My Backyard & Beyond: Ramadan Chocolate

Last week my four year-old said something to me that I didn’t understand. This is not unusual. The reverse often occurs too, and sometimes we have no choice but to put up with being mutually incomprehensible. In this case, though, the mystery was soon solved. I’d gleaned only that she had some sort of grievance about chocolate (this is not unusual either). But after my wife took her to the nursery at our local primary school the next day, the missing links in her story were revealed. It turned out she’d been talking about “Ramadan chocolate,” and how her teacher hadn’t given any to her.

I’d never heard of Ramadan chocolate. So the next time I fetched my four year-old – Orla is her name – I told her teacher I’d been hearing all about Ramadan chocolate and could I see some, please? The teacher is a young woman with pleasing smile, which is always framed by a headscarf. I don’t yet know her very well – she’s only been Orla’s teacher for half a term – but she seems nice: not at all the sort to deny chocolate to a child who behaves well, as I’m told Orla does at nursery.

“Oh, yes, Ramadan chocolate,” the teacher enthused when I inquired about it. She produced a cardboard construction exactly like a Christmas advent calendar, the sort with bits of chocolate behind each window. “Orla got a piece today.” I took a good look. At the bottom it said, “Eid Mubakak!” meaning that when the last window was opened Ramadan would be over and the blessed festival of Eid would begin.

Everyone loves chocolate. Maybe that’s why I found the calendar – it’s very existence – so cheering. One of the many depressing aspects of what some have dignified as the “necessary debate” about integration over the past two weeks is that it has been focussed entirely on Muslims, and on Muslim women in particular. The government and media appear to think that no one else in the country has any part to play in enhancing integration, and that no one else could possibly be to blame for its lack.

I’ve found myself wondering what it must have been like to be Muslim, and how it wouldn’t be surprising if even those I know might have become anxious about encountering me, wondering what I might think about them secretly. The “debate” has been so one-sided, so hectoring, so accusatory, its effect has been to put on edge even somebody as content as I am to live in a neighbourhood whose cultural diversity some are convinced is by definition problematic, even menacing.

Such people might be horrified by the very idea of Ramadan chocolates in a British classroom, seeing it as proof that “multiculturalism” has "gone too far". For me, though, their presence served as a welcome confirmation that there is nothing inherently hostile about Islam in this country, nothing necessarily separatist about its observance, and nothing wrong about its most attractive customs having a place in British schools. After all, Orla got a piece didn’t she?