Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Luna(r)cy

Something I posted in April. Here we go again...

With the imminent advent of moonfighting committees to diffuse the havoc caused by moonsighting committees, and the launch of the new Conservative manifesto, perhaps it's time to borrow a Tory phrase and get 'back to basics'. The perennial drive to standardise the Islamic calendar may well be blinkering us from the actual ethos behind the act of moonsighting - regaining a sense of perspective.

Hamza Yusuf touches on the issue in his commentary on Sachiko Murata and William Chittick's 'Vision of Islam' by quoting an unnamed Scottish phenomenologist:

There are efforts to standardise the Islamic calendar so that Ramadhan can be started on the same day in different communities. But the relationship of the celestial bodies to the earth is a living thing and every location has its own sky. So why shouldn't religious festivals begin on dates peculiar to different places? The modern mind, however, wishes to generalise and abstract the situation so the phenomena are bypassed. As with the length of the day, the average is calculated and becomes the accepted truth to accommodate the limits of circular wheels in clocks, yet none of the celestial bodies moves in circles.
You can listen to the relevant extract (in mp3 format) from Hamza Yusuf's commentary here.

Some comments arising therefrom:

Mohammed said...
Yeah i just listened to that snippet yesterday on the zaytuna website. I found it to be insightful. I wish ppl would explain the system of moonsighting itself as well. I think 99.9% of muslims dont understand it, including me.

10/04/2005 10:55 PM

Anonymous said...
Since Islam encourages the use of technology, I (even as a girl) would say it was quite simple to click on an obervatory website (Jodrell Bank for example) and in 2 seconds flat, you can find out if the moon has been sighted. They use these MASSIVE telescopes that are awfully complicated and surprisingly accurate. Easy as pie.

11/02/2005 12:43 PM

Leo_Africanus said...
But where's the fun in that?!

11/02/2005 1:08 PM

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Theres lots of fun in pie. Especially when the whole community is eating it at the same time!

Leo_Africanus said...

Must be a pretty big pie! Though I can't seen why the whole community should be eating it. Are you implying humbleness is due all round?