It's Ramadan again, and during this holy month of Islam, Muslims are required to abstain from food, drink, smoking and sex from dawn until dusk. Since Ramadan moves backwards by several days each year, it now falls during early autumn (in the northern hemisphere at least), which means that over the years the daylight hours during Ramadan will be longer and longer. So Muslim tummy rumbles will get bigger and bigger as the years pass by.

Right now, if you're a Muslim in London, England, today's dawn was at 5:59 am and dusk is at 7:52 pm. That's almost 14 hours without food or drink. Unfortunately for Muslims, the further away from the equator you travel, the more extreme are the boundaries between daylight and night, so in Reykjavik, Iceland, the world's most northerly capital city, the Ramadan fast lasts for almost 15 hours (5:57 am to 8:47 pm).

And that's just when Ramadan falls in autumn. When Ramadan drifts back towards June, Muslims are in big trouble. In London, mid-June, dawn begins at around 4:00 am and dusk doesn't roll around until about 10:00 pm! They are allowed to have breakfast, but only before dawn, which means getting up in the middle of the night, and then waiting until after 10 pm, before they can even have a sip of water. Madness. Any cheating, for example by sneaking a pork pie into a darkened room, is strictly forbidden (for a multitude of reasons).

But it gets worse, much worse, because those Muslims daft enough to follow the rules to the letter in Reykjavik will probably give themselves some serious medical problems. For one thing, in June there is no dusk in Reykjavik, and no dawn either. Yes the sun does set, but light is still visible, therefore no dawn/dusk. Since the rule is 'dawn to dusk', Muslims shouldn't eat for the whole 24 hours. Even if you take the sunrise/sunset times you'll find that Icelandic Muslims must fast between the hours of 3am and midnight. No food or water for 21 hours, each and every day, for a whole month.

Further north? Forget it. In Murmansk, Russia, the sun doesn't set at all in June. If you are a Muslim in northern Russia you would have to stop eating and drinking permanently for the entire month of Ramadan. You would, in fact, die.

More evidence (if it were needed) that God, in this case Allah, doesn't exist: if he was up there he'd have known that there would be technical problems with the dawn/dusk rule in certain parts of the world. Just more evidence of the arbitrary and ridiculous rules of crackpot religions. If you're a northern Muslim, do yourself a favour when Ramadan moves back into June - book a 4-week vacation in Florida. I'm sure the American people would love to see you all.

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Links:
Gaisma - Sunrise, sunset, dawn and dusk times around the World
The World's most northern