Further to the issue of the french trial delay in Ramadan that I mentioned earlier, comes some commentary on the matter by FaithWorld that is worth reading. After pointing out that similar “accomodations” are made for defendants of other faiths on similar grounds, they note that in Egypt the courts work straight through Ramadan:
I asked our Cairo bureau how courts deal with Ramadan there. According
to our court reporter, nobody there has ever asked for a delay because
of weakness due to Ramadan. In fact, courts sometimes sit during the
day, break for the iftar meal at sundown and then resume the session.
So they don’t make any exception.
However, thabet at TalkIslam questions the relevance, pointing out:
What do the court practices of Egypt during Ramadan have to do with French court practices?
There seems to be some kind of dissonance when it comes to issues
like this: on the one hand Muslims living in the UK, France, etc.
should conform to the cultural norms of their countries* and not of
their ‘ancestral’ homelands. Yet you will see commentators and politicians invoking practices of these very same Muslim countries.
As thabet says, the issue is one of French law. What they do in Cairo or Saudi is not really relevant, because this is a procedural, not religious, matter.
I think I detect a Bateson’s double-bind in effect here.