Ramadan

Ramadan is the calendar and daily rhythm through which Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s 2001 detention is experienced: a month of fasting, prayer, and family meals becomes a measure of separation, illness, and the authorities’ control over his movements. The contrast is sharpest between the meal prepared at home for sunset and the food served in custody, where even the timing of fasting is governed by guards.

A working day in Ramadan

After returning to Mauritania and resuming his life, Slahi describes coming home from work at about four in the afternoon on the fourth day of Ramadan. His family was fasting, apart from the children. The day had taken him to the Presidential Palace of Mauritania, where his small company had asked him to estimate a project to connect the palace’s computer and telephone systems. He had spent much of the morning waiting outside the project coordinator’s office: the appointment did not begin on time, the corridor had no free chair, and he waited on the floor with his back against the wall, falling asleep repeatedly.

The month had already affected the night before. Slahi had stayed awake after an argument with his wife and was depressed and drowsy, yet still made his way to the appointment. Ramadan’s altered daily pattern—people partying at night and sleeping through the day—provides the background to the fatigue, but his account remains grounded in a particular working day and its domestic strain. The ordinary obligations of work and family had resumed; their apparent stability would not last.

Fasting interrupted in Mauritania

Slahi was taken into Mauritanian custody again after this return to daily life. During the detention he became so ill that he lost his appetite, could not stand, and suffered a grave drop in blood pressure. A doctor told him he could not continue fasting and prescribed medicine. He tried to eat while lying on a thin mattress, becoming dizzy when he sat upright; because he could not stand, he had to urinate in a water bottle. The episode makes fasting more than a calendar observance: illness and confinement had taken control of what his body could manage.

He spent seven days in custody without a family visit, and his relatives were not told where he was. On the eighth day, November 28, 2001, he was told he would be sent to Jordan. The date was Mauritanian Independence Day. Slahi emphasizes the contradiction between the public celebration of national independence and the secret transfer of a Mauritanian citizen to another country. The evening before, guards let him watch the parade moving toward the Presidential Palace of Mauritania, with bands and schoolboys carrying candles. The spectacle recalled his own participation as a schoolboy nineteen years earlier; now the calendar’s public commemoration of the nation accompanied his removal from it.

As the car carried him toward the airport, Slahi imagined his family preparing the sunset meal. He pictured his mother praying as she worked on modest dishes, his relatives waiting for the sun to disappear, and the family breaking the fast when the call announced that God was great. His brothers would have tea and a quick cigarette; his sisters would drink first. He imagined them praying for him and believing that he would soon be released. The scene is not a reunion but an absence: the meal continues at home while he is taken through a secret airport gate.

The fasting day in Jordanian custody

In Jordan, Ramadan carried a different social pressure. Slahi notes that more than ninety percent of Jordanians are Muslim and that fasting is widely regarded as the most important religious service of the month. People who do not fast may be resented, and some fast because of social expectation even if they are not religious. He contrasts this with Mauritania, where people are more relaxed about fasting but less relaxed about prayer. The comparison shows that a shared religious calendar does not produce identical customs or pressures.

Custody nevertheless imposed its own schedule. During Ramadan, two meals were served: one at sunset and another before first light. The early meal, Suhoor, began the fast. In Slahi’s memory, it differs from the meal at home less by its place on the calendar than by the missing company: at home his older sister woke everyone, and the family sat together over warm tea; in detention he ate a small meal of pita bread, buttermilk, and cucumber. He was not allowed to know the date or time and had to estimate the hour, guessing that it was about 4:30 in the morning. He ate more than he had the previous night, read the Quran in the dim light, and prayed when he thought dawn had come. The meal, prayer, and faint call to prayer preserved recognizable parts of the day, but could not restore the family setting that gave them meaning.

Meals, concealment, and control

A later move to a cellar exposed another way prison authorities controlled the conditions of religious life and outside contact. Slahi was awakened, given his blanket, Quran, and one library book, then blindfolded and placed in a cold, unclean cell. At about 4:30 in the afternoon, Iftar was served. On the door he found a neglected sheet of prison rules: smoking was allowed only for cooperating detainees, talking to guards was forbidden, and visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross were scheduled every fourteen days. The document also forbade discussion of political cases with the visitors.

Slahi initially thought the rules meant he might be able to send letters to his family. He later understood that the recurring cellar transfers were designed to hide him from the International Committee of the Red Cross: every fourteen days, guards moved him there for a few days before returning him to his cell. The practice continued through his eight months in Jordan. Ramadan’s sunset meal thus appears within a larger system in which access to food, family, and the outside world followed schedules made by his captors. The fast marked the hours, but did not determine the terms of his confinement.

Ramadan as a measure of separation

Across these scenes, Ramadan gives Slahi a way to register what detention has changed without reducing religious practice to a symbol. The family’s sunset meal is described through its particular people, food, prayers, and habits; the prison meals arrive at appointed hours, apart from the people with whom he would ordinarily share them. His illness interrupts fasting in Mauritania, while in Jordan the meal before dawn and the prayer after it offer a structure for days whose date and time are concealed.

The calendar also helps make the transfer legible. November 28 is at once the eighth day of his Mauritanian detention, the day he is told he will be sent to Jordan, and the country’s Independence Day. That collision between private religious time and public national ceremony sharpens the account’s central contrast: the rituals continue, but the places and relationships that once gave them their ordinary shape have been taken away.