Jakarta - The Muslim fasting month of Ramadan is a time to focus on the faith in Indonesia, but that hasn‘t stopped television stations from combining religious fervor with a healthy dose of laughter.
Ramadan began on Thursday in Indonesia, the world‘s most populous Muslim country. During the month, healthy Muslims must abstain from eating or drinking from dawn to dusk.
For 30 days, Indonesian television stations allocate as many as seven hours daily for Ramadan-related shows, including soap operas with religious messages, but in recent years comedians have featured prominently in many of these programs.
Millions of Indonesians eating the sahur, or the daily pre-dawn meal before the start of fasting, just can‘t miss rowdy jokes and pranks little to do with religion as they switch from one channel to another.
Such programs have proved popular and enjoyed high ratings in the past few years.
"Sahur time is a time when people don‘t want to think hard. People digest jokes better than religious sermons," said Hadiansyah Lubis, spokesman for Trans TV.
This Ramadan, Trans TV will show comedy sketches revolving around a maid-supplying labor agency starting at 2.30 a.m., and another comedy program at 9 p.m. he said.
A rival channel, Indosiar, is bucking the comedy trend and will inject a bit of reality to its Ramadan package, its spokesman Gufron Sakaril said.
For one and a half hours daily, starting at 2.30 a.m., when most people except those who cook sahur meals are still asleep, the station will air a religious story-telling contest for teenagers, he said.
"Oral story-telling is part of our culture but it seems it has been abandoned. We are trying to revive young people‘s interest in story-telling through this reality show," Sakaril said.
The Indonesian Council of Muslim Scholars has urged TV stations to stop airing gossip shows exposing celebrities‘ dirty laundry, those depicting women in skimpy clothing, and soap operas with power and revenge storylines.
"TV programs that tarnish the Muslim holy month must be stopped," council chairman Ma‘ruf Amin was quoted as saying by the state Antara news agency.
Last year scholars from the country‘s largest Islamic organization, Nahdlatul Ulama, issued a fatwa declaring that gossip shows are haram, or religiously forbidden, because they expose people‘s private matters to the public.
But the edict was ignored and TV stations continue to broadcast the extremely popular shows.
Source: uk.reuters.com (17 September 2007)
