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In response to a blog post last month about planned construction of a mosque in Inuvik, Northwest Territories, I received this intriguing comment:
James Snapp, Jr. says:
Hmm. I wonder how they plan to measure the appropriate times for the Islamic daily prayers so close to the Arctic Circle. And what about Ramadan?? The usual rule is, I think, that nothing is to touch one’s mouth from dawn to dusk. So what happens when that’s, like, 23 hours? Just wondering.
Inuvik is north of the Arctic Circle, so, for part of the winter, the sun never rises; conversely, for some time during the summer, the sun never sets. (Inuvik is at 68.37° N latitude, while the Arctic Circle is 66.56° N.)
According to a blog run by two Inuvik residents, this year’s annual Sunrise Festival was celebrated on the evening of 6 January 2008, marking the end of a month without sunshine.
For 30 days, between December 6th and January 6th, the sun does not rise above the horizon. Darkness settles in, with periodic instances of twilight, where things fade from deep black to a quiet gray.
How do Inuvik Muslims know when to observe their five set daily prayers? How can they have the Dawn Prayer or the Sunset Prayer when neither dawn nor sunset occurs between 6 December and 6 January every year?
This completely baffled me, so I searched the internet for information indicating how Muslims living in extreme latitudes know when they’re supposed to pray. I found the mind-boggling answer online in an article entitled “Seeking Mecca in Inuvik”, written by Allen Abel and published in the January-February 2001 issue of Canadian Geographic.
We're not halfway in from the airport when Mr. Emam invites me to join him and his friends for sundown prayers, even though I am not an adherent of Islam.
"How can you have sundown prayers if the sun doesn't go down?" I wonder.
"We looked to the Holy Koran for guidance on this matter," Ebaid Emam says. "We are going by Edmonton time."
Unfortunately, if Mr Abel asked which Sura in the Quran mentions Edmonton, he doesn’t tell us.
Previous related post: Mosque planned for Inuvik
[...] Edmonton is in the Quran? Or how to pray in Muslim when there is no day. [...]
Well, for what it’s worth, the problem isn’t unique to Islam. I remember asking a similar question of an Orthodox Jewish co-worker some two decades ago. I also wanted to know what a Jewish astronaut in orbit would need to do to observe the proper prayer times. I forget what his answers were.