From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Jan 07 2003 - 09:22:57 MST
I have never heard of muslims having trouble in northern Sweden
due to the midnight sun. My experience is that most of them -
like everybody else - are practical about their religion and
decide on some compromise that fits the spirit of the commandment
(a typical example is how many muslims in non-muslim countries
delay their daily prayers when at work or school for later). In
this case I would expect some nearly arbitrary cutoff time late
in the evening/early in the morning.
On Tue, Jan 07, 2003 at 08:00:57AM -0800, spike66 wrote:
> So what would a true Muslim do on Mars? Would Ramadan
> be based on the orbit of Phobos or Diemos? Would Ramadan
> be every 5 days then? Or 9? Or would they use telescopes
> to figure out what the moon and sun are doing as viewed
> from earth? Where on earth? Mecca or Cape Canaveral?
I think most Muslims would consider the important thing being
that every faithful were having Ramadan at the same time, so they
would use Earth time. As for direction, I guess it would be the
projection of the difference vector between their position and
Mecca onto the local horizontal plane - probably a great market
for prayer clocks.
One interesting "solution" was mentioned in the roleplaying game
2300AD, where a planet with a large Muslim population got
permission to acquire a tiny grain from the Black Stone and built
their own subsidiary "Mecca copy" to pray towards. Not very
likely, but another solution.
Overall, people are amazing at inventing clever "solutions" for
the "problems" created by their religion. Sabbath-approved
electronics in Judaism is another favorite of mine: since you may
not start a device on the sabbath, these devices get activated by
pressing a button which cuts power to a subsystem.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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