Funny that with all the wisdom you'd think a deity possessed, he made the deal pretty bad for those followers who live in the very northern latitudes and happen to be born in the wrong century. Not eating for an entire month (or even a week) is extreme in itself, but not drinking anything either is just impossible.
Or maybe Muslims were not intended to come and live here.. :-)
> Funny that with all the wisdom you'd think a deity possessed, he made the deal pretty bad for those followers who live in the very northern latitudes and happen to be born in the wrong century. Not eating for an entire month (or even a week) is extreme in itself, but not drinking anything either is just impossible.
Not sure if you're just trolling or being a typical reddit atheist jackass, but Muslims have adapted Ramadan at latitudes that the sun never rises (or sets) by using the times of a city or country where there's a clear and distinguishable difference between day and night. Not only that, but the entire point of fasting isn't the exact time that one is fasting, but the meaning behind it.
I'm not even a Muslim, but playing these kinds of logical "gotchas" with religious texts that were written centuries ago is just dumb.
Just gonna add to what dvt said: the Islamic calendar is based on the lunar calendar. Unlike some other lunar calendars, the Islamic one doesn't add/intercalate days into the calendar to make the lunar months align with the solar months. The lunar year is about 11 days shorter than the solar year, so the month of Ramadan (in which Muslims fast from food, drink, and intercourse during daylight hours for one month) actually moves "back" 11 days each year. Every ~16.5 solar years, the month of Ramadan has effectively moved half a year. All of this translates into much shorter fasts for those of us further north/south when Ramadan falls in the winter.
I live in Seattle; being decently north, the Ramadan fasts are long in the summer (~18 hours) and super short in the winter (~10.5 hours). These days, Ramadan falls around June so the fasts are long but in ~16.5 years they'll be short again. Another factor to take into account: the further north/south you are, the milder the summers tend to be, so fasting is a cakewalk compared to what Muhammad and his followers had to deal with. I'll take an 18-hour fast in mild Seattle weather to a 15-hour fast in the deserts of Arabia any day.
Even today, Muslim farmers work in the baking heat of an equatorial sun while fasting during Ramadan. And these folks aren't sitting in air-conditioned tractors; they're working the fields by hand, far too poor to afford the machinery considered standard by farmers in the developed world. And before you get worried, those who are too old or sick to fast are excused from it.
Anyways, I'm not attacking you. I can understand how impossible it must seem to someone who isn't Muslim. But it really isn't that difficult, especially if your job consists of sitting in a comfy chair in a climate-controlled classroom/office. We have lots of non-Muslims who fast with us from time to time during Ramadan; give it a try and I think you'll be surprised with what you can do when you put your mind to it.
User dvt covered that situation just fine, so I didn't feel like repeating what they said :) Residents living in areas that experience periods of 24-hour of continuous daylight/night base their fasting on the dawn and sunset times of the nearest city that have normal sunrises and sunsets. It's a common case study when learning Islamic Law (aka Shariah).
