The iftar you do not host

Somewhere in every marketing budget in this region there is a line for the corporate iftar, and it is one of the largest single hospitality items of the year. A ballroom. A set menu for two hundred. A photographer. Invitations that went out three weeks ago.

It is defended as relationship building, and nobody argues, because nobody argues with hospitality in Ramadan.

Look at it from the guest's side of the desk.

The invitation is for the one meal of the day, in the one month of the year when that meal is not really a meal. It is the thing the family has been waiting for since the afternoon. Somebody at home has cooked. The children stay up for it. There are thirty of these evenings and no more, and every one spent in a ballroom with a supplier is gone.

So the guest accepts, because the relationship is real and declining is awkward. Then the guest sits at a round table of eight strangers, eats quickly, is photographed, and leaves before the speeches to get home for the rest of the evening. Nothing was built. Something was spent, and the guest paid most of it.

The free thing always has a price. It is rarely paid by the person handing it out.

The same dinner in October is a gift. In the last week of Ramadan it is a request wearing the clothes of a gift, and the guest can tell.

The version that respects the month is small, early, near where people actually live, and finished on time. Or it is not this month at all. The week after Eid everybody is back, nobody is exhausted, and an invitation costs an evening that nobody was saving.

The most generous corporate iftar I know of is the one that was not held.