In search of Ramadan with South Africa’s men who sight the moon

Cape Town, South Africa – The digital clock on Shaykh Safwaan Sasman’s smartphone reads 6:59 PM and the 32-year-old looks up. Beside him stand a dozen other men in thobes and matching black puffer jackets embroidered with the words ‘Crescent Observers’, staring silently at the sky.

A splash of orange-red streaks across the horizon heralded dusk. Below, the Atlantic Ocean runs along the shoreline; a weekday stream of joggers and cyclists shuffle along Cape Town’s Sea Point promenade; and families relax while children play on the grass.

In the 37 minutes between the setting of the sun and the disappearance of the moon below the horizon, the South African Crescent Observers Society’s Maankykers (Afrikaans for moon watchers) are on the clock to spot and announce the crescent moon whether the first day of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan will begin.

For more than 70 years, lunar skykers have stood in the same spot, their gaze anchored to a fixed star on the horizon, before scanning the sky around them.

“Seeing with the naked eye,” says Imam Yusuf Pandy, a petite, bespectacled 82-year-old in a spotless white thobe, black coat and Palestinian keffiyeh draped around his head. He explains the classic Islamic view of the Sunnah, or prophetic tradition, of announcing the beginning of the next month. “Not with a telescope, but with the eye,” says the group’s oldest and longest-serving active member.

Pandy served as chairman of the all-volunteer moonkykers for over 40 years, before handing the position over to Sasman in 2020 and taking on a more honorary role as president. But he hasn’t slowed down, still spending weeks analyzing the maps and astronomical data he’s neatly stored in files at his home in Lansdowne before heading 19km (12 miles) to Three Anchor Bay on the day of the sighting. travels to look at the sky. herself.

The number of moonkykers varies, with males joining and occasionally leaving at different times. Currently about 30 active members are spread over four major viewing sites in the Western Cape. Each month, they dutifully and consistently venture out — “literally rain or shine,” says Sasman — even amid COVID lockdowns, controversies over whether or not to see a moon, or squabbles between communities over the ideal way to get their work to do.

With his eyes still on the horizon, Sasman frowns under half-round glasses and sees more than just a striking sunset. “There’s a thick haze on the horizon, so it’s going to be a bit of a challenge…” He fades away, straightening the Kashmiri shawl on his shoulders and flicking through his phone.

Nearby, Maulana Abdul Khaliq Allie of the Muslim Judicial Council (MJC), the Cape Town body responsible for ensuring a moon sighting complies with Sharia or Islamic law, gets updates from other parts of the country. “They didn’t see anything nationally,” he tells Sasman, “but they did in neighboring countries.”

Behind them, a man rings the adhan, or Islamic call to prayer, and dozens of families who have arrived to witness the sighting take off their shoes, lay their prayer mats on the grass and look northeast toward Mecca.

The moonkykers, some with prayer mats under their arms to use when their main task is completed, creep forward to give the congregation more room – their focus never leaves the sky.

“We have 37 minutes, three minutes have passed. We have to be ready by 7:36 am,” Sasman, who works in his day job as a sharia controller for the MJC’s Halaal Trust, reminds the others before picking up his mobile phone to call the captain of the second viewing site in a nearby lookout point on Signal Hill.