UNITY

Bismillah.

According to Sheikh Salman al-‘Awdah’s website, http://www.islamtoday.net, Eid has been announced for tomorrow (Tues) in Saudi, Egypt, Yemen, UAE & Qatar. (Saudi claim that the crescent was seen in its Sudair & Shaqra’ regions.) This is despite zero moon-visibility there, as the following links demonstrate: http://astro.ukho.gov.uk/moonwatch/nextnewmoon.htm and http://www.icoproject.org/icop/shw32.html#whenwaxing. Oman has announced Eid for Wed.

Over the next few hours (UK evening time), the crescent moon will be visible over the Southern Atlantic and South America. Therefore, Eid on Tuesday is valid for many parts of the world (inc. the UK) if one goes by “global sighting” and “sharing the night” fiqh principles, especially in an age of instant communication (please refer to Ibn Taymiyyah’s discussion about the importance of knowledge and news of moonsighting in this issue, available elsewhere on this blog).

But if one goes by more “local sighting” criteria, Eid would be on Wednesday in many parts of the world.

Here is what ICOP have to say about the “Universal Hejra Calendar”:

According to the Universal Hejric Calendar (UHC), which is based on the calculated crescent visibility, the start of this month [& Eid] in the Eastern Region will be on Tuesday 30 August 2011 and in the Western Region will be on Tuesday 30 August 2011. Kindly note that the UHC is a pre-calculated calendar, which adopts a certain criterion to start the new Hejric month. Your country/organization might adopt different criterion to start the new Hejric month. So it is highly advised to read the UHC website (http://www.icoproject.org/uhc.html) before giving any judgment.

So Eid Mubarak, whenever you celebrate :), and a sad farewell to Ramadan! 😦

This entry was posted on August 29, 2011 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.