LAST week I went to two dinner parties. The first was given by a Western acquaintance and the other by an old friend. The host at the first party had invited 14 people but to my surprise, only three turned up. I was shocked at the number who did not come after being invited but the host assured me that such behavior is not at all unusual. Quite often, he said, people do not even bother to inform the host that they are not coming! Being aware of this made the host very conservative in the amount of food he provided as well as the number of chairs.
Why, I wondered, would people accept an invitation and then be so inconsiderate as not to inform their host that they were not coming? Along these lines, I remembered an incident when a popular and well-known Jeddah doctor was hosting a dinner for a famous international surgeon from England. Twenty-four doctors had been invited to meet the guest of honor but only four turned up! And by the way, there was no football match that night!
Returning to the Western dinner, I noticed that the guests did not pile food on their plates as if they were starving. They took reasonable portions and then after finishing, if they wanted more, they took a second helping. At the end of the meal, there was very little left on any plate nor was there much to be thrown away.
And now for the other dinner party. At the buffet the guests piled their plates so high with food that everything ran together and more than a little fell onto the expensively-carpeted floor. Once we had sat down at the table, only a quarter or maybe half the food on a plate had been consumed and then a rush was made for the dessert table where all kinds of delectable looking sweets were displayed. What was the rush for? Were people afraid that the dessert would be removed before they had taken what they wanted? Most people took one plate of different sweets and a second one of fruits. What followed when they returned to the table was a scandal. No more than a fifth of the food was eaten and you could hear some whose plates were full to overflowing saying blatantly that they always try to avoid eating too many sweets. I would never have guessed it from looking at their heavily-laden dessert plates!
Now I must mention something else that I have encountered at many dinner parties and which is irritating and annoying. It is also bad-mannered but when did that ever stop people? Are they not even aware of the concept? Around the dessert table there was a group of people poking fingers into the delicacies and then licking their fingers, breaking open the sweets to see what was inside, some even taking a bite and when they realized that it wasn’t what they wanted, they simply put it back on the plate! Others use the serving spoons to eat the custard! It was a pathetic — and also a disgusting — sight!
In the West, which we always deride and attack for its shortcomings and failures, this kind of behavior would be considered shocking. If it did occur, it is likely that the guilty party or parties would never receive another invitation from that evening’s host or hostess. Here, I am sorry to say, that kind of behavior is not only common but it is also tolerated by virtually everyone. The perpetrators are evidently not shamed by their inconsiderate behavior. Do they ever realize the error of their ways? Once at one of these social evenings, I was brave enough to tell a young man whose plate, towering with food, resembled the Himalaya mountain that one should fill one’s plate moderately. His reply — as rude as you might have expected — was, “This is not your food.” So much for respecting one’s elders these days!
Quite rightly and justifiably, we claim that we are proud of being Muslims and desirous of behaving as Islam directs us. But are we really being good Muslims? Are we truly behaving as Islam directs us? Too often, these claims come from the tongue; they have no connection at all with the heart, the mind or the spirit. Let us not forget or overlook that Islam focuses on — and emphasizes the importance of — organization, punctuality, good behavior, cleanliness and consideration for others.
All these teachings, however, are violated at gatherings such as I have described. People are disorganized; some arrive on time and others come when they like with no consideration for the host or the other guests. Cleanliness is thrown to the winds by people whose hands or spoons or forks go into the serving dishes. And truly, if you took a picture of the table at the end of one of these evenings after the guests have left, you would think from the food still on the plates that the party had not yet begun. Just as we have learned that we in the Kingdom are No. 1 in the world in terms of traffic accidents, so I confidently state that the one thing we can definitely teach the world is how to waste food. Are either the traffic accidents or the waste a credit to us and our religion? There are no doubt many like me who are deeply disturbed by these things and the decline in standards they represent. My advice to them is to point out these failures of civilized behavior to the guilty parties and hope that we can stop the tendency before it becomes so normal and accepted that it produces neither disapproving looks nor corrective comments.