Ramadan by CCD

This is a weekly post by Nidhal Guessoum (see his earlier posts here). Nidhal is an astrophysicist and Professor of Physics at American University of Sharjah.

Ramadan is almost here, so this is the time for the annual saga of “when do we start the month of fasting” (and later “when does it end?”) – according to the astronomers and/or according to the Muslim jurists/scholars… In a contribution I made to this blog a couple of months ago, I reported on a conference that had just taken place in Abu Dhabi on issues at the interface between astronomy and Islamic jurisprudence, including the topics of the determination of Islamic months and calendar, the calculation of prayer times in (high-latitude) places where the usual definitions do not apply, etc. I mentioned then the chaos that we continue to witness whenever an occasion like the start of Ramadan comes around.

Why is there a problem in knowing when a month (Ramadan or other) is supposed to start or end if, after all, months are defined by the motions and (apparent) positions of the Sun and/or the Moon with respect to the Earth? Well, there are two reasons for this problem: one minor and one major. The minor difficulty is that the astronomical problem is quite complicated because the month starts not when the Moon achieves “conjunction” (lining up) with the Sun and the Earth, but rather by the “visibility” of the new crescent, and this definition introduces atmospheric (local and seasonal) factors, not to mention human sighting capabilities and such. (Some jurists have suggested changing the definition to a purely astronomical one, i.e. one based on simple conjunction, but such scholars have remained an extreme minority.) Even with those complicated factors, we have made such great progress in the past few decades that we now can predict when and where (by small-size regions) the crescent will or will not be visible on any given night. The major problem that still remains is the literalistic insistence of many scholars (and traditionalists are still largely dominant in the Muslim world today) that predictions and determinations by calculations are not acceptable, that testimonies of actual sightings of the new crescent be the determining criterion for starting or ending the month. Moreover, Muslim jurists of each country and school of thought have to decide whether observations made in other regions (nearby or far away) can be accepted or not…

And so, as you can imagine, all this leads to chaos with conflicting, and oftentimes ridiculous/impossible reports being exchanged and debated on the eve of Ramadan, sometimes live on TV… We then get one country’s officials (the religious and the political establishment) announcing the start of the month for the next day, and other countries rejecting the claims and postponing the start till the following day; other countries will have started the month a day earlier on various criteria; and so on and so forth. We now regularly end up with the Muslim world forming a mosaic of dates for the start or the end of Ramadan over 3 or 4 different days…

Now, if that is not enough in terms of confusion and chaos, in recent times we have had the added complication of deciding whether the usage of telescopes and binoculars for sighting the crescent is (islamically) acceptable or not for starting and ending Ramadan. And of course, there are two camps on this issue – among the Muslim jurists, that is.

And that’s where the CCDs pop up – to add more complications and “fun” to the circus. Indeed, in the past few years, CCD/digital imaging, which of course has been used in Astronomy for decades now, came into the field of crescent observations. Why only in the past few years? Because it turns out that imaging a thin new crescent, which stays above the horizon only a short time (due to the thick with air, dust, humidity, and pollution), is conceptually an easy matter but practically a very complicated task requiring adequate setup, know-how, and practice. But now we do have a handful of people, some in Europe and some in the Arab world, who can image the crescent in broad daylight (see the accompanying image). Is that an acceptable way of establishing the start of Ramadan? The debate is raging right now, with the majority of Muslims (even the learned ones) weighing against it – though the tide is slowly turning…

This Ramadan promises to be an interesting case in point. Indeed, the (geocentric) conjunction of the Moon with the Sun and the Earth occurs on Tuesday August 10 at 03:08 GMT (astronomers say UT, universal time), and it will be impossible to see the crescent by any means on that evening in Asia, Europe, and the northern half of Africa; it will be possible to see it by telescopes in the southern half of Africa and North American as well as in most of Central America; and it may be visible by naked eyes in South America. So these different possibilities lead to all kinds of possible conclusions/decisions... But the interesting part is the fact that the crescent is expected to be somewhat easily imaged by CCD (digital camera and small telescope) during the day! I can’t wait for the debates – though I can already foresee the chaos in the decisions that will come with all this.

So what’s the solution to this state of affairs? An Islamic calendar, of course, which I’ll discuss next time.

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Also see an earlier post: The Lunacy Around the Islamic Lunar Calendar