Abdur Rahman ibn Yusuf Mangera – Q&A Why do We Follow Saudi for Moon Sighting

Why is it that we always tend to follow Saudi Arabia for the moon

sighting, even though we know there is some controversy

regarding this their source of information that you will have to

for that, you'll have to actually ask the people that follow Saudi

Arabia for that, ask them their reasons. Personally, that's not my

opinion, though. For the sake of unity, I will do eight with

everybody else, because I was an imam in the masjid that followed

Saudi, so then I would do that just for the sake of unity. But

why they do it, that's something that you have to ask the people

who, personally the reason is that initially, many, many years ago,

they used to follow Morocco. But at that time, communication was

complicated. And they wouldn't receive information quick enough.

Then slowly, slowly, more and more people started going for Amara,

during the month of Ramadan and for Hajj, and communication became

easier, three years, three hours before is where they were, you

know, their sunset is. So people started saying, Oh, we're doing

Ramadan, here, we're doing Ramadan, you know, it's eat

tomorrow, it's the moon has been seen here. So they've, they

started following that. And now it's very difficult for most

people to change, there is a increasing movement to move away

from Saudi Arabia. But at the end of the day, it's going to take a

while what you have to realize, just from a social perspective, is

that when people have been following something for a very,

very long time, it's very difficult to make that change. And

mostly, you can never make a change, especially when you're not

living in an Islamic Heroku Islamic rule where they could

implement whatever they want. It's a case where everybody has the

right to do what they want. So they exercise that, right. So if

they've been all following the same thing for many, many years,

and now for them to be told that you're totally wrong, it puts into

question all the previous years, it's very difficult for a lot of

people to handle. And then some of the people unfortunately, that are

pushing and encouraging the idea that we need to move away from

Saudi Arabia, they're sometimes they go very extreme in the way

they do this. So it puts the other people off and it just makes them

more defensive and makes them dig their heels further into the

ground. So I do have seen though, I have seen though, that it's just

slowly slowly it is moving towards you know, looking for the first

credible Moon sighting wherever it be from the world. And it's going

to take a while though. It's going to take a while for that to come

in. If it ever if it does, inshallah.