"Badr on the night of 16 Ramadan" .. Have we fasted an extra day this year?

Among the strangest Ramadan observations, which are repeated every year without stopping, are the questions that circulate all over social media about the validity and timing of our fasting: Did we fast early this year?

Have we fasted an extra day?

Did we fast late?

Is the moon swollen on the third of Ramadan?

Did they make a mistake in seeing and we broke our fast on Saturn?

Well, the latter is a famous rumor about ten years old, which says that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia erred in its vision because someone saw Saturn instead of the crescent, so people ended their fast early and the kingdom had to pay millions of dollars as penance. There is no documented evidence of the validity of this claim, and if you ask A citizen in the Kingdom would have told you that he hears this news every year from social media and he himself has not heard anything about it!

It is simply fake news.

This year (2022) a new rumor appeared that says that the moon was full on the evening of Ramadan 15 (the night of Ramadan 16), and therefore this inevitably means the middle of Ramadan on this night, and by extension, this means that Ramadan was supposed to start on April 3 And not April 2, as it happened in countries such as Egypt or Saudi Arabia, and therefore we “fasted an early day” in the words of the publications that started from Egypt and spread in several countries after that, and the matter developed into heavy questions such as: Does this mean that we sinned in some way?

Does this affect the last ten?

How does this affect Eid al-Fitr?

lunar cycle

Let's start with a short answer. This claim is wrong, and it is based mainly on ignorance of the difference between what the lunar month means and what the Hijri month means, in addition to several factors that we will talk about shortly, but let's start by understanding the movement of the moon in the sky.

Do this simple experiment, put in front of you - on the table - a lamp with a high light capacity, then grab a small plastic ball and extend your hands with it forward, then turn around yourself in front of the lamp, here you will simply notice that the light of that lamp will be reflected on that ball in your hands, But this reflection will give a light that varies little by little with your rotation, exactly like the phases of the moon that start with the crescent, then increase a little and fill up until the first square, then the full moon.

The full moon occurs when your back is to the lamp and the ball is in front of you, so you see it fully lit from your perspective (just imagine that you are small in size so that you pass the light to the ball), then the moon’s illumination decreases until you return to zero again, this means that the phases of the moon are basically nothing but our perspective on Earth towards The moon, as for the moon itself, is always lit by 50% by the sun, as shown in the attached design.

Now let's contemplate that special cycle of the moon, but from our perspective on Earth, the new lunar month is born when the moon is standing completely next to the sun "New Moon", we cannot see it because the light of the sun blinds us from it, and then on the next day the moon has He moved in his cycle a little away from the sun, in that case we will see the sun setting and then the moon setting after a while.

For us, the moon sets after the sun by about 50 minutes every day. This is not magic, but it is just the natural opposite of the moon’s movement around the Earth, but from our perspective on Earth, let’s give a simple example to understand this: One day, the sun sets at 6 pm and sets The moon after that at 06:50, the next day we add another 50 minutes, so the moon sets at 07:40, then an additional 50 minutes for the next day, so the sun sets at six and the moon sets at 08:30 in the evening, and so we continue to add 50 minutes every day, and the moon continues to exist in the sky for a longer time with a greater distance between it and the sun.

This means that on the day of the full moon, after about 14-15 days, a number of minutes will have passed that allow the moon to rise (from the east) at the moment when the sun sets from the other side, and the moon will continue to diverge from the sun day after day, until He reaches it from the other side, and they meet again, and another month begins. Of course, there is no need to explain that all of these are examples of approximation only, while in fact, of course, it takes more complex astronomical calculations than that, but the main idea is that simple.

For this reason, the position of the moon changes in the sky every night, it seems as if it jumps in the sky, you sometimes see it close to the sun, and sometimes far from it, you may see it during the day and you may see it at dawn or after sunset, the reason is that movement.

What does vision mean?

Now let's get acquainted with the difference between the Hijri and lunar months, the lunar month begins at the moment when the moon stands next to the sun, and this is mathematically that can be known over many years in the future, for example, we knew before the beginning of Ramadan that the lunar month would begin at the moment of conjunction at 9:25 am Mecca time on Friday, April 1, and the full moon will be at exactly 9:55 pm on Saturday, April 16, but the hijri month adopts the principle of sighting, and it means that specialists in legal bodies go out to monitor the moon at sunset on the day of sighting (29 Shaban), If the crescent moon is observed, then Ramadan will be tomorrow, and if it is not observed, then tomorrow will be its completion.

This year, there was a state of controversy over vision, because the moon - within about 10 hours after its conjunction with the sun - had moved away from it, so it remained after sunset about 17-18 minutes, but this period was not enough to observe the moon with the naked eye, and there was difficulty In observing it with optical telescopes, but it was possible to see it with some telescopic techniques that are able to monitor in the presence of sunlight, here some countries disagreed about the matter.

The difference here is not astronomical, but depends on the legislator’s understanding or interpretation of the term “vision.” Some countries, such as Turkey, do not take optical vision at all, but rather take an arithmetic vision - that is, what the astronomical account says - while some countries take optical vision and others with telescopes, and we have preferred Reference to this controversy in our report because it was the basis for the current full moon controversy.

This year, in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, for example, it was announced that the day following the sighting (April 2nd) is the first day of Ramadan. Observing the full moon between 14-15 Ramadan is possible, add to this another very important point that some people do not realize, and it may have been the main reason for this controversy because it was indeed one of the reasons for the appearance of the full moon late, which is that although the lunar cycle is from the new moon Until the next new moon is about 29.6 days, the problem is that the moon does not orbit the Earth at the same speed.

jogging moon

The moon revolves around the Earth in an elliptical (elliptical) orbit, meaning that it approaches it at times and moves away from it at others. According to Kepler’s laws, this means that the moon runs faster the closer it approaches the Earth and slower the farther away from it, and because the phases of the moon change month after month. The time distance between them is not fixed.

We said a while ago that the length of the month from a new moon to a new moon is about 29.6 days, which means that the full moon is supposed to be after exactly 14.8 days, but this does not happen in all cases because of the change in the speed of the moon, so we find that the full moon occurred in Ramadan this year. After about 15.5 days, which is an addition to the current problem, some thought we had fasted a day early.

A final important point that some people do not realize is that the length of the lunar month between a new moon and a new moon is 29.6 days, while the Hijri month is a fixed number, 29 or 30 days. This difference in hours accumulates month after month to sometimes cause slight anomalies from the normal People think that something wrong has happened, as it happened several years ago, and the full moon appeared swollen on the 2nd or 3rd of Ramadan, as if it was supposed to be on the 6th of Ramadan, and the world rose and did not rest on the “puffy full moon.”

As for two years ago, some people made a mistake by depicting the moon on the 13th of Ramadan as a “full moon,” and therefore we fasted “late.” In fact, the moon on this night was not a full moon, but rather was “close to a full moon.” This is another information that many are ignorant of. The phases of the moon change slightly around the full moon, so you can see a full moon for three consecutive days, but astronomers have only one full moon, and the rest were normal optical illusions and astronomically understandable, but many do not know about them.

In any case, the recurrence of this type of debate, year after year, reflects a severe state of societal anxiety and skepticism about authority, in all its political, religious, scientific and judicial forms.

The Arab world has gone through ten socially turbulent years, and this kind of dispersal will be evident in everything, from the quality of clothes and food products in the market, to the phases of the moon, and the beginning of fasting and holidays.