This project started as a discussion with a friend a few months ago and developed into an informal survey looking into Ramadan announcements in Canada in the past 10 years. In case you are not familiar with this issue, Ramadan is the 9th month in the Islamic Hijri lunar calendar and it is the month of fasting so it enjoys special importance in the Islamic calendar. Most of the time in Canada, the leadership of the Islamic institutions announces the start of Ramadan based on a criteria they adopt for the start of the lunar month. Options include followings local moon sightings, global sightings (i.e., reports of sightings from anywhere in the world), declaring the month in Saudi Arabia, or following calculation methods most of which estimate the visibility of the new crescent moon (i.e., the conditions to sight it but does not require actual eye sighting) but some permit only calculating the moment the moon sets after sunset (i.,e. even if the conditions do not allow sighting it).

As you may imagine, this can result in occasional disagreements on when to declare the start of Ramadan. For instance, in cases when the “calculation” method predicts Ramadan starting on a certain date but the moon is not sighted (for whatever reason), or when there are reports of sightings somewhere in the world but the moon visibility calculations indicate with certainty that it is impossible to be sighted in this location and at this time. So as a result, it happens every now and then that people in the same community (same city) start their fasting on two different dates. And considering the religious significance of the month and all the cultural festivities associated with it, in addition to the lack of awareness by many on the different methods followed when declaring the month, such disagreements on the start of Ramadan can cause much disappointment and confusion. But how often does this happen and is there anything we can do to mitigate those instances?

To answer those questions, I collect data from over 160 Canadian muslim institutions across the nation since 2011. As I only use public data, there are many missing dates that I could not find. This can be seen particularly in 2011 and 2012 but I still include the dates I found for completion. I should also mention here that I did not attempt to contact any institution to ask for data as I am aware they might not feel comfortable sharing this info with me not knowing who I am and what I am going to do with it. In addition, I won’t be surprised if this information is not available anymore or might require a long time to be retrieved from the masjid archives. This is perhaps a good point to mention that it would be a shame to lose this sort of information if it turns out that our mosques do not keep track of this sort of data -I noticed that many of the announcements are posted on their websites and later on those pages were deleted so they might not be available any longer.

I should also clarify that this post is not about the religious legal aspect of Ramadan determinations. I am by no means an expert in Fiqh or Usul al-Fiqh but I have studied those topics to a level where I understand and appreciate that most of the methods of declaring the start of the lunar months have valid roots in islamic legal tradition. Moreover the present differences we experience now have existed for centuries and should not be simplistically seen as old fashioned approaches vs. modern and scientific ones. And by this little survey, I am not intending to support one over another. I am simply trying to quantitatively examine how significant the division here in Canada over the starting dates of Ramadan is in hope that studying some of those cases can help us learn to mitigate such disagreements in the future.

The Criteria:

There are many details pertaining to the issue of declaring the start of the lunar months and some are particular to Ramadan that I am not going to discuss here (please consult your local scholars). Before introducing the data, let me introduce some common terms that are often referenced when an institution announces the beginning of Ramadan.

The word calculations is often used in this context to refer to the method of declaring the beginnings of the lunar months based on an estimation of the visibility of the new crescent moon that does not require the actual sighting of the moon. One of the major misconceptions when it comes to the calculation methods, is that what is being actually calculated is the visibility of the new crescent moon and not the moment of its birth. This is important because the moment of conjunction (more precisely, inferior conjunction) is actually known for astronomers with high precision. But the crescent moon cannot be seen at the moment of conjunction because it is not illuminated by the sun sufficiently until a few hours after. For those who are not astronomically inclined, inferior conjunction happens when the moon is in line with the Sun with its illuminated side turned away from us.

To be able to sight the new moon, a few conditions are needed. One is to have a sufficient window of time during which the moon has moved far enough from the sun to have some light reflected from its surface and also far enough from it so the sun light is not too strongly overwhelming the very thin new crescent moon. The moon also needs to be high enough above the horizon and stay there for sufficient time for people to see it. Those conditions as you might have noticed are not set in stone and can vary depending on where you are observing from, the condition of the atmosphere, and what tools you are using (if any). This is exactly why “calculation” approaches are subjective in nature as they try to mimic the conditions of observing to try to predict whether the moon can be sighted or not at a given time and location.

moonsighting.com is one of the services that provides visibility maps for the moon and is used by major muslim organizations in North America to declare Ramadan. On its website, it mentions “The criteria mentioned below are based on statistical data of sighting/nonsighting and are subject to revision as we accumulate more authentic sighting data”. One big plus for using calculations, is that even with their inherent subjectivity, they tend to be consistent and therefore can be very useful for predicting the starting date of the month in advance.

Another concept that is important to mention is the place of sighting (referred to in islamic literature as matla’). Some follow global matali’ (sing. matla’) which means they consider the sighting (or the visibility) of the moon anywhere in the world sufficient to declare the start of the lunar month. For instance if the new moon was sighted in South America (or conditions are met for it to be sighted there in calculations methods), muslims in Turkey consider this sufficient for them to start fasting. Others only take local matali’ into consideration -so for instance, for someone who lives in Indonesia, a report from California is not enough for her to start Ramadan.

The Fiqh Council of North America and the European Council of Fatwa and Research are examples of major organizations that adopt calculations with global matali’.

“The Fiqh Council of North America recognizes astronomical calculation as an acceptable Shar’i method for determining the beginning of Lunar months including the months of Ramadan and Shawwal. FCNA uses the criteria of European Council of Fatwa and Research (ECFR), which are that somewhere on the earth, at the sunset, the elongation should be at least 8 degrees and moon should be at least 5 degrees above horizon. If these conditions are met, the new crescent will be visible somewhere on earth. Hence the new lunar month will start the next day, otherwise it will start on the day following next.”

Where elongation here refers to the angular separation between the Moon and the Sun as seen by an observer on Earth. And for reference, 10 degrees are approximately the size of a fist (placed horizontally) when you extend your arm and look with one eye (please see here for a nice handy guide).

The data

The sample consists of dates of Ramadan 1st from public data of 160 Canadian Islamic institutions in 7 provinces -most of them are in Ontario. The starting point to create a list of Islamic institutions was through the muslimlink.ca directory.

In the plot I show a count of 1st of Ramadan announcements dates since 2011, those that followed moon sightings, calculation, and cases when both dates agree.

As you can see, in at least most of the cases I was able to document, Ramadan declarations in Canada were pretty good in the past decade with the exception of 2018 which I discuss below. But please keep in mind that this is only for the data collected and the missing ones can potentially change things significantly.

Also even for a year like 2020 which appears like a near consensus, there was indeed some confusion that you can read more about here. So even a small number of institutions declaring Ramadan differently can in fact cause stress to the community. Is total consensus possible? I do not think it is. Nor I think it is even necessary to be frank. But can we move closer to it? I believe we can.

What happened in 2018?

Let us look at 2018. The plot above indicates that most institutions across the nation followed methods of sighting the moon and declared Ramadan 1st on May 17th which was one day after the predicted date by methods of calculations (May 16th). In Ontario (for the data collected at least), the number of institutions that followed sightings was almost double those that followed calculations. So what happened?

When we look at the Ramadan crescent moon visibility for that year, we see that the New Moon started on May 15th but according to the visibility map of moonsighting.com (which is adopted by the FCNA), it required optical aid to be seen in Western side of South America and small parts of south west of the USA. In cities like Phoenix, Arizona, and San Diego, California, the moon set close to 30 minutes after sunset and had altitude very close to the minimum limit assigned by the calculation method (4-5 degrees).

This basically meant that most moon sighters will have a very hard time finding the moon and consequently there were no reliable reports on the night of the 15th. For those who follow moon sightings, the lack of reports on the night of May 15th meant that they need to wait to the next day and therefore started fasting the day after (Ramadan 1st was declared on May 18th).

What happened in 2013 and 2014?

I am not going to comment much on 2013 and 2014 because the data is sparse. It looks like from the data available that there is disagreement but it is possible that the missing mosques all followed one date and will outnumber the ones with data. But if we examine the visibility conditions in 2013 and 2014 we find that similar ones lead to the disagreement in 2018; namely visibility conditions were too tight for reliable sightings. So it appears that the number of masajid which decided to wait for the next day was high. To be fair, FCNA’s decision to announce the beginning of Ramadan is not wrong. Based on their adopted criteria, they are consistent. See here for example for a clarification on Ramadan declaration in 2013.

In 2014, the crescent moon on the eve on June 27th was only visible to the western parts of South America and the Pacific Ocean but not in North America. The same applies to 2013 in which the moon on the eve of July 8th was not possible to be sighted anywhere in North America so the chances of reliable reports were small.

Concluding Thoughts:

• Based on the data collected, disagreements regarding Ramadan declaration in Canada appear limited to at least 3 years in the past decade (2013, 2014 and 2018); most of the time people fasted on the same day but instances when disagreements took place are present and could be mitigated.
• Examining the three years in which Ramadan was announced on two different dates, it appears that those cases of conflict could be reduced if the criteria of the calculation methods are slightly modified to require the visibility of the new moon in larger parts of North America. Such requirement will increase the chances of eye sighters to be able to provide reports for the organizations/mosques that follow eye sighting methods of declaring the month.
• On the years when there was disagreements, people in the community expressed confusion and frustration (and in some instances there were some angry comments on social media in response to a Ramadan announcements that were in conflict with another organization in the same community). This indicates the need for more education and discussions to raise awareness about this topic.
• Communities with entities such as imam council/fatwa council appear to be in a better position to take unified decisions and bring more stability to the whole issue. This shows the importance of the roles played by local religious leadership in establishing authority when it comes to such topics especially when they work together on taking a collective decision.
• This is a very informal survey that used public data. I hope it can be reproduced by someone with more resources. A more formal study can look into this topic using better data provided by the institutions themselves. Perhaps also include information about their rational for choosing a method over another and how this changed over the years (some institutions I looked into seem to have changed their method over the years.). Another important element to include would be examining how the communities responded to such choices.
• I hope this study will be a reminder of the importance of preserving information regarding Ramadan and Eid dates and other related details of decision making to help us understand our community and institutions in Canada in addition to preserving our history in general as a community in Canada.

---

Header image: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200507.html