By Zeeshan Haider

Pakistan is battling Taliban militants, trying to patch up relations with old rival India and struggling to revive a limping economy but another issue has preoccupied the country over recent days: the sighting of the moon that markes the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

A row erupted when the Eid al Fitr holiday that follows Ramadan was celebrated in several parts of North West Frontier Province (NWFP) on Sunday, a day ahead of the rest of the country. Many Pakistanis say that violated a spirit of harmony and unity that should mark one of the
most important events of the Islamic calender.

Some clerics in NWFP announced on Saturday evening that the crescent moon, which marks the end of a month in Islam's lunar calender, had been sighted, meaning Ramadan was over and Eid would be celebrated the next day. But a government-appointed body of clerics responsible for
moon-sighting rejected the announcement, citing reports from the Meteorological Department that said the moon could not be seen on Saturday.

Clerics in  NWFP, a religiously conservative region on the Afghan border dominated by ethnic Pashtuns, have called Eid early before but this time the politicians jumped into the fray. The Awami National Party (ANP), a secular party ruling NWFP which is also part of the federal coalition, backed the clerics from its province who called Eid early.

Analysts say the ANP's stand could be a aimed at winning the support of conservative Pashtuns.

Some ANP ministers exchanged barbs with Mufti Muneeb-ur-Rehman, the head of the federal government's moon-sighting committee, and called for his removal.

Minister for Railways and senior ANP leader Bashir Ahmed Bilour described Rehman as a "remnant" of Pervez Musharraf, the former military ruler who stepped down as president last year after ruling the country for nine years, and said he should be replaced by Mufti Shahbuddin Popalzai, a hardline cleric from NWFP who called Eid early.

Rehman responded by saying Bilour was trying to stoke religious tension by promoting the conservative Popalzai.

"By demanding that Popalzai be made chairman of the Reut-e-Hilal (moon-sighting) Committee, Bilour is paving the way for Talibanisation in other parts of the country," the News newspaper
quoted Rehman as saying.

Both Bilour and Rehman later toned down their rhetoric.

Bilour apologised for some of his remarks while Rehman said he would not oppose Popalzai's appointment as a member of the central moon-sighting committee.

But debate is still raging in the media, amid calls for the federal government to take steps to ensure unity on religious questions.

"I have a simple suggestion to permanently end the annual moon-sighting controversy: a compulsory course in astronomy for all members of the Reut-e-Hilal Committee as well as those clerics who think that the moon should appear in Pakistan on the same day as in Saudi Arabia,"
Shakir Laskhani said in a letter published in the News newspaper on Thursday.

The daily said in an editorial headlined "Moon madness" scientific methods should be employed when sighting the moon.

"The time has come to find rationality".

[Reuters pictures of Lahore's Badshahi mosque and sighting of the moon in Malaysia]

The Muslim holy month of Ramadan has disrupted one of the wackier tasks for OPEC reporters: running around Vienna's beautiful inner ring road with Saudi Arabia's Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi, who likes to keep himself and the press corp fit. He often uses the 45 minute walk-cum-jog to give media a background briefing of his view on the oil market as he and the bizarre group of security, aides and reporters trot past the city's stunning palaces and bemused Viennese on their way to work (or home from a night's revelling).

(Photo: al-Naimi with journalists in Cairo, 28 Nov 2008/Amr Dalsh)

The daylight fast for Muslim delegates and ministers means that most meetings are taking place late at night, making an early morning run less practical. Naimi ran on Tuesday afternoon, accompanied only by security. He didn't go at all on Wednesday morning, much to the chagrin of the reporters on the early shift. The run is sometimes the only chance for media to get Naimi's insight. It is a blessing and a curse for reporters on the beat, who have to be up at the crack of dawn to take part but are often rewarded with the biggest oil story of the day. Maybe Naimi figures this time there's no need for a background briefing. With the oil price where it is, he seems relaxed enough to put it all on the record.

(Photo: Food sellers on Ramadan evening near old Delhi’s Jama Masjid (Grand Mosque), 23 Aug 2009/Parth Sanyal)

For Imrat Salaam, the holy month of Ramadan couldn’t have come at a tougher time: India’s weakest monsoon in decades has hiked food prices, and her eldest son, the main breadwinner, lost his job in the economic downturn.

The start of the fasting month, the holiest in the Muslim calendar and which began on Saturday in most countries, is usually a joyful occasion, but the mood at the Salaam household in Delhi’s old quarters is somber, as the family is unable to put together a decent meal to break their day-long fast.

“We cannot afford anything more than a handful of dates. Even fruits and vegetables have become very expensive,” said Imrat Salaam, as she struggles to care for her paralyzed husband and seek work to earn some money.

Read the whole story here.

(Photo: Muslims break their fast on the first day of Ramadan at the Jama Masjid in old Delhi, 23 Aug 2009/Parth Sanyal)

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The France24 satellite television channel has put out an interesting series in English on Ramadan in France, home to Europe’s largest Muslim minority. According to a survey just published, 70% of Muslims polled here said they would fast during the Islamic holy month now underway and only 20% said they would not. The rest said they would fast partially or gave no answer.

Former Paris staffer Brian Rohan (now in Berlin) visited a Ramadan soup kitchen in Paris last year for a Reuters feature illustrated by the photo above taken by Benoit Tessier.

Here are links to the France24 videos:

* Ramadan in France: a guide

* Ramadan in France, behind closed doors

* Free meals, despite the crisis

* Muslims in Europe: transforming the continent?

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Dressed in his robe and turban, Sheikh Khaled Al-Guindy sits in the plush offices of the main benefactor of his new satellite television channel and speaks about how modern technology can be turned to service for Islam. The al-Azhar scholar, who in 2000 launched a phone-in service for Muslims seeking religious guidance, is one of the founders of Azhari, a 24-hour channel due to launch on the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which this year will start in mid-August. Read my interview with him here.

(Photo:Sheikh Khaled Al-Guindy, 31 May 2009/Tarek Mostafa)

The channel will be broadcast on both main satellite channels operating in Egypt and will be accessible worldwide. It will initially transmit in Arabic with some English and French programming and there are plans to add content later in Urdu and Turkish. Azhari received its initial 15 million Egyptian pounds funding from a Libyan businessman and philathropist, Hassan Tatanaki.

Guindy told Reuters the plan really got going about a month ago, when he officiated at the wedding of Tatanaki’s daughter. “The father of the bride and I forgot completely about that wedding and started to talk about a new wedding, about how to introduce this new channel to the rest of the world,” he said.

(Photo: Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo, 13 July 2006/Suhaib Salem)

Guindy is hopeful that a new age, which he dubs the Age of Obama, is dawning in which a dialogue between Islam and the West will flourish. And he hopes his channel will play an important role in that conversation. Yet for all his modern touches, Guindy retains a deeply traditional side. He preferred to conduct our interview not in English or everyday modern Arabic, but in precise classical Arabic.

(Photo: Carnival revelers parade in Düsseldorf, 4 Feb 2008/Ina Fassbender)

Germany’s pre-Lenten carnival festivities got underway on Thursday with an official Turkish carnival association is joining in the fun this year for the first time.

Long sidelined from the usually raucous celebrations, an annual highpoint in Catholic areas such as the Rhineland, Bavaria and Black Forest, residents of Turkish origin in the city of Dortmund have created their own “Guild of Fools”. That means they can have their own float in Monday’s big procession, a troupe of dancers and a symbolic “prince and princess couple”.

“We set up our own association because many Turks in Germany have enjoyed carnival over the years. As an official guild, we want to enable Turks living in Germany to join in,” says the 1st Turkish Guild of Fools Dortmund 09 on their website.

(Photo: Carnival parade in Cologne, 19 Feb 2007/Alex Grimm)

These days, carnival is mainly an excuse for many Germans to parade through the streets dressed up as clowns and go on a six-day beer binge — an aspect that may be problematic for Muslims. But carnival has ancient roots. The partying grew out of the Roman tradition of celebrating the onset of spring which was later adopted by Christians to usher in Lent, the forty days preceding Easter that are a season of reflection and fasting.

In the Muslim calendar, there is no equivalent to carnival before Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting and prayer, and the Turkish Guild is giving out mixed signals on exactly where the limits are for its members.

A spokesman has told German media the guild may look to its roots by having belly dancers but stressed that members can have just as much fun as other revellers. “Religion is important for many people at carnival and we accept that. We are not pursuing any political or Muslim goals,” he is quoted as saying, adding that alcohol and kissing are part of the fun.

However, the guild’s website says its members should celebrate carnival according to Muslim rules and do without the “sexual liberation,” alcohol or kissing.

Perhaps these contradictions highlight the difficulties faced by Germany’s more than 2 million-strong Turkish community, many of whom lead parallel lives and complain about Islamophobia among Germans.

(Photo: Düsseldorf carnival float caricatures Osama bin Laden, 4 Feb 2008/Ina Fassbender)

In Cologne, a carnival stronghold, there is strong resistance to plans to build a big mosque.

How important is it for Germany’s Turkish community to take a fuller part in German traditions like carnival that have their roots in Christian festivals? Is this taking integration too far?

(Logo from 1st Turkish Guild of Fools Dortmund 09 website)

As the official umbrella group for Europe’s largest Muslim minority, the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) should play an important role in integrating Islam into French society. In fact, it hardly has any influence at all. The CFCM is so split by internal differences that it can hardly agree on when Ramadan should start or end. The link above is to the Wikipedia entry on the CFCM because the council has not been able to get its act together sufficiently to produce its own website.

France 24, the all-news TV station Paris launched two years ago as a kind of “French CNN,” has produced an excellent report on the CFCM — “Divisions within French Islam deepen at Ramadan.” It zooms in on the rivalry between Algerian and Moroccan Muslim groups that has crippled the council from the start. In one of the most telling scenes in the report, the Algerian and Moroccan groups meet separately at the (Algerian-run) Grand Mosque of Paris before a joint session where they argue about how to decide when Ramadan ends. The discussion got so heated that journalists were asked to leave the room.

The report also has interviews with leading figures in the CFCM as well as observers and critics. In all, an insightful report into the politics of Islam in France today.

Ramadan television always throws up some controversy or talking point in the Arab world, but never of the nature of this year’s talking point. Hardline Saudi religious scholars are saying enough’s enough on the fun and frolics of Ramadan television and demanding trials for TV channel owners that could impose the death penalty.

What’s more, these owners are in fact Saudi royals and their friends. The main culprit is MBC1, owned by a brother-in-law of former King Fahd, but others include billionaire playboy prince Alwaleed bin Talal, dubbed by the religious right in Saudi Arabia “the shameless prince” (al-amir al-majin). The clerics in Saudi Arabia have enormous influence and they are worried that liberals in government and their royal allies are plotting to caste them aside and secularise the country.

It is unlikely that Alwaleed or the family of Fahd’s sister are worried about the attacks. They live in a world apart of palaces, servants, private planes and cruise ships in France and probably no one could get near them if they tried. The clerics were careful to talk about a legal process in any case. In fact, one of them, Sheikh Saleh al-Lohaidan, said specifically that he wasn’t calling for vigilantes to take the law into their own hands.

For Saudi clerics, the process is all, since they have the unique privilege in the Islamic world of sitting as judges in the Sharia court system. That is the very definition of the Islamic state in their eyes. It’s not the first time the religious establishment has condemned liberals in any case. Even Osama bin Laden singled out Labour Minister Ghazi Algosaibi — a poet, former ambassador to London and confidante of the king — in a taped message from his hideout on 2006 attacking a liberal “fifth column” at home. But Algosaibi and other punching bags of the Islamists survived.

Interestingly, most Saudis would probably say Lohaidan and co. have a point. Everyone complains about cheap jokes and sexual innuendoes in some Saudi comedy shows on TV after sunset during Ramadan. Most would say that the “sorcery” channels on Arab satellites are wrong. But it’s a vague tut-tut of disapproval delivered in the knowledge that the clerics’ ability to stand up to the temporal power of the Al Sauds has always been limited despite their loud bark (the most notable modern example being the way they were forced to sanction the presence of US troops on Saudi soil to eject Iraqi troops from Kuwait). People will nod in agreement that “immodest” and “immoral” television must stop, but not fully compute the fact that for the clerical puritans “sorcery” includes horoscopes that so many follow and the romantic soap operas from Turkey that their wives are hooked on.

A popular Arabic saying has it that “the dogs bark but the desert caravan rolls on.” It is a notable shift in the socio- political landscape of Saudi Arabia that this is how a significant portion of the population now view the once all-powerful clerics.

Regarding those romantic Turkish soap operas — they’re a hit across the Arab world. Riyadh staffer Farah al-Sweel wrote about the hit series “Noor” a few months ago. The Algerian daily Le Quotidien d’Oran recently ran a story about its effect there, including warnings by imams not to watch such immoral fare.

Part of the attraction for female viewers seems to be the heartthrob leading man, Kivanc Tatlitug. Here he is in a scene, dubbed into Arabic, where he visits his wife Noor in hospital.

PARIS (Reuters) - It’s sunset in the French capital, and hundreds of hungry people are poised to begin their meals at the sounding of a Muslim call to prayer.

Elsewhere in the world, the call rings forth from the minarets of mosques, but inside a tent in a gritty part of north Paris, it comes from a tinny radio speaker.

For the holy month of Ramadan, a soup kitchen has opened outside Cite Edmond Michelet, a tough public housing project in Paris’ notorious 19th arrondissement. On the menu is a traditional dinner, starting with yoghurt and dates.

I heard a lot more stories that could fit into this feature on the Ramadan soup kitchen in Paris (click here). One thing that was surprising was how many people there said they had professions and jobs and so didn’t really need the free meal. I met an architect, a waiter, a hairdresser, a construction worker — lots of people claimed they were working, or had come to France to work.

Some said they were at the soup kitchen for its community feel and chaleur (warmth), others because they loved the soup. One fellow said “It tastes exactly like mom used to make” but since she lives so far away in the suburbs, he can’t visit her often. He even brought a thermos to take some soup home.

It took us a while to get any images as people were quite camera shy. A volunteer told me that many might fear being on television because they had invented stories of successful lives in Paris and didn’t want to risk having relatives see them accepting charity.

Should a court delay the opening of a trial because a Muslim defendant is weak due to the Ramadan fast? A dispute has broken out in France about this because a court in Rennes allowed just such a delay for a French Muslim accused of armed robbery. His lawyer had said his client would be in “great physical and psychological weakness” due to the fast. Critics promptly cried foul and accused the court of violating laïcité, France’s separation of church and state. The Rennes public prosecutor denied the decision was made for religious reasons, citing other complicating factors he said must be resolved before the trial could start.

The case looks like the “virginity lie” dispute back in June. In both, a court is accused of wrongly taking religious considerations into account to give a ruling favourable to Muslims. The court denies the charge. In the end, it turns out that the lawyer involved got the desired ruling without formally arguing for it on religious grounds. It all seems legitimate but leaves the impression with the public that exceptions are being made for Muslims.

A lawyer for one of the seven men on trial in Rennes on the armed robbery charges further complicated things by saying the real issue was discrimination. “I don’t understand this uproar in the media when it’s normal procedure to obtain a delay because of Jewish or other feast days,” Yann Choucq said. “And there are no court hearings on Christmas or Easter.  Are some religions more respectable than others?”

Asked about the case on Europe 1 radio, Cardinal André Vingt-Trois, the archbishop of Paris, said nobody could criticise a lawyer for using all the options the law allowed to defend a client. But he said he thought courts in Muslim countries worked straight through Ramadan.

Just to be sure, I asked our Cairo bureau how courts deal with Ramadan there. According to our court reporter, nobody there has ever asked for a delay because of weakness due to Ramadan. In fact, courts sometimes sit during the day, break for the iftar meal at sundown and then resume the session.  So they don’t make any exception.

Is it discriminatory to refuse to accommodate a Muslim during Ramadan?