Lol, it was like the longest comment I ever wrote.

I think my main point revolved around the issue of trust.

Shayke Sulaiman Ghani does some excellent presetations around moonsighting. I can’t tell the difference between the waxing and waning moon. This is largely the case with Muslims today, we are unlike the bedioun described in the Hadith of the Prophet (saw).

Which leaves it to various hilal commitees, who have a global cross-organisational presence to try to ascertain the moon globally. But then trust comes into issue again. Maybe internally they can disparage and attest to the qualities of their members. Otherwise, it leaves most to head towards to the Saudi’s - who are the nearest thing to a global authority for the Muslims.

Naturally - and proven so - that the Saudi’s can’t really be trusted. So Muslims are concentrating much on calculations and locality based sightings. Both though are strongly intertwined with issues of expediency. Govts use scholars to overly push calculation based fiqh, primarily to help set dates for national calenders and economic interests. Local sightings, might appear easy for homogenous landmasses like North America or the Indian Subcontinent, but falls apart in Europe due distinctions of being a British, French or Dutch Muslims.

In the end, a centralised Muslim authority i.e. Khilafah, that has the corresponding trust and leadership globally across the Ummah, is the clearest solution (though undoubtably will face issues to).

Allah knows best.

Your brother.

Afs-M, could you resubmit that comment if possible, b/c my blog system seems to have eaten it.