New ways to answer old questions about Ramadan

Like many parents of teenagers, I delightedly welcome any occasion to connect with a generation I don’t always understand and that doesn’t always understand me. As a Muslim family in Australia, this inter-generational exchange is often characterized by questions from my children about our Islamic practices and how we talk about these with our friends who are not Muslim. One of the most questioned of these practices is Ramadan, the month in the Islamic calendar when Muslims abstain from consumption of food and drink during the day.

So, when my children began texting me a range of Ramadan-themed memes, I was elated to find something that we could relate to and laugh at together. Image 1 has always topped the list of our favorites.

There are many versions of this meme, and it owes its popularity to the fact that across generations, we answer this question every Ramadan, without fail. In fact, the first time I showed this meme to a work friend, he exclaimed, “Hey, I asked you that, too!” We both laughed (at him) and then, spent the next half hour going through other Ramadan memes, like those in Image 2 and Image 3.

And once more, I shared not just a laugh with someone, but an opening for genuine intercultural communication and sharing. In the numerous conversations these memes inspired, most expressed that they had no idea that there was a ‘world’ of Muslim memes that entertained and explained.

For me, these memes have played two important communication roles: intergenerational and intercultural. In the Australian context, second and third generation Muslims communicate with each other and outside of the Muslim community in English. Many of their linguistic expressions relate to sarcasm, irony and wordplays based on English. Their cultural references are TV shows like Friends and The Hunger Games and there is no shortage of memes based on dialogues from popular TV shows and movies. The creative efforts behind Muslim-based memes have been written about in numerous places such as here.

The humor not only provides a platform for internal communication for Muslims but also a means to connect to non-Muslims, with whom they share these linguistic expressions and cultural references. Both my Muslim and non-Muslim friends always get a kick out of the memes in Image 4 and Image 5. By the way, iftar is the meal eaten at sunset to break the day’s fast and traditionally begins with the consumption of dates.

Humor – specifically, humor in a language and mode that we all relate to – connects us and provides access to the practices of a community often questioned and misunderstood. A few years back, the ABC offered a Ramadan explainer using a series of memes and tweets. There are also innumerable social media feeds devoted to Muslim memes, such as this Facebook page or this Twitter feed.

The volume of meme production on these platforms is indicative of the time devoted to this means of communication. In a study of young American Muslim women who engage in meme-making, Ali (2020) showed how these memes allow their creators to negotiate aspects of their citizenship in USA. For a community that is often subject to stereotyping, these memes offer a way to construct their own identity.

I think that is true, also, of me and my teenagers. We can rummage through our sociolinguistic repertoire, draw on the pertinent elements of our identities, and exercise some control over the way we present ourselves as Muslims. Many of these memes have been the starting point of deeper and more engaging conversations about being Muslim in Australia today.

As we come to the end of Ramadan this week and look forward to the day of Eid to celebrate a month of fasting, I have been sharing the meme in Image 6 far and wide.

References

Ali, I. (2020). Muslim women meme-ing citizenship in the era of War on Terror militarism. The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 106(3), 334–340.

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Piller, I. (2009). Ramadan Kareem! Or: Urban Etiquette for Monolinguals. Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/urban-etiquette-for-monolinguals/
Piller, I. (2017). Money makes the world go round. Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/money-makes-the-world-go-round/
Tenedero, P. P. P. (2023). Lent, Language, and Faith Work. Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/lent-language-and-faith-work/
Wehbe, A. (2017). Silent Invisible Women. Language on the Move. https://www.languageonthemove.com/silent-invisible-women/