Srinagar: How Pakistani announcement of the Dhul-Hijjah moon reaches Kashmir before the moon does, why the Shia community is being mocked for following its own tradition correctly, and what the absence of a local Hilal committee reveals about a political project dressed in religious clothing.
The moon of Dhul-Hijjah, the twelfth and final month of the Islamic lunar calendar, is not an ordinary moon. Its sighting determines the first day of the month, which in turn determines the Day of Arafah, the most sacred day in the Hajj calendar, and then Eid ul-Adha, the Festival of Sacrifice, observed by over a billion Muslims across the world. The stakes, spiritually and practically, could not be higher. It is, accordingly, a moon that demands the most rigorous process of verification. And it is precisely this moon that Pakistani Central Ruet-e-Hilal Committee has, in recent years, taken to announcing at midnight.
In 2021, the announcement by the committee came at approximately 11:30 PM Pakistani Standard Time, which translates to 12:00 AM in Kashmir. The meteorological office, in a rare moment of institutional candour, had earlier in the same evening stated that there was little to no chance of the crescent being sighted that night. Astronomical calculations, which are not infallible guides to religious observance but are reliable indicators of basic physical possibility, confirmed the same conclusion: the elongation of the moon from the sun, its altitude above the horizon at sunset, and the duration of its visibility window were all, by conventional criteria, insufficient for naked-eye detection. The crescent, as a matter of physics, was not there to be seen.
This year as usual, the announcement came anyway. Pakistan declared Eid ul-Adha holidays from June 27. Kashmir, as it has done for decades, followed. The shopping was done early. The animals were prepared. The valley is all set to celebrate with Lahore. Not with Delhi. Not with its own sky.
This is the annual ritual at the heart of a question that Kashmir has never been permitted to ask openly: whose moon is this, and who decided that it belonged to Pakistan?
Any serious engagement with the moon-sighting dispute in Kashmir must begin with coordinates. Srinagar sits at approximately 34.07 degrees north latitude. Kargil, the Ladakhi town roughly a hundred and sixty kilometres to the east, sits at 34.55 degrees north. Lahore, from which the announcements come, sits at 31.52 degrees north.
The difference of nearly two and a half degrees between Lahore and Srinagar is not trivial in observational astronomy. Sunset times differ. Moonset times differ. The precise geometry of the crescent position relative to the horizon differs. More importantly, the atmospheric environment differs enormously. Lahore sits in the Indo-Gangetic plain, one of the most heavily polluted airsheds in the world. Crop burning in Punjab, industrial emissions, vehicular exhaust, and dust from the Thar desert conspire to create, especially in the period around Dhul-Hijjah, atmospheric conditions deeply hostile to the observation of a thin crescent moon hanging just above the western horizon in fading evening light. A crescent that is astronomically marginal under clear skies becomes effectively invisible under a layer of fine particulate matter.
Kargil is a different world. At high altitude in the rain-shadow of the Great Himalayan range, it sits in air so thin and transparent that astrophotographers travel from across the subcontinent to use it. The skies above the Suru Valley and the surrounding Ladakhi highlands are, by any objective measure, among the finest observational environments in South Asia. If the purpose of moon-sighting is to actually sight the moon, Kargil is not merely a good option for Kashmir. It is the obvious one. It shares the latitude of Kashmir, its sunset geometry, its celestial horizon. What is visible from Kargil on a given evening is precisely what would be visible, conditions permitting, from the rooftops of Srinagar.
When no observer in Kargil, or in Srinagar, or anywhere in the Kashmir Valley saw the Dhul-Hijjah crescent on the evening of its supposed Pakistani sighting, this was not a coincidence or a collective failure of observation. The moon that Pakistan announced was not a moon that Kashmiri skies contained. Astronomical tables do not make theological rulings, but they do establish what is physically possible. In 2021, what Pakistan announced was not physically possible. That the announcement was made anyway, and that Kashmir largely followed it, tells us something that has nothing to do with the moon.
A Committee That Does Not Exist
India, as a republic, has never established a Ruet-al-Hilal Committee for Jammu and Kashmir. The absence of such an institution is, in the context of everything else, quite remarkable. The state has invested enormous resources in its administration, its security, and its political management. Yet the basic question of who determines the Islamic lunar calendar for the Muslim population has been left, with remarkable consistency, unanswered at the official level.
Vacuums of authority do not remain empty. The vacuum left by the indifference to this question has been filled, over the decades since Partition, by a network of informal religious authority whose centre of gravity lies not in Srinagar but in Lahore, Rawalpindi, and Islamabad. Pakistani religious institutions, patronised and in critical ways directed by the Pakistani state, have maintained a steady and carefully cultivated presence in the spiritual infrastructure of the Kashmir Valley. The Offices of several Grand Mufti’s, various mosque committees, Darul Uloom-affiliated seminaries, and the web of clerical relationships that connect Kashmiri religious leaders to Pakistani counterparts have ensured that, when the moon is announced, it is the Pakistani moon that Kashmir follows.
This arrangement has served the strategic purposes of Pakistan with remarkable efficiency. The Pakistani state does not need to win a military or diplomatic argument about the status of Kashmir if it can simply make the religious calendar of Kashmir answer to Islamabad. Every year that Kashmir celebrates Eid with Pakistan and not with India is, in the symbolic grammar of the Kashmir dispute, a small victory. The calendar itself becomes a form of political possession. And it costs nothing. It requires no soldiers, no diplomats, no formal institutional machinery. It requires only the continued absence of a credible Indian alternative, and the continued dependence of Kashmiri religious life on cross-border authority.
That this arrangement has persisted for as long as it has is a failure of imagination on the part of the Indian state, a failure of scrutiny on the part of Kashmiri civil society, and a considerable achievement for Pakistan's soft-power apparatus.
Loyal to India, Paid by India, Deferring to Pakistan
Among the more disquieting features of this landscape is the conduct of a segment of Kashmiri religious and political leadership whose relationship with the Indian state is, to put it plainly, one of financial and institutional dependence, and whose religious loyalties run nevertheless in the opposite direction. These are not separatists operating from Muzaffarabad or Rawalpindi. These are clerics and community leaders who sit on government bodies, draw government salaries, attend government functions, and accept government honours. And when the moon is announced from Lahore at midnight, they follow it.
The phenomenon is not entirely mysterious. In a valley where public religious identity has for decades been intertwined with political positioning, following the Pakistani moon announcement has acquired the character of a cultural marker of a particular kind of Kashmiri Muslim identity, one that is distinct from the secular Kashmiri nationalism of earlier generations and distinct also from the quietist pro-integration position of other communities. It is a way of saying, without saying it, that the spiritual heart lies elsewhere, even if the salary comes from the same government that administers the roads and the courts and the schools. The contradiction is lived with, apparently, without great discomfort.
What makes this particularly striking in the context of the recent Dhul-Hijjah sighting is that the argument for following Pakistan is, in this case, not even a theological one. There is no school of Islamic jurisprudence, Sunni or Shia, that requires a Muslim living in Kashmir to treat the Pakistani Ruet-e-Hilal Committee as the authoritative body for determining their religious calendar. The classical debate about whether a moon sighting in one location is valid for Muslims elsewhere is a genuine jurisprudential discussion, and scholars differ on it. But none of those scholars were contemplating a situation in which a neighbouring state announces a midnight sighting under conditions that its own meteorological office had declared physically improbable, and expects the announcement to be accepted uncritically by communities whose sky told them a different story. Following this particular announcement, under these particular circumstances, is not Islamic jurisprudence. It is politics.
That individuals on the payroll of the Indian state are participating in this politics, year after year, is a fact that deserves more scrutiny than it typically receives.
What Shia Jurisprudence Actually Requires
Into this contested landscape has come, in recent weeks, a voice that insists, with considerable precision, on the actual requirements of its tradition: A local Shia moon-sighting committee established by Imran Ansari led All J&K Shia Association, which has established its own process and begun conducting independent observations. Ansari has, for long and since decades remained pro-Indian, including his late father, Iftikhar Ansari, a stalwart leader who challenged the authority of Abdullahs.
The Shia jurisprudential standard for establishing the new crescent is not ambiguous. It requires the testimony of two witnesses who are just, upright, and morally reliable. They must have personally sighted the moon. The sighting must have been accomplished with the naked eye. No telescopes, no binoculars, no astronomical calculations, and no testimony from another country. The testimony of a single man, however respected, does not meet the threshold. The calculations of astronomers, however sophisticated, do not substitute for actual visual observation. This is not a minor procedural requirement. It is the evidentiary core of the entire practice, designed with the explicit purpose of preventing manipulation and ensuring that the calendar is grounded in real, witnessed, physical reality.
When the Shia committee states that it did not receive the testimony of two qualifying witnesses who had personally sighted the Dhul-Hijjah crescent over the Kashmir horizon, it is not making a political statement. It is making a legal one, in the most precise sense of religious law. It is saying that the conditions its tradition requires have not been met. And if those conditions have not been met, the month cannot be declared.Click Here To Follow Our WhatsApp ChannelThis is the tradition working exactly as it was designed to work.
The question that this raises about the midnight Pakistani announcement is a simple one: if no observer in Kashmir saw the moon, if no observer in Kargil's exceptionally clear skies saw the moon, if the meteorological office had forecast negligible probability of sighting, and if astronomical calculations confirmed that the crescent was beneath the threshold of naked-eye visibility, then who were the two just, upright, personally witnessing male observers in Pakistan? Where were they standing? What horizon were they watching? And why, if the moon was so clearly visible, did not a single observer in the far more observationally advantaged skies of Kashmir and Ladakh independently confirm the sighting?
These are not hostile questions. They are the exact questions that Islamic jurisprudence, both Shia and Sunni, has always demanded be answered before a lunar month can be declared.
Mocked for Getting It Right
The insistence of the Shia community on its own committee and its own standards of evidence has not been met, in significant quarters, with theological engagement. It has been met with mockery. Social media, predictably, has provided the arena. The decision to observe Eid ul-Adha on a different day from the majority, based on the absence of valid witness testimony for the crescent over their own sky, has been characterised as divisive, as politically motivated, as an expression of disloyalty to the broader Kashmiri Muslim identity.
Some of the criticism has come from figures who profess a general commitment to Islamic unity while endorsing a moon-sighting process that would not survive ten minutes of scrutiny under the evidentiary standards of any classical school of Islamic law.
There is a particular irony in this. The Shia community is being attacked for demanding the highest standard of religious evidence before declaring a sacred day. Those attacking them are defending a system that produced, in 2021, a midnight announcement that contradicted both meteorological forecasting and astronomical calculation, issued by a state body whose independence from political instruction no serious analyst would uncritically assert. The accusation of political motivation is being levelled, in other words, by those whose own practice is saturated with a politics they have simply ceased to recognise as such.
The Kashmiri Shia community has historically maintained a different political orientation from the Sunni majority of the Valley on the question of the independence movement and relations with India. This is a documented, longstanding fact of Kashmiri political life. The community has, by and large, participated more fully in the democratic processes of the Indian state, maintained a greater degree of public distance from armed separatism, and expressed, through its religious and political leadership, a general preference for integration over uncertainty. This record of pro-India orientation is now being used against it. The lunar independence of Kashmiri Shias is being read, in the logic of the critic, as another expression of that orientation. As if following one's own jurisprudence correctly is a political act, but following the Pakistani state body is not.
It is worth noting also that a segment of Shia organisations in Kashmir has, in this environment, chosen to follow the Pakistani announcement rather than the findings of one of their own. The motivations are understandable at the human level: the desire to celebrate with family across sectarian lines, the social cost of visible difference, the weight of long habit. But the theological position these organisations adopt when they do this is not a neutral one. They are choosing social conformity over the specific evidentiary requirements of their own tradition. They are, in effect, conceding that the declaration of the moon is a social and political matter first, and a religious one second. This concession is precisely what the independent Shia committee was established to resist.
The Midnight Call and What It Reveals
Return to the evening of that 2021 announcement. The meteorological office has forecast little chance of sighting.
Astronomical calculations confirm that the visibility of the crescent parameters are below standard thresholds. The evening passes. Observers across Kashmir scan a western horizon that gives them nothing. And then, as the clock approaches midnight, Pakistani Central Ruet-e-Hilal Committee assembles and, at approximately 11:30 PM Pakistani Standard Time, announces that the moon has been sighted and that Eid ul-Adha will fall the following morning.
The crescent moon is visible only in the period immediately following sunset. On a day when the new moon is born in the afternoon, the crescent sets roughly forty to seventy minutes after the sun. By 11:30 PM, or 12:00 AM Indian time, the moon has been below the horizon for hours. The idea that a credible naked-eye sighting of the Dhul-Hijjah crescent was made and verified by two upright witnesses and reported to a committee and confirmed and announced at midnight is not a theological position one can hold with a straight face. It is an impossibility. It could not have happened because it cannot happen. The moon does not stay up that late on its first evening.
What actually happened is less mysterious than it is dispiriting. The committee, meeting under pressure and presumably receiving testimony from witnesses whose accounts were either exaggerated, mistaken, or fabricated, announced a sighting that the sky did not support. Why? The honest answer is that the timing of Eid ul-Adha is a matter of considerable political sensitivity in the relationship of Pakistan with Kashmir. An Eid that falls on the same date as India is an Eid that symbolically aligns Kashmir with India. An Eid that falls one day earlier, announced by Pakistan at midnight in defiance of meteorological probability, is an Eid that symbolically separates them. The calendar, once again, is a flag.
This is what Pakistani lunar propaganda machinery looks like in practice. It is not sophisticated. It does not need to be. It requires only a committee willing to accept dubious testimony under political pressure, a Pakistani media ecosystem willing to amplify the announcement without scrutiny, and a Kashmir religious establishment sufficiently habituated to deference that it will follow the announcement even when its own sky tells a different story. These three ingredients have, for years, been reliably available.
The solution to this situation is not complicated. It is, in fact, obvious. Kashmir requires a properly constituted, formally recognised, locally grounded Hilal committee with the institutional authority to conduct moon-sighting observations and issue declarations that are both religiously valid and practically binding for Kashmir.
Kargil is the natural reference point for such observations. At 34.55 degrees north, it shares the celestial geometry of Kashmir. Its altitude and atmospheric clarity make it one of the finest naked-eye observational sites in the subcontinent. A trained team of observers stationed at appropriate locations in Kargil, operating under a clear protocol derived from Islamic jurisprudential requirements, reporting to a committee that includes qualified religious scholars from across the sectarian communities of Kashmir, would produce moon-sighting determinations that are simultaneously astronomically credible and jurisprudentially sound. They would produce determinations based on what was actually seen, or not seen, in the sky that Kashmir actually inhabits.
The contrast with following Lahore would be immediate and stark. Kargil, under clear skies, cannot see what Lahore did not see either. But Kargil also cannot be instructed to announce at midnight. Kargil does not have a state to serve. Kargil has only a horizon and, on the right evening, a crescent.
For the Kashmiri Shia community, whose jurisprudence already demands the exact kind of direct, verified, naked-eye witness testimony that a Kargil-based observation would provide, such a committee would not merely be convenient. It would be the fulfilment of what their tradition has always required. The current independence of the Shia Community is valuable and brave, but it operates in an environment without institutional recognition or the weight of state backing. A formally constituted committee, drawing on observations from Kargil and operated according to a transparent, publicly explained jurisprudential standard, would give that independence the institutional grounding it deserves.
The religious scholars of Kashmir, of all communities, but especially those who have already demonstrated the intellectual honesty to apply their own jurisprudence rigorously rather than deferring to political convenience, have an obligation to push for this. The Indian state, which has for too long been content to let the lunar calendar remain in Pakistani hands, has both an interest and a responsibility to facilitate it.
The Loyalty the Sky Reveals
There is something clarifying about the moon. It is the same object for everyone. It follows the same orbital mechanics whether one is in Srinagar or Lahore, whether one is a Sunni or a Shia, whether one is pro-India or pro-Pakistan. It does not adjust its position to accommodate political preference. When it is not visible, it is not visible. When an institution announces it at midnight, the institution is lying, or being lied to, and the distinction, in this context, barely matters.
Kashmiri Shia community, in refusing to celebrate Eid ul-Adha based on an announcement that the sky above them did not support, was not making a political statement. It was insisting on a religious fact: that the moon had not been seen, that the requirements of its tradition had not been met, and that the Festival of Sacrifice should be observed when it is actually the Festival of Sacrifice and not a day before, because a state institution in Lahore decided that the politics of the situation required it.
This insistence has been met with mockery and accusations of division. The mockers are, in the main, people who have inherited a system of cross-border religious deference so thoroughly normalised that they have ceased to examine it. They are people for whom celebrating with Pakistan is simply what Kashmiri Muslims do, and for whom any departure from that custom reads as transgression rather than faithfulness. They are, in many cases, people drawing Indian government salaries while observing Islamic festivals on Pakistani government schedules, and who do not find this arrangement strange.
It is strange. It is, in fact, deeply strange. And the fact that a portion of the Kashmiri Muslim community, led by its Shia scholars and moon-sighting committee, has begun to say so openly, based not on political argument but on the specific, rigorous, centuries-old evidentiary requirements of their own jurisprudential tradition, is not a source of division. It is a source of clarity.
The moon is visible from Kargil. The sky above Kashmir is clear enough to see it. All that has been required, all along, is for someone to look.
The author writes on religion, politics, and identity in South Asia.