Shaykh Hamza Yusuf has a short and valuable blog post entitled “The Lunacy of Lunar Sightings” in which he defends a middle position between naked-eye sightings and the use of astronomical calculations to determine the beginning and end of Islamic months.  He argues for the need to establish Islamic dates based  on a combination of the best-available scientific evidence along with naked-eye observation.  I still think, however, it does not make the case for continuing with naked-eye observation rather than simply using calculations to determine the beginning and end of Islamic lunar months.  Here, the decisive question is whether what is required is certainty or probability.  The very fact that in traditional fiqh, the beginning and end of months could be established by the testimony of individual witnesses, and not the kind of corroborated testimony that Shaykh Hamza seems to demand in this essay, shows that certainty is not required in this matter. And, when this is combined with the element of practicality — something Shaykh Hamza dismisses too easily, I believe — it seems that simply using astronomical calculations, regardless of the fact of the naked-eye observation, makes sense.  As far as an official public calendar, sure, that does require certainty, and perhaps there should be a specialized astronomical institute that can maintain an “official” Islamic calendar, but as Shaykh Hamza knows, one of the great disputes in fiqh on this matter is the debate between ikhtlilaf al-matali` and ittihad al-matali’, basically, whether the lunar calendar is the same in all places of the world, or differs according to one’s location on the planet.  I believe that, if the standard is naked-eye observation, we must adopt the principle of ikhtilaf al-matali’, which renders the possibility of a unified Islamic calendar impossible.  But in any case, at least for Muslims in the west, none of this is really relevant because we don’t use the hijri calendar for administrative purposes, only for religious ones, and from that perspective, having a sound basis to believe that the month has started or ended is sufficient.  (There is also another fundamental point of disagreement with respect to how to interpret the Prophetic hadith on this topic: did the Prophet (S) tell his companions either to observe the moon or to count the days because that was a ritual command, or because that was the means that was easily available to his people to calculate the month?  Shaykh Hamza’s position is that the means the Prophet (S) communicated to his companions were themselves a part of the ritual. There is certainly support for that position from the tradition, but why should we reject what seems to me an equally plausible view that it was simply the most convenient means available for them to calculate the month? After all, the Prophet (S) did not tell his companions to fast based upon the government’s declaration that the month has begun, nor did he tell them to cease fasting based upon the government’s declaration that the month has ended, but the jurists all concluded that a judge, based on competent testimony, can declare the beginning and ends of months.  It seems bizarre to then say that we can’t use astronomical calculations to determine the beginning and ends of months because they do not correspond perfectly with naked-eye observation.

Brookings’ 2015 US-Islamic World Forum invited me recently to contribute to Will McCants’ series of discussions regarding ISIS’s relationship to the Islamic tradition which he initiated in response to the now (in)famous Atlantic piece by Graeme Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants“. I wrote about ISIS’s appropriation of classical concepts such as dar al-islam and dar al-harb to justify their actions against their enemies, domestic and foreign, while ignoring over 1200 years of the concepts’ evolution, including, in the post-World War II era where leading Muslim jurists have concluded that the distinction is irrelevant in the modern world.

It was my distinct honor to have been invited to give the 2015 Noel Coulson Memorial Lecture at the SOAS School of Law.  Noel Coulson was one of the most prominent British scholars of Islamic law in the 20th century, and he was a canonical author for those of us who studied Islamic law in the west.  As I mentioned in the introduction to my lecture, much of my own work in Islamic law — despite my numerous differences with Coulson in specifics — is motivated by similar concerns: how to reconcile fidelity to revealed law with the legitimate needs of human society, without giving in to either utopian textualism or secular absolutism.  The topic of my talk was “Islamic Reform: Democracy or Reinterpretation?“

One of the interesting fall outs of the Arab Spring has been a renaissance of traditional Sunni quietism and support of authoritarianism as the proper response to political conflict.  As reported by CNN Arabic Service, the UAE (who else?) is now patronizing a group of Sunni scholars under the not so modest name of “The Council of Wise Muslims (Majlis Hukama’ al-Muslimin).” One of its goals, according to this article, is to revive basic doctrines of Sunnism, including, “obedience to the ruler” (ta’at uli’l-amr). The article also states that the wise ones are cautioning Muslims that democracy is not a good desired for itself, but rather, justice and stability are the aims, and these can be achieved, apparently, without democracy.  Indeed, if democracy is pursued in circumstances that are not appropriate, e.g., the Arab world, it will only lead to civil war.  What the wise ones have failed to explain, however, is why oligarchical rulers would be interested in pursuing, among other things, distributive justice.  Just sayin’.

Muslim Matters has published a very interesting history of moon sighting in North America, and the context behind the 2006 decision of ISNA and the fiqh committee to adopt astronomical calculation as the basis for determining the beginning and end  of Ramadan.  It also has a special shout out to Toronto, although I’m not sure it is one we should be proud of:

“Toronto is one of the few cities, if not the only, which hosts mosques that simultaneously follow all permutations of moonsighting opinions that have ever existed in Islam’s legal history; local sighting, global, Saudi-sighting, astronomical calculations – perhaps there are more. This represents a trend which has become common occurrence across much of the North America; Muslim communities split along lines of lunar dogmatism.”

Meanwhile, if you need evidence that Muslims are great at making lemonade when life gives them lemons, check out what the article attributes to Shaykh Hamza Yusuf on this situation:

“While its easy to have a dismal outlook on this debate, there are positive take a ways from this situation as well. As Shaykh Hamza Yusuf recently pointed out, Muslims arguing over something like moonsighting, which may appear as a trivial matter, is a sign of a serious community of believers. People disagree because they hold their convictions to be true, they care about their religion, and they strive to practice it in the most correct way. In a society where religion is increasingly viewed with an eye of irrelevance, it is refreshing to see a people who care enough about it to disagree over it.”

Well, one might think there are more useful things for us to engage deeply in to evidence the strength of our convictions, but that perhaps that discussion is best left for another day.

‘Id Mubarak to all, but especially for the Gazans.

This book contains a series of studies that emerged from a conference held in the fall of 2008 to honor the career of Bernard Weiss, a pioneering scholar of Islamic jurisprudential theory in the United States.  His most famous book is “The Search for God’s Law,” a magnificent study of the medieval Islamic theological-jurisprudential tradition through the works of the 13th century Ash’ari theologian and jurisprudent, Sayf al-Din al-Amidi. Happily, the book is now out.  Many thanks to Kevin Reinhart and Robert Gleave for their hard work in putting together this book.  Here is a link to my chapter, “Istafti qalbaka wa in aftaka al-nas wa aftuka: the Ethical Obligations of the Muqallid Between Autonomy and Trust.”