Ramadan Is Coming, We Won’t Fast

Ramadan’s Mercy, Morocco’s Starving Dog.

Every year, as Ramadan approaches in the Kingdom of Light, the streets swell with sudden piety. The mosques fill, the sermons thunder, and the air thickens with ritual. But beneath the surface, hypocrisy reigns. Ramadan, for many, is less a spiritual awakening than a dictatorship of appearances. To dissent is to risk prison. A few years ago, a small rebellious movement dared to say “Ma Sayminch”—“We won’t fast.” Their defiance was crushed, and today, every apostate who refuses the ritual must hide in toilets to eat his tagine, lest the law catch him with food in daylight.

This is the month we call mercy. The month of feeding the poor. The month of compassion. Yet as I walked the streets a week before Ramadan, I saw a dog—starving, skeletal, its bones protruding like accusations. And I wept. Because in a country where animals are left to rot while people parade their devotion, mercy is a hollow word. The God of mercy, they say, presides over this month. But what kind of god leaves a dog like that? What kind of mercy ignores the voiceless, the forgotten, the creatures who cannot fast or feast?

Ramadan is supposed to be about humility, about remembering hunger so we can heal it. Instead, it has become theater. A performance of faith enforced by law, where dissenters are jailed and the truly hungry—human or animal—remain invisible. Morocco’s streets echo with prayers, but its alleys echo with silence, the silence of bones under fur, the silence of a dog dying unseen.

If mercy means anything, it must begin with the weakest. Until then, Ramadan will remain not a month of compassion, but a ritual of hypocrisy. Enjoy your feasts. Enjoy your prayers. But remember the dog. Remember that ALLAH THE GREAT HAVE NO MERCY AT ALL.