Black Swan Ramadan
Can a permanent religious ritual be meaningfully integrated into the everyday life of a polycultural, multimoral, and also secular democratic society?
The world of work is full of advice on how Ramadan can be more or less skillfully integrated into the daily routine of companies. My personal experiences with the Islamic month of fasting are limited, but as we all know anecdotes also have the potential to falsify existing attitudes.
So I'll start with a little field report:
Soon after I sold most of the shares in my company (Super-Fi) in 2013 and we in our small local admin team in Vienna were no longer able to cope with the accounting requirements of the buyer - the international media company Vice - we looked for a CFO.
The number of candidates for this position was quickly reduced to the three people we actually wanted to talk to. Among them was a man who had for this purpose come to our office on a hot day in early summer. Right at the start of the appointment, he seemed a little tired and not entirely focused - not surprising given the temperature. Nevertheless, he declined the offer of coffee and water. It was Ramadan.
He would have been halfway suitable for the job despite his condition, but we later gave preference to a much better qualified applicant.
I would have hired the fasting person, if only for lack of alternatives. What am I supposed to do with a chief accountant who can't do his job properly for a month of the year because he is unfocused and tired? But maybe I'm doing him an injustice because he wasn't feeling well that day? I wouldn't want to draw the inductive conclusion that it's due to Ramadan based on a single data point, especially as I wouldn't have noticed this self-induced reduction in cognitive performance in other Muslim colleagues.
Black Swan
I don't know how many Muslims are only able to work to a limited extent during Ramadan. However, there are indications that at least some are unable to perform adequately due to strict observance of their rituals. This is clearly evident in sport: In some football leagues, players are suspended from the squad during the fasting month because they do not drink during the day, and lately matches are also interrupted shortly after the astronomical sunset so that footballers can drink in a manner pleasing to a god. There is nothing wrong with that - sports associations set their own rules and the public can decide whether they accept them. Conversely, however, the associations and clubs would also have to accept it if the fans do not want to tolerate these interruptions as supernatural special exceptions.
Football is a physically demanding sport. Perhaps fasting does not restrict the pursuit of other professions at all, or perhaps the applicant was simply the one black swan that is enough to falsify the hypothesis that Ramadan is not an obstacle in the world of work?
But that type of general consideration is not particularly relevant anyway, because only the individual case counts. It is the voluntary decision of every adult to subordinate their fitness for work to a religion (or intermittent fasting), even if this undermines their own career. The situation is different for children who fast during Ramadan and often experience school classes unfocused and dehydrated. A condition that is not only harmful to health, but which teachers complain about, but which is obviously not being counteracted in the public debate or by the authorities. Perhaps I will go into this in more detail elsewhere.
And what about religious freedom?
A qualitative classification of the health, social and professional effects of magical fasting does not per se conflict with the exercise of religious freedom. Not wanting to employ a person because their religiously motivated behavior does not comply with the requirements of the workplace is not directed against a specific religion or even against religion in general.
Going back to my example: Of course, the prospective CFO's beliefs in themselves would not have been a problem for the collaboration. I've hired hundreds of people in my life - mainly in my own companies - and I've never been interested in their personal beliefs. There was certainly a lot that I didn't agree with and a lot I noticed without asking and nevertheless tolerated - including astrology, Islam, Catholicism and communism. However, atheists and agnostics got an extra day's vacation with me and I have no idea whether this form of positive discrimination against my affirmative activism was legal or not. I didn't care then any more than I do now.
Laïcité
Living together in a polycultural, multimoral society is reality. I can easily accept this without reluctance because it makes life more exciting as long as the negotiation processes about the still undivided values remain within certain limits of rationality. These discussions are not much fun only with those who are morally stuck in the dead ends of the labyrinth of evidence-free thinking and place feelings above data. They cry out for help like "Free Palestine" because they can no longer find their way out of the maze into which they have wandered without an ethical and intellectual compass.
We can be as different as we want as long as we agree on an ethical foundation that we share, says Italian philosopher Cinzia Sciuto: "The more complex a society becomes, the harder and more unquestionable this core of values must become, otherwise there is a risk that belonging to the political community will fade under the centrifugal aspirations of identitarian demands, with the result that parallel societies emerge in which the rights of individuals lose their binding force." (p. 141 Sciuto, Cinzia. Die Fallen des Multikulturalismus. Laizität und Menschenrechte in einer vielfältigen Gesellschaft [The traps of multiculturalism: laïcité and human rights in a diverse society] Rotpunktverlag. Kindle Edition.) This core also includes laïcité (which is not the same as secularism) as a pre-political prerequisite for democracy. The consequence of this republican disposition is a state that does not categorize its citizens according to external characteristics, with only a few restrictions such as biological age. The state has as little interest in ethnic origin, sexual identity, skin color or sexual orientation as it does in the political, religious and ideological views of its members.
Implementing this simple idea of equal rights has no dramatic consequences. In addition to the abolition of discrimination and privileges with regard to the retirement age and general compulsory military service, the preferential treatment of religion as such and individual specific religious communities would also be abolished. I will not list them here because I can assume that my audience is familiar with them. But I will mention one for the sake of argument.
When religious street decorations are financed with taxpayers' money as Muslim advertising spaces during Ramadan as the city of Frankfurt did, the state's neutrality requirement is once again violated. Belief in magical fasting is a private matter, can be put into practice, can be tolerated in working life or not, but religious rituals must for the ideologically neutral state not become the basis for preferential treatment. The same applies to other religious communities and, by analogy, to Christian markings (cross, crucifix) in schools and official buildings.
Nota bene: It is a completely different matter if this advertising for Islam is paid for privately - especially if the state, provinces and municipalities otherwise administer the proper separation of republic and religion. There is enough room for religion in the public sphere, as there is for other traditional forms of expression. It should just not be sponsored by the general public.