Ramadan ended a few weeks ago. Due to the lockdown it was tougher than usual. Staying at home to fast all day, and the celebratory meal when darkness finally falls had to be eaten without the usual gathering of friends and relatives. Being a moslem isn't much fun, but being a locked down moslem is even worse.
But I suppose it’s unreasonable to expect a lot of fun from religion. After all, most of them really hit their stride when they discovered how profitable it was to warn us against eternal damnation. So daily starvation for a month is a small price to pay for avoiding that.
And actually, Muslims do get to have fun occasionally. In Mayotte, they have a moulidi, when they dance, sing, and proceed through the streets enjoying themselves (at least the men do – women don’t get to participate).
Sometimes the moulidi gets a bit exuberant. In 2014, a gendarme’s wife, exasperated by the noise, filed a complaint. This didn’t go down well. The organisers had obtained official permission, considered they were within their rights, and the upshot was an angry demonstration outside the gendarmerie. The complaint was eventually withdrawn, but a subsequent moulidi was cancelled and the affair left a lot of bad feeling.
That was the year I arrived in Mayotte, and the gendarme’s wife’s complaint was one of the first stories I came across when researching Perfume Island. It was too good to pass up, and the discontent it aroused, only slightly exaggerated, became the backdrop for the first chapter, which you can read here. As for the gendarme’s wife herself, I never found out more about her but that didn’t matter: she’d already given me more than enough to create a character in the novel. And that was fun.
Read the first chapter of Perfume Island
A brief sample of a moulidi song is below.