Eid ul-Fitr, the end of Ramadan

“Eid Mubarak.” On the day of Eid ul-Fitr, these are the two words with which families, friends and neighbours greet one another in Mauritius. The festival closes Ramadan, Islam’s month of prayer and fasting. The fast is broken together, people go to the mosque to pray, wear new clothes and give to those in need. It is a day of celebration, prayer and sharing, and one of the Republic’s public holidays.

Eid ul-Fitr follows the Islamic calendar, and its date therefore varies every year. It has a peculiarity that the other festivals of the Mauritian calendar do not share: even once published, it remains dependent on the moon being seen. The official list of public holidays says so in a note, for this festival alone: the exact date is subject to confirmation, as the celebration depends on the visibility of the moon.

In 2026, Eid ul-Fitr was listed for Saturday 21 March. March thus had three public holidays in ten days: Independence and Republic Day on the 12th, Ugaadi on the 19th and Eid ul-Fitr on the 21st. For a traveller, the practical consequence is simple: around Eid, any plan that depends on a particular day is best given a day’s margin.

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The Muslims of Mauritius

At the 2022 census, 224,885 residents of the Republic declared themselves Muslim, a little over 18 per cent of the population. Islam is the country’s third religion, after Hinduism and Christianity. The answers, recorded just as each person gave them, reveal the diversity of the group: 158,212 people answered “Muslim”, 65,527 “Islam”, 819 described themselves as Ahmadi, and 327 gave another Muslim affiliation.

The geography of Mauritian Islam is above all urban. Of these 224,885 people, 119,979 live in towns, more than half, whereas the Hindu population is overwhelmingly rural. The district of Plaines Wilhems, the most populous, has the largest number of Muslims, 67,678. But it is in Port Louis that they form the largest share: in the capital, 43,463 of 106,332 residents are Muslim, more than four in ten. Together, Port Louis and Plaines Wilhems account for nearly half the country’s Muslims. In one of the city’s districts, the fifth municipal ward, they number 17,058 out of 17,620 residents. In Rodrigues, by contrast, there are only 372.

The community’s history can also be read in the language of its ancestors. In 2022, 27,366 Mauritians gave Urdu as the language of their forebears, 5,260 named both Creole and Urdu, and 1,372 Arabic. These are ancestral languages: at home, the great majority of Mauritians today speak Creole.

The state supports this culture through several institutions that come under the Ministry of Arts and Culture. The Islamic cultural centre, set up by an act of 1989, gives Arabic lessons, provides translations, organises competitions in naat, anasheed, Quranic recitation, sketches and theatre, and takes charge of organising and supervising the pilgrimage to Mecca. The Urdu Speaking Union is governed by an act of 2002, and an Arabic Speaking Union was constituted in August 2021. In 2025, the ministry held talks with the ambassador of Saudi Arabia about a donation of six million dollars for the needs of the Republic’s mosques.

Eid ul-Fitr does not have the street presence of Divali or Chinese New Year. It is above all a festival of family and mosque, which begins with a shared meal and a prayer. Visitors in Port Louis that day will nonetheless sense it easily: the capital is the city where the festival carries most weight, and the Ramadan that precedes it shapes, for a month, the days of part of its population.

Eid also holds a place of its own in the calendar of public holidays. Of fifteen public holidays in 2026, five go to Hindu festivals, two to Christian feasts, one to the Chinese Spring Festival, and only one to a Muslim festival: Eid ul-Fitr. It is the day on which Mauritian Islam, the country’s third religion, becomes the whole country’s occasion.