The title must make you think twice as to what I intend to write in this post. Well, I myself was enlightened with this new piece of information when I opened up and spoke to a friend of mine who follows Islam. The conversation happened over a cup of coffee and fortunately for me my friend was frank enough to consider my thoughts/misconceptions and clear them for me. We starting with something about work and then I posted a question whether he follows Ramzan and then I got to know few things which I would have probably never known. For a Hindu, like me Ramzan was all about month long fasting. I also assumed there could be some religious belief as to why its followed but never really asked someone to know about it. Some of the things that my friend told left me intrigued me.
Ramzan or Ramadan is not just about fasting, at least for my friend. He says as per the holy Quran, it’s a month of charity for them. People who are doing well give percentage of their earnings/savings in charity. The most interesting part is it is given to a person who is not doing well hoping and wishing that even that person does well in life and by the next Ramzan, he is capable to giving it to some other needy family. So there is a lot of evaluation that is done on how much one can give as charity and more focus on whom it should be given to. Assume even if 10% of entire population following Ramzan do this stringently, the impact on economy is going to be huge. There is going to be a balance of the rich and poor, it’s like creating an opportunity for everyone to do something in life. I thanked my friend for explaining me this.
After a while I thought about my own beliefs. I recollected one of the lectures that I had heard as a kid in a neighborhood temple, the pundit said yes you need to give charity but not for everyone and only for the eligible ones. It’s like giving food to a person who is very hungry and is incapable to earning it by any other means. In a set of 10 hungry people, 9 of them could do some job and get some food but they are not willing to. So yes, I was convinced how Ramzan plays a role in economy, some googling also showed that people who follow Ramzan book good profits in stock markets during that month.