Why not have world-standard weekends and standardized public holidays?

Islamic nations such as Pakistan have moved to the world-standard weekend for reasons of business productivity, with time off for Friday prayers. Is it not about time that the Middle East started to consider realigning its weekends with the rest of the world?

For business the benefits of being in touch with the rest of the world for five instead of four days a week are obvious enough. There is more time to do business, everything can be speeded up by 20%.

Unacceptable chaos

But the present weekend situation in the Middle East often degenerates into a farce. In the UAE Government is off on Thursdays and Fridays, while multinationals generally take Friday and Saturday off, because headquarters is working on Thursday and to be in contact for only three days just is not enough.

Then again the new Dubai International Financial Exchange has chosen to adopt the Monday to Friday trading week, with Saturday and Sunday as the weekend. This makes sense for the DIFX with its international clients. But how does the DIFX staff cope with schools that close when it is still open?

Indeed, there are families whose parents and children hardly meet because their weekends are completely misaligned. But even for the average family planning more than a Friday together is difficult with weekends in disarray.

Surely this sort of muddle is unacceptable in a modern nation, and this is what Qatar is currently putting to its citizens to try to establish a way forward. But the same problem also applies to the present situation with regard to public holidays.

Standardize holiday dates

Nobody is ever quite sure when a public holiday will fall until a day or two before the holiday. On the last Eid Al Fitr holiday in the UAE, the banks received a memo that meant they were closed on the day they were supposed to open, and open on the day that people thought they were closed!

Why not standardize public holidays for the benefit of all business, and government for that matter? Then residents could also book in advance for holidays knowing that the dates were actually going to be holiday, and not just guess.

More importantly for business planning, the scheduling of operations can be made in advance. Some might argue that the public holidays often depend on religious scholars to pronounce them, but even here there is room for disagreement.

In Bahrain starting date for the last Ramadan holy month was disputed by rival religious factions, and so half the island state began its holiday a day earlier than the other half. This is not the face of the modern Middle East; it is most inconvenient for business and citizens alike.

World-standards

The most logical answer is to move to the two-day weekend, Saturday and Sunday, for business and government, so as to be fully aligned with the rest of the world like the DIFX.

Public holidays should be debated and agreed in advance, and with the latest computer technology predicting the position of the moon on a given day should hardly be a problem.

This will bring a real benefit to family life and business planning in the Middle East, and is the single most obvious economic reform that remains undone.