Matiang’i: announce the date of Idd right now
By MUNGAI KIHANYA
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
03 June 2018
For the fifth time
in as many years, I want to advise the Cabinet Secretary in charge of
the Ministry of Interior that it is there is no need to wait until the
12th of June 2018 in order to announce that the 15th
will be the public holiday to commemorate the end of the Holy Month of
Ramadhan – Idd-Ul-Fitr.
In short, if you can
announce it three days in advance, you can also do so 3 weeks, or 3
months, or 3 years, or 3 decades, or 3centuries ahead. Heck! I have even
seen calendars on the internet showing the dates of this holiday going
three millennia into the future!
How is this so? The
answer is simple, the motions of the moon are very accurately known. The
cycle from one full moon to the next takes 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes
and 2.8769 seconds; +/- 0.0002 seconds!
This duration is so
accurately known because the moon has been with us for a very long time
– obviously! One doesn’t need very sophisticated equipment to get a
precise measurement. In fact, you don’t need any apparatus at all! You
naked eye is enough.
All you do is count
how many full moons appear over a long period of time, say, ten years.
Then you divide this number by the days that have elapsed.
You will probably
count just under 1,260 full moons in a ten-year period; each observed
with a margin of error of about give-or-take one day. Thus, according to
the science of measurements, your final answer will have an error of +/-
30 minutes.
In other words, if
you used your 10-year average to predict the date of next year’s
Idd-Ul-Fitr, you would be unlikely to miss it by more than 3 hours. But,
with their sophisticated equipment, astronomers have given us the
duration of the moon phases accurate to within two ten-thousandths of a
second.
With this astronomic
(not “astronomical”!) value, we can predict the date of the next
Idd-Ul-Fitr with less that one second a margin of error. Why don’t we do
that?
The conventional
answer is that, the religious ceremonies can only happen after the
crescent moon is physically sighted.
My reaction to that
argument is this: even our current method of waiting till the last
minute makes the declaration before the moon is sighted. Secondly, the
date of the public holiday is a civil matter, not a religious
consideration.
Therefore, if we are
OK with announcing this date three days in advance, then we should have
no problems announcing it one year ahead. Indeed, I should reiterate a
point I made last year: the Public Holidays Act needs to be amended to
state that these dates should be gazetted at least 12 months in advance.
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