Ramadan under restrictions: what changed, and who decided each part

Ramadan in 2020 ran through the period of Singapore’s tightest restrictions. Mosques were closed, congregational prayers were suspended, and the communal meals that structure the month did not happen.

The practical changes were reported at the time. The part worth recording is how the decisions were made and announced, because it illustrates an arrangement between religious authority and state authority that is specific to Singapore and mostly invisible until something tests it.

What the month normally involves

Ramadan is a month of fasting from dawn to sunset, observed by Muslims worldwide. Three of its practices are congregational rather than individual:

Taraweeh, the additional night prayers performed in the mosque throughout the month.

Iftar, the breaking of the fast at sunset, which in practice is eaten with family and often extends to the wider community — mosques and organisations provide meals, and the bazaars that precede and accompany the month are a significant part of how it is experienced.

Hari Raya Aidilfitri, the celebration at the end, whose central practice is visiting: relatives, neighbours, elders, in sequence over days.

Each of those is a gathering, and gatherings were what the restrictions removed.

What was decided

Mosques closed before the month began and remained closed through it. Congregational prayers, including Friday prayers and Taraweeh, were suspended. The Ramadan bazaars did not take place. Visiting for Hari Raya was not permitted under the movement restrictions in force.

Religious guidance accompanied each of these: that prayers ordinarily performed congregationally should be performed at home, that the obligation to attend was suspended by the circumstances, and that preserving life takes precedence — a principle with established standing in Islamic jurisprudence rather than an improvisation for the occasion.

Who issued what

This is the part that is structurally interesting.

The closure of premises and the restriction of gatherings were state decisions, made under public-health powers applying to all religious premises and all gatherings, without reference to any particular faith.

The religious guidance — how to observe obligations when the ordinary form is unavailable, whether the obligation is suspended, what should be done instead — came from the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore, the statutory body responsible for Muslim religious affairs, and from the Office of the Mufti.

That division is deliberate and consistent. The state closed buildings; it did not rule on religious obligation. The religious authority ruled on obligation; it did not decide public-health policy.

The arrangement holds because the religious authority is itself statutory — established by legislation, funded through it, with defined responsibilities. That is unusual by international standards and it is what allows guidance to be issued quickly, with authority, and in a form the community recognises as legitimate.

Why the sequence mattered

Announcing a closure without accompanying religious guidance would have left an obligation in place with no lawful way to discharge it. Announcing guidance without the closure would have had no force.

The two were issued together, and that pairing is the operative feature. It is also why the transition was, by most accounts, less contested in Singapore than the equivalent decisions elsewhere: the question of whether a believer was failing an obligation had already been answered by the body entitled to answer it.

What could not be substituted

Some things moved online and some did not.

Sermons, religious instruction and community programmes moved to broadcast and streaming, and were widely used. The obligation to fast was unaffected; fasting is individual.

What could not be substituted was the congregational element itself — the presence of others, the shared meal, the visiting at the end. Those are not content that can be delivered through a different channel; the gathering is the practice. A streamed sermon is a sermon; a streamed iftar is a meal eaten alone while watching a screen.

That distinction applied across every faith community during the period, and it is the reason the restrictions were experienced as a real loss rather than an inconvenience, however well the guidance was handled.

The economic layer

The bazaars are also commerce. Vendors who rely on the season for a substantial share of annual income lost it entirely, and the businesses concerned were often small, seasonal and not obviously covered by support schemes built around continuing employment relationships.

That gap — between support designed for payroll and livelihoods that are not payroll — was raised in Parliament in the general context of the support packages, and the seasonal traders of Ramadan are one of the clearest instances of who falls into it.

What it showed

The arrangement between the state and statutory religious authority worked as designed under the first serious test it had faced: the decisions were divided along the line the structure anticipates, they were issued together, and the guidance came from the body whose guidance carries weight.

That is a narrow finding, and it is the one the record supports. It says nothing about whether the restrictions were correctly calibrated, which is a separate argument that was had on its own terms.

The same problem in every community

Singapore’s other faith communities faced the identical structure at the same time, and comparing them is what shows the arrangement rather than the exception.

Churches suspended services, temples closed, and the festivals that fell within the restricted period — across several calendars — proceeded without their congregational elements. In each case the closure was a state decision applying generally, and the guidance on obligation came from the relevant religious leadership.

The Inter-Religious Organisation and the individual religious bodies issued parallel guidance, and the pattern was the same each time: the state decided access to premises, the religious authority decided what observance required in the absence of access.

What differs between communities is how centralised the religious authority is. A community with a single statutory body can issue one ruling that settles the question. A community organised into independent congregations issues guidance that each congregation applies, which is slower and less uniform. Neither arrangement is better in principle; they behave differently under time pressure.

What was learned for the following year

Restrictions eased in stages, and the subsequent year’s observance ran under a different set of rules: limited capacity, booking systems for attendance at prayers and services, and zoning inside premises.

Those arrangements were worked out jointly, which is a change from 2020 when the closure was immediate and total. The practical mechanism — booking a slot to attend a prayer — is unremarkable administratively and was novel religiously, and it required the same division of responsibility to operate again: the state setting capacity, the religious authority deciding how to allocate it fairly among a congregation larger than the capacity allows.

That second question is the harder one, and it belonged entirely to the religious authorities.

Why this is a governance question

It would be possible to read all of the above as a description of one month in one community, which is why the general point is worth stating on its own.

Singapore’s arrangement places religious authority inside the statutory structure rather than outside it. That is a deliberate settlement with costs and benefits, and both were visible in 2020.

The benefit is speed and legitimacy under pressure. A ruling could be issued within days, from a body whose standing the community accepts, coordinated with a state decision made on other grounds.

The cost is the obvious one, and it is stated plainly by people who are uneasy with the arrangement: a religious authority constituted and funded by statute is not independent of the state in the way an entirely separate institution would be, and guidance issued in that arrangement carries the question of whose judgement it reflects.

Nothing in 2020 settled that argument. What 2020 did was demonstrate what the arrangement is for, and under what conditions the benefit becomes concrete.

What the bazaars are

A brief note on the commercial element, since it is easy to underestimate from outside.

The Ramadan bazaars are large seasonal markets — food, clothing, household goods — running for weeks in the lead-up to Hari Raya, with the Geylang Serai bazaar the largest. For many traders this is not a supplementary income but the concentrated earning period of the year.

Their cancellation in 2020 removed that entirely, from businesses whose structure — seasonal, often family-run, frequently without continuing payroll — sits outside the instruments designed to support employment. That is the specific version of the general gap discussed above.

The calendar problem

One further complication is worth recording, because it recurs every year and is invisible to anyone working from a fixed calendar.

Ramadan follows the lunar calendar and moves through the solar year, which means its date relative to any set of restrictions is not predictable in advance. In 2020 it fell squarely inside the tightest period; in another year the same restrictions would have caught a different set of observances from a different community.

That is an argument for framing rules by activity rather than by occasion. Restrictions written for “gatherings” apply evenly whenever a given festival falls; restrictions written around named events do not, and they produce the appearance of singling out whichever community’s calendar happens to coincide with the measure.

Singapore’s restrictions were framed the first way, which is why the closure applied to all religious premises at once rather than to any particular observance — and why the guidance on obligation had to come from each community separately.

Where to check this

Restrictions on gatherings and on religious premises during the period were made under public-health legislation and announced by the Ministry of Health and the multi-ministry task force. Religious guidance for Muslims, including rulings on congregational obligations during the closure, was issued by the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore and the Office of the Mufti. The statutory basis for the Council is in the Administration of Muslim Law Act. Parliamentary exchanges on the support packages and the groups they reached are in Hansard, the official verbatim record of proceedings published by the Parliament of Singapore.