Even the most devout Muslim can eat like a pig once the sun goes down, as well as do all the other things. This isn’t really fasting in the sense the rest of us understand.
It’s a bit like intermittent fasting, aka “The 6/8-hour diet”. I was invited to one of these meals in Afghanistan. The food was great, other than the bread, which was stale. The only thing I liked about Ramadan in Kabul was that the air quality improved dramatically when the wood-burning naan stoves weren’t used early on the morning.
Back in 2014, I sat and observed this in early summer in a classroom environment. Muslim members of the class were getting up around 4AM, guzzling down as much water as possible, eating a fair amount of food, and smoking as much as possible until the sun rose (roughly 5:15 AM).
In the class, by 11 AM, they were stressed out....starting to get dehydrated, and missing their cigarette breaks.
By 1 PM, when the class ended....they were in bad shape. The problem is...they still had another eight-plus hours to go.
In a business environment, I can’t see hiring them because of the dehydration issues. The stress caused by lack of smoking by mid-afternoon is another issue.
Correct. When I lived in the gulf, most actually got fat during Ramadan!
A fake fast for a fake faith.
In the early days of my Air Force career (1963) I was in tech school at Keesler AFB, MS. We had an Afghan exchange officer in our class (Afghanistan was an ally and a kingdom at that time). Nicest guy in the world but a very, very strict moslem. By the time we finished with him he was as good a drinker as the rest of us and a connoisseur of fine foods, tobacco, and women. So there is hope.