Jerusalem’s online Ramadan quiz attracts interest from Muslim world

By Rizwan Khatik - Tue Aug 23, 6:18 am

The quiz, in which participants can win prizes, is running for its 10th consecutive year and proving to be much more popular than in the past.

The Jerusalem Municipality’s Internet site has been attracting a great deal of traffic from the Muslim world lately, due to an online quiz on the Ramadan fast that is being sponsored by the city’s Arabic Culture Department.

As of this week, the third week of Ramadan, there have been a record 800 participants, compared to 363 participants throughout Ramadan last year.

Imam Nasri Mansara, 28, a mother of two from the village of Anata in northeastern Jerusalem, is one of the contestants.

“This year, the quiz is not at all easy,” she said. “But it talks about Islam and to me it’s special and good that in Jerusalem something is happening that relates to the topic.”

This is not Mansara’s first experience with the quiz; four years ago, she entered and won first prize.

Though Mansara is indeed a resident of East Jerusalem, many of the contestants are decidedly not; a check of where participants are coming from shows that some are from Arab cities in Israel, such as Nazareth and Umm al-Fahm, as well as from Palestinian cities such as Nablus; there are even surfers from Jordan.

The quiz has 30 questions, with a new one every day. Though it focuses on Ramadan, it aims to evaluate knowledge of all areas connected to religion and Muslim history, with questions of varying levels of difficulty. For example, contestants were asked this year to identify the Jewish doctor named by Salah e-Din to be his personal physician, or to name Mohammed’s successor who declared that Ramadan was to be a month of penitence.

The budget for prizes is NIS 18,000, with the first-prize winner to get NIS 4,000.