Alternative Fatwas

Throughout the twentieth century, a number of contemporary scholars answered the same question by fatwas that allowed Muslims in the far north to follow a different calendar, even with the existence of sunrise and sunset. I found three main approaches in the literature of contemporary Islamic jurisprudence.

1. Sheikh Mohammad Abdu (1849-1905), as quoted by his student Sheikh Rashid Reda, has the following reasoning (Al-Manar 2/163):

“Allah Almighty ordered us to pray, and the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) showed us the timings of the prayers in the context of the moderate part of earth, which is most of the earth in any case.

Now, when Islam reaches the people of regions where days and nights are too different from the moderate regions, they can estimate their prayer times by reasoning and analogy with the Prophetic timings. Fasting is dealt with similarly …

Scholars of the past discussed the issue of “estimation” of the timings when Muslims started to live in countries where the day was too short and the night was too long, or the other way around.

However, they differed over the reference region for this estimation. Some chose to refer to the moderate regions where the legislation itself was revealed, such as Makkah and Madinah, and some chose to refer to the closest of the moderate regions to their own extreme regions. Both opinions are valid, since there is no script that dealt with this issue in any case”.

Several Egyptian Muftis who came after Sheikh Mohammad Abdu followed his opinion (Egyptian Dar Al-Ifta, Fatwas: 214/1981, 160/1984, 171/1993, 579/1995, 438/1998, and 2806/2010).

2. Sheikh Mustafa Alzarqa (1904-1999), also a prominent twentieth century scholar, was a member of the Fiqh Council in Makkah when it issued the fatwa mentioned above. He, however, objected to the fatwa, and commented:

“The Hadith that the Fatwa quoted is assumed to be addressing the people of the Arab Peninsula. There is no evidence that the Hadith does not consider the large difference in timings between the Arab Peninsula and regions that are much further to the north or to the south.

These regions have to be judged based on the purposes/Maqasid of the Shari`ah, because the Hadith did not mention these regions. To generalise the regular calculations just because people could differentiate between a day and a night, without considering their proportional length, is at odds with the Maqasid and the general rule of avoiding hardship.

It is not reasonable to pray all of the day or the night prayers in half an hour, and it is not reasonable to fast for one hour and then break your fast for 23 hours.

My opinion (that was not mentioned in the decision, even in a footnote) is one of two solutions: Either to go by the timings of the region where Islam was born and that was the geographical context of the quoted Hadiths, i.e. Hijaz, or to go by the timings of the furthest northern and southern regions under the Muslim rule. Otherwise, there is immense hardship. It is obvious that the Quran asked us to elevate hardship” (Al-`aql wal-Fiqh fi Fahm al-Hadith, p.124, 1996).

3. Dr. Mohammad Hamidullah (1908-2002) took the latitude of 45º North or South as the limits of a moderate region and hence decided to limit the duration of fasting to a minimum of 8 hours and a maximum of 16 hours. He wrote:

“In regions far away from the equator, these times are too inconvenient to be practical. So instead of the movements of the sun, one calculates and follows the movements of the clock: and, as has been explained, the times obtained at the 45º North or South Latitude are valid in all the regions between 45º N or S and the pole.

So, Bordeaux-Bucharest in Europe, Portland-Halifax in North America constitute the limit of the normal zone; all countries North of these places have to follow the time table of these places. Mutatis mutandis the same applies to countries in the extreme south of Argentina and Chile in South America” (Introduction to Islam, Centre Culturel Islamique Paris series, Ch. 15).

Sheikh Mohammad Abdu and Sheikh Mustafa Alzarqa both gave an option to refer to the timing of Makkah, or the maximum timing of Makkah, which happens in the Summer in any case. Sheikh Abdu also allowed the calculation based on the closest regions that have moderate timings, whereas Sheikh Alzarqa restricted this land to be under “Muslim rule”, which is similar as well.

Dr. Hamidullah’s calculation is similar to the above views, because he calculated that these moderate regions are the regions that fall between 45 degrees north and south, hence he estimated the maximum period for fasting to be two thirds of the day (16 hours).

My opinion on this particular calculation differs slightly from that of Dr. Hamidullah’s. I believe that the limit of the moderate region in the North should be 48 degrees rather than 45 degrees. Precisely, 48.5 degrees is the start of the twilight lasting from one day to the next, which means that the sun does not go lower than 18 degrees below the horizon and thus complete darkness (`Isha’) never occurs (based on: The United States Naval Observatory, USNO Data Services aa.usno.navy.mil/data).

I used the widely accepted 18 degree below the horizon and based on my calculations at 48 degrees latitude, the maximum number of hours for fasting would be about 18 hours.

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