THE Islamic holy month of Ramadan begins
at the sighting of the new moon in the ninth month of the lunar calendar.
During Ramadan (which starts on July 9th this year) observant Muslims abstain
from food and drink between sunrise and sunset. Because it follows the
lunar calendar, Ramadan shifts by 11 days
a year in relation to
the Gregorian calendar. In some places, like Saudi Arabia, that makes little
difference to the number of hours a day Muslims must fast. But what happens in
northern countries where there can be up to 24 hours of darkness or light,
depending on the time of year? What about in Antarctica, where periods of
continuous daylight and continuous darkness last several months? How do Muslims
observe Ramadan in places where the sun does not set?
This question has become more pressing as
Muslims have ventured further afield from their original Arabian homeland, where
the shortest day of the year lasts for around 12 hours and the longest for
about 15. Islamic scholars have proffered various solutions. The strictest
interpretation of the Koran, as argued by Saudi
Arabia’s Council of Senior Scholars, maintains that one must always observe
local timings as long as night is distinguishable from day, even if that means
fasting for more than 23 hours a day in the summer and for just a few hours
during the winter. (The photo shows Kaltouma Abakar, a refugee from Sudan's Darfur province, breaking
her fast during the four-hour night in Rovaniemi, a city in northern
Finland.) In those places where the sun does not set at all, one
must observe the times of the nearest place where it does.
But other scholars argue that this makes
for confusion over which city to follow, and that it is anyway unreasonable and
not in the spirit of Islam to require people to fast for such long periods. Al
Azhar Mosque in Cairo, one of the world’s most respected Islamic institutes,
has ruled that Muslims should not fast for more than 18 hours a day. “We are
not supposed to starve to death,” says Salman Tamimi, head of the Muslim
Association of Iceland. Some communities, like the 1,000 or so Icelandic
Muslims, therefore follow a fatwa (Islamic ruling) which recommends
observing the fast times of the 45th parallel. Others, in Alaska and Sweden for
example, instead observe the times of Mecca, since that is the place to which
the Koran’s verses originally referred, a ruling backed by the
European Council of Fatwa and Research. Yet another group of scholars suggests
fasting for 12 hours irrespective of the time of year, because an average day
offers 12 hours of sunlight.
And what of observing Ramadan from
low-earth orbit, where each period of daylight lasts just 45 minutes? In 2007,
when Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, a Malaysian astronaut, became the first observant Muslim to go into space during Ramadan,
Malaysia’s government published a 20-page booklet of guidelines, confirming
that astronauts should follow the same prayer and fasting times as the location
from which their spacecraft lifted off—in this case, the Baikonur launch pad.
“There is no monolithic standard,” says Imam Abdullah Hasan of the Neeli mosque
in Greater Manchester, Britain. “The beauty of Islam is its
