Eid-ul-Fitr marks the end of Ramadan and a return to ordinary life – shaped, at least in principle, by gratitude, charity and human fellowship.
Too much, however, has happened in too few years for the occasion to be approached as though the country were merely preparing for another holiday. The pandemic years took one kind of toll, reducing worship to distance and caution. In May 2020, on the eve of Eid, the PIA crash in Karachi killed 97 people and turned what should have been a day of reunion into one of mourning.
This year, the war around Iran has altered the meaning in ways that go beyond the obvious matter of oil prices, though those are punishing enough. Pakistan recently raised petrol prices by Rs 55 a litre, a roughly 20 per cent jump, which has already led to panic buying and long queues, while the State Bank has warned that inflation will remain elevated for the rest of the year.
But treating the Iran war simply as the cause of a petrol shock would miss the larger point. Across the Gulf, the conflict has turned Eid itself into a securitised occasion. In the wake of constant drone and missile attacks, many have decided to hold prayers indoors rather than in open prayer grounds. That is a practical decision, plainly justified in the circumstances, but it also says something stark about the region’s condition. When even congregational prayer must now be arranged around the risk of falling debris, war has definitely moved beyond the frontlines into the texture of civic and religious life.
Then there is Gaza, where all arguments about Muslim solidarity and international law are tested and usually fail. More than 72,000 Palestinians have already been killed, and hundreds more have died since the collapse of the ceasefire. Eid, for many, will be a tumultuous reminder of displacement, scarcity, and mourning, blurring the lines between everyday life and war.
Pakistan, however, has its own reckoning to make. It is not enough to say that Eid should be simple, modest and charitable. All of that is true, but it becomes a way of softening realities that ought to be stated plainly. Ours is an unequal country in which inflation is borne downward. The people who absorb the consequences of higher fuel prices are those who already count every bus fare and every purchase at the grocer’s.
That is why the official language of resilience should be used with some care. People do endure. They always have. But to celebrate the public’s capacity to absorb blows without asking why those blows are so regularly passed on to them is a disservice to our collective conscience.
The better lesson lies elsewhere: in narrowing, however imperfectly, the distance between comfort and need, between the haves and the have-nots, and in recognising that piety without social obligation is hollow. *