Source: Washington Post
By Andrew Martin July 10
Andrew Martin is a fiction writer and freelance journalist and critic living in Charlottesville, Va.
In the Canadian city of Iqaluit, laborers are working long hours to finish the region’s first mosque before winter. And they’re doing so without eating or drinking anything, even water, for almost 22 hours each day.
Like Muslims around the world, the mosque’s construction crew is observing the holy month of Ramadan — which moves based on the lunar calendar and this year falls during summer — by fasting from sunrise to sunset. Summertime means longer days without food for Muslims across the Northern Hemisphere. But it is particularly challenging for the thousands who live near the Arctic Circle, where the sun barely sets. In Iqaluit, one of Canada’s northernmost cities, dusk begins around 11:00 p.m . By about 2:00 a.m., the sun is up again. In St. Petersburg, daylight lasts at least 21 hours. In Stockholm, the sun sets at 1 a.m. and rises just 2 1 / 2 hours later. The land of the midnight sun does not offer much time for repast.
How Muslims living in nearly 24 hours of daylight should observe Ramadan is a fairly new question for the faith’s leaders, says Shankar Nair, a religious studies professor at the University of Virginia. Until the 20th century, the number of Muslims living in northern climes was quite small. But generous immigration and refugee policies have drawn followers of Islam to Canada and Northern Europe. About 600,000 Muslims live in the Nordic countries. Canada’s Muslim population numbers around 1 million.
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