Moroccan Alcohol Sales Plummet as Ramadan Approaches

"People don’t drink during the forty days before Ramadan. That’s how it is every year. I’ll close the bar on Saturday when I’ve sold the stock," confides El Haj, as his customers call him, to TelQuel. His bar, La Cigale, is not crowded due to the upcoming month of Ramadan. It is not the only business affected by the "quarantine" crisis. Restaurants, hotels, brewers or simple guerraba are facing the same difficulties. "Sales drop by 35%, even 40%, from the start of the quarantine," says a Brasseries du Maroc manager.

What could justify this habit of Moroccans to stop consuming alcohol forty days before Ramadan? "It’s in the religion. Welcoming the month of Ramadan by drinking is haram," explains Yassine, in his thirties, a manager in a telecommunications company. "There are neither 40 nor 15 days. Haram or halal are not defined in number of days. It’s cultural, like many things. We try to stick cultural beliefs to religion," says Ahmed El Khamlichi, director of Dar Al Hadith Al Hassaniya.

"It has nothing to do with Islam, for the simple reason that there is no text in the Quran or authenticated hadiths," adds Mohamed Rafiki, better known as Abou Hafs. According to the former Salafist sheikh, "this cultural invention" would be explained by a religious text where there is no mention of fasting. "In the 1960s and 1970s, people could stop drinking as Ramadan approached by devoting themselves to prayer. But the notion of forty days did not exist," says El Khamlichi.