet dreams,” bathe or use perfume while fasting, to which the state-theologians’ respond, “just don’t swallow it.”

Meanwhile, the media is wheeling out experts each year to provide some hard-hitting answers, like if its okay to end your fast at iftar with sex or alcohol or whether lipstick, nicotine patches or seeing girls in bikinis break your fast (yes, no and “only if you stare” respectively, links Turkish).

Mosque Lights

Unlike the drummers which can be seen in Muslim communities throughout the world, Mahya is a uniquely Turkish practice. For nearly 400 years, lights have been strung up between the minarets of mosques offering inspirational and uplifting messages in honor of Ramazan, like “Greetings oh Month of Ramazan,” “the Sultan of the Eleven months” and “Fast and be healthy.”

Because really, not fulfilling God’s orders might warrant His anger, but forgetting which month you are in just earns His derision.