The
sun shines low in the sky just after midnight over a frozen coastline
near the Norwegian Arctic town of Longyearbyen on April 26, 2007.
(Francois Lenoir/Reuters)
The Atlantic
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
One Norwegian Muslim community's clever solution to an unusual geographic problem.This week, with the start of Ramadan, Muslims from Indonesia to Michigan
began fasting from sunrise to sunset in observance of one of the
religions'
primary holidays. But what happens in places where the sun never
sets because the country is too far north? For many, this particular
dilemma is a
relatively new one, only apparent over the last two years. Since the
month of Ramadan is pegged to the lunar calendar, it rotates on a
yearly basis. The
last time the holiday fell this deep into the summer months was
nearly three decades ago in the mid 1980s, a time when few Muslim
communities could be
found above the Arctic Circle. But with Muslims from Somalia, Iraq,
and Pakistan -- to name a few places -- increasingly immigrating to
countries like
Sweden, Norway, and Finland, the ethical dilemma posed for them by
the endless summer days has become very real.
For an answer to this question, I caught up with Muslim residents of
Tromsø, a city located in the heart of Norway's northernmost region --
approximately
350 km (215 miles) north of the Arctic Circle. Between late May and
the end of July, the island city, which is surrounded by dramatic
snow-covered
mountains and fjords, experiences the phenomenon of "midnight sun."
This year, for the first time in the growing Muslim community's history,
the sun will
not cease shining for the majority of the Ramadan month.
In 1986, the last time Ramadan and the midnight sun overlapped so
closely, the city of Tromsø barely had a Muslim population to speak of.
The establishment
of a refugee center that same year encouraged
the first Muslims to begin arriving, primarily from Iran. Today,
Tromsø's Muslim population numbers roughly 1,000 and consists largely of
refugees from
Somalia, but it also includes immigrants from elsewhere around the
globe and a handful of local converts.
As Hassan Ahmed, a Muslim resident who came to the city from Somalia
and works at the Islamic Center of Northern Norway told me, "the sun
doesn't set. For
24 hours it's in the middle of the sky." Faced with the
impossibility of adhering to the sunrise/sunset rule, Tromsø's Muslims
must find alternative ways
of determining when to fast. "We have a fatwa," or clerical decree,
Ahmed said. "We can correspond the fast to the closest Islamic country,
or we can fast
with Mecca."
Sandra Maryam Moe, a Norwegian convert to Islam and manager of
Tromsø's community center and mosque, Alnor, echoed Ahmed's statement:
"since we have
midnight sun during Ramadan this year, we've chosen to use the
timetable for Mecca." This means that if the sun rises in Mecca at 5:00
am, residents of
Tromsø will begin the fast at 5 a.m. (Norwegian time). In addition
to being a good symbolic choice, adhering to Mecca's timetable,
according to Moe, also
provides a practical benefit: "they have very stable times for
sunrise and sunset so that makes the prayers and the fasting quite
balanced."
So tonight at 7:07 -- the time of the would-be-sunset -- Muslims in
Tromsø will gather at Alnor's mosque, one of the northernmost in the
world, and with
the afternoon sun still shining through the windows, break the fast.
Typically, this involves a combination of cuisines -- from traditional
dates to the
rich, thick bread Norway is famous for. A nightly ritual during
Ramadan, Moe says the gathering is very popular. "It's full every night
with people coming
to join and break fast together and pray together. It's a very
social time throughout Ramadan."
But though this may be the sunniest Ramadan many of Tromsø's
Muslim's have experienced, it won't in actuality be the first time
they've had to get creative
with scheduling. In the winter, they have the opposite problem.
Moe says they prefer to just stick to the Saudi schedule year round.
"In wintertime we have polar nights, so it's the same problem here.
There's no
sunrise."