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Abstract

This essay examines the paradox that Ramadan’s ethical horizon of restraint and moral accountability often coincides, in contemporary Qatar, with heightened provisioning and recurrent food waste. Bringing Émile Durkheim’s sacred–profane distinction into dialogue with Nancy Ammerman’s “lived religion,” the analysis treats commensality as a privileged site where religious meaning is socially produced, renewed, and contested through embodied practice. It further mobilizes Benjamin Smith’s critique of Market Orientalism to caution against culturalizing narratives that frame Gulf “excess” as moral deficiency while obscuring political-economic conditions, labor arrangements, and infrastructures that normalize surplus. Methodologically, the article is a theory-driven, interpretive conceptual essay grounded in interdisciplinary scholarship and publicly available documentary sources (policy/NGO reports and datasets, institutional communications, and published media interviews), rather than original fieldwork. As a focused case illustration, it analyzes Qatar Foundation’s Education City Zero-Waste Iftar as both a proof-of-concept for “eco-dimensional” ritual redesign (where ecological norms are embedded in the choreography of iftar) and a diagnostic case that reveals why consumer-facing sustainability initiatives may remain socially uneven and difficult to scale beyond institutionally resourced sites. The article concludes by arguing that effective intervention requires linking Islamic ethical discourse to scalable, justice-oriented—and decolonial—environmental strategies attentive to class, gendered food labor, migrant labor, and the broader provisioning and waste-management systems through which Ramadan hospitality is organized.

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