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Shame on these corrupt mullah

RasuluLLAH lived in ancient world, we should understand the context.

Calculation (Hisab) is mentioned in Quran

Quran is higher than Hadith.
Qur'an tells us to obey Rasul'Allah (SAW), and Rasul'Allah (SAW) didn't say anything about the moon being present or not. He (SAW) said: if you can't see it -- even due to overcast -- then you let the month complete. The ones who insist on moonsighting are focused on staying sincere to Rasul'Allah (SAW)'s orders and avoiding the risk of mixing what he (SAW) said with speculation and assumption.

So, from their standpoint, saying, "oh, Rasul'Allah (SAW) didn't know anything about astronomy" etc is an assumption or dhann, and in matters of Hukm Shari, we stay away from dhann. Rasul'Allah (SAW) also admonished a pair of Muslims for giving speculative advice to someone (which led to that person's death).

You're entitled to your view about using calculations, but I just want to caution against railing against the moonsighting folks as they have a solid Shari' grounding for their perspective.
 
Qur'an tells us to obey Rasul'Allah (SAW), and Rasul'Allah (SAW) didn't say anything about the moon being present or not. He (SAW) said: if you can't see it -- even due to overcast -- then you let the month complete. The ones who insist on moonsighting are focused on staying sincere to Rasul'Allah (SAW)'s orders and avoiding the risk of mixing what he (SAW) said with speculation and assumption.

So, from their standpoint, saying, "oh, Rasul'Allah (SAW) didn't know anything about astronomy" etc is an assumption or dhann, and in matters of Hukm Shari, we stay away from dhann. Rasul'Allah (SAW) also admonished a pair of Muslims for giving speculative advice to someone (which led to that person's death).

You're entitled to your view about using calculations, but I just want to caution against railing against the moonsighting folks as they have a solid Shari' grounding for their perspective.

Not my personal view, Muslim is indeed devided on this. I choose the most logic one and use context.

Both have solid Shari grounding, just how to interpret Quran and Hadith people have differences. The solution is respecting each other view
 
Rasul'Allah (SAW) said if you can't see the moon due to overcast, then you complete the month.

So, let's say calculations tell you that the moon is present, but due to overcast you can't see it, what opinion would you follow?
There are no overcast days in Mecca. So, the question doesn't arise.

MonthJanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDecYear
Average precipitation days4.00.91.81.80.70.00.31.52.01.93.93.622.4
Mean daily sunshine hours8.48.79.19.49.810.710.19.69.49.78.88.09.3
 
A great man once said, "Religion is the opium of the people". If instead of an army of people seeing from earth with telescopes, if the International Space Station travelers tweet a picture of today's crescent, wouldn't that be easier? They don't have to battle the weather and clouds.
Then it would be Ramadan at the ISS, not necessarily where you are located when seeing that image. Moon sighting needs to be local.
 
Then it would be Ramadan at the ISS, not necessarily where you are located when seeing that image. Moon sighting needs to be local.
What if you see when the ISS is passing over your country? You are just standing on a very tall tower. It goes over Pakistan.
 
What if you see when the ISS is passing over your country? You are just standing on a very tall tower. It goes over Pakistan.
Then it would be Ramadan on top of that tower.
It's Ramadan at the place from which the moon is viewed.
There's no fix geographical boundary so for administrative purposes and the fact that Pakistan isn't that wide i.e. it has the same timezone all across GMT+5, the entire country observes it at once provided a sufficient number of people witness seeing the moon from different locations across the country.

At least that's the principle. In practice, there's fueds between different groups of clerics and almost always they differ. Which means one of them is always wrong since it's not that big a country like Russia that's you'll see the crescent/first night's moon more than once in it's territory.
 
Then it would be Ramadan on top of that tower.
It's Ramadan at the place from which the moon is viewed.
There's no fix geographical boundary so for administrative purposes and the fact that Pakistan isn't that wide i.e. it has the same timezone all across GMT+5, the entire country observes it at once provided a sufficient number of people witness seeing the moon from different locations across the country.

At least that's the principle. In practice, there's fueds between different groups of clerics and almost always they differ. Which means one of them is always wrong since it's not that big a country like Russia that's you'll see the crescent/first night's moon more than once in it's territory.
BTW, if anyone is interested, there is a sure-fire way to detect new moon, the instant after it occurs. A French guy has perfected a technique by using filters to take a picture at t = 0 after new moon.
 
While people don't have enough to eat, some folks are celebrating.

"Chand Raat Party"

No wonder it is stated

In End of times,
  • Knowledge will be taken away (by the death of people of knowledge), and ignorance will prevail;
  • Wild animals and inanimate objects will speak to people (AI , Chat bot , Alexa etc)
 
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The issue of moonlighting has a tremendous amount of history and is very nuanced. It’s not easy to make cookie cutter arguments here.

First of all, the Greeks and the Mayans already had a method to predict the new moon at the time of the Prophet (PBUH). That was accurate to within minutes. The Jews who had been Hellenized 600 years prior to Islam were also doing calculations. The Prophet forbade the Muslims from doing that.

To be fair, the new moon calculations that the Greeks and Mayans did was the new moon at birth, ie the astronomical new moon. Not the “ahila” that is mentioned in the Quran for hajj, which means sliver of the crescent moon that you can see.

This introduces the first nuance here. The new moon calculations that Muslim organizations do now is not based on the astronomical new moon but actually a calculation based on the possibility of making an observation. They do this by setting some basic cut-off heuristics, like if the astronomical new moon is born and has been 8-12 hrs old (depending on the calculation method school - say Egypt/ Turkey). Then there might be requirements for it to also set half an hour after sunset.

Ultimately, this is a dumb way to predict the visibility of the new moon (which all Muslim calculations try to do). So second nuance:- The proper way to do so is to actually construct the moon charts and do proper optical calculations (you can take a look at these moon charts at say moonsighting.com). The problem with these scientifically grounded calculations is that they actually disagree with sightings on the ground from certain Muslim countries.

So third nuance. People in Saudi do moonsighting based on eye witnesses. The eye witnesses sometimes see the moon when it’s not even astronomically born. Whatever threshold the Saudis put in terms of scientific possibility, witnesses will present themselves to claim to have seen the moon. The Saudis don’t care about scientific viability of observation. They just take the two witnesses and you’re good to go.

This created a problem in North America. Because scientifically if Saudi sights the moon, you should be able to see it- but you couldn’t. So ISNA which initially was doing sighting decided to move to calculations in an effort to actually match the minimum Saudi criterion for visibility.

And as you can imagine this story drags on. Even moonsighting proper has issues like whether to use scientific calculations to validate a sighting. Etc. and on and on.
 

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