Riyadh, Saudi Arabia - Religion plays an even greater role than normal in ultraconservative Saudi Arabia during the holy month of Ramadan, when clerics go into overdrive providing fatwas for the devout on every possible detail of fasting.
Religion plays a central role in everyday life in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam and home to its holiest shrines where clerics of a puritanical school of Islam have created what they consider to be the model Islamic state.
During Ramadan, when Muslims fast from dawn to dusk, Saudi Arabia becomes a country totally dedicated to serving the Muslim seeking favor with God by performing the rites as correctly as possible and avoiding sins of error and omission.
Islamic tradition saying Muslims should spend the month in prayer and reading the Koran is followed to the letter in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam and home to its holiest shrines.
Foreign residents caught violating the fast in any public space risk deportation.
Dozens of clerics are on hand to offer advice to believers with fatwas online, on radio and television, and in the press.
Last week, for example, one Sheikh Saad al-Shathry told callers into state TV's "Correct Fasting" show that it was okay to swallow saliva during the daylight hours.
One viewer asked a TV sheikh whether he must do special evening prayers called "witr," which are performed in Ramadan in addition to the five prayers stipulated as a duty in Islam.
"The witr prayers bring blessings from God and the Prophet said they can be done any time between the evening and dawn prayer (the next day)," the religious scholar said.
But he added that only one school of Islamic law says witr is obligatory and it is not the one followed in Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia's puritanical school of Islam, often known as Wahhabism, requires rigorous application of rules laid out in the Koran and hadiths, or sayings of the Prophet.
Different schools of Islamic law differ over interpretation of the Koran and the hadith, or sayings of the Prophet related by oral tradition and preserved in legal tomes composed by medieval Islamic scholars.
Many of the world's one billion Muslims will break their daily fast with dates and milk because of hadiths -- accepted by all schools -- saying the Prophet did it that way.
Some hadiths, propagated in Saudi Arabia, say Muslims should eat as soon as the sun sets and not wait for the call to sunset prayer to start because that was not approved by the Prophet.
But Salman al-Odeh, one of Saudi Arabia's most well-known sheikhs with a Web site and a show on pan-Arab MBC television, popped up in a newspaper to explain that the Islamic medical practice of "hejama" -- placing cups on the body to suck up skin and stimulate blood flow -- constituted breaking the fast.
While men fill mosques in the early evening, shopping malls are jam-packed into the early hours of the morning as Saudis engage in another national pastime -- mass consumerism.
Retailers say they are waiting for the last week of Ramadan when schools go on holiday for sales to boom.
Adverts on giant electronic billboards looking down upon the streets ply everything from Ramadan foodstuffs to luxury cars and holidays to a populace seeing the benefits of an oil boom that has swelled state coffers in Gulf Arab oil-exporters.
But they are interspersed with reminders not to forget God -- Koranic verses ordering believers to pray and slogans reminding the nation of the faithful: "Do not forget to mention God."