http://www.iht.com/articles/119263.htmlBAGHDAD The question sounds straightforward enough: Was there, or was there not, a crescent moon in the chilly sky over Iraq?
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"You know, everyone has his own opinion," said Abdul Latif Khalil, 66, a retired clerk visiting a small amusement park here with his children.
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An opinion about seeing the moon? Khalil gave a weary look, then acknowledged that on this first Ramadan free of Saddam Hussein, it might be better if Shiite and Sunni Muslims were not divided on a question like this, at once harmless but also deeply telling about the unity of Iraq.
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"We should have one opinion," said Khalil, a Sunni. "We don't need this in the future. In the future we must have one celebration for Id." Id al-Fitr is the joyous Muslim holiday of reconciliation and forgiveness that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan.
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After a month of shunning food, drink, sex and cigarettes during daylight, Muslims break out into three days of feasting when the moon is right, as proclaimed by the Prophet Muhammad 1,300 years ago: "Fast when you see the crescent and break your fast when you see the crescent."
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The difficulty is that there is no agreement on when that moon actually appears, and so Sunni and Shiite Muslims celebrate perhaps the biggest festival of Islam separately in Iraq.
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Most of the country's Shiites, who make up two-thirds of Iraqis, said they did not see the crescent. So they went on fasting, working and waiting for the first sliver of moon to appear.
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"It's impossible," Saad Raed Jerian Amin, a Shiite security guard, scoffed on Monday, as the Sunni celebration was in full gear. "There are 26 million Iraqi people," he said, overstating the true figure by about 3 million. "Say only half of them are Shiites. Then how is it that not one of these people saw the moon?"
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Libya and the Sunnis in Iraq began Id on Monday this year. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria and the United Arab Emirates began Id on Tuesday. Iran, which is composed almost entirely of Shiites, waited until Wednesday. So did the Shiites of Iraq, and on Tuesday, the markets in Shiite sections of Baghdad were full of shoppers preparing for the feast.
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But here is where the question of Id takes on greater significance: Some Sunni Muslims say that the Shiites of Iraq take care to celebrate the same day as their fellow Shiites in Iran, thus showing a greater loyalty to religion than to country, at least so far as Id is concerned. They also say that the Iraqi Shiites, long repressed by Saddam, a Sunni, chose a different day to mark Id as a subtle protest. Shiites deny these allegations and say, in turn, that the Sunnis generally choose to see the moon when their fellow Sunnis in Saudi Arabia and Egypt do (though it did not work out that way this year).
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But complaints like these are usually made in private. In public, Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq almost unanimously play down the differences, saying that the important fact is that they are all Muslims. Indeed, top clerics on both sides agree that they use a different method of seeing the crescent moon: essentially, Sunnis actively seek out the crescent at its earliest appearance, even if it is during the day and hard to see, while Shiites wait until it is plainly visible to anyone.
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The New York Times BAGHDAD The question sounds straightforward enough: Was there, or was there not, a crescent moon in the chilly sky over Iraq?
.
"You know, everyone has his own opinion," said Abdul Latif Khalil, 66, a retired clerk visiting a small amusement park here with his children.
.
An opinion about seeing the moon? Khalil gave a weary look, then acknowledged that on this first Ramadan free of Saddam Hussein, it might be better if Shiite and Sunni Muslims were not divided on a question like this, at once harmless but also deeply telling about the unity of Iraq.
.
"We should have one opinion," said Khalil, a Sunni. "We don't need this in the future. In the future we must have one celebration for Id." Id al-Fitr is the joyous Muslim holiday of reconciliation and forgiveness that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan.
.
After a month of shunning food, drink, sex and cigarettes during daylight, Muslims break out into three days of feasting when the moon is right, as proclaimed by the Prophet Muhammad 1,300 years ago: "Fast when you see the crescent and break your fast when you see the crescent."
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An interesting look at something I have too little knowledge about.
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