The Moon
&
the Sun

So how come the muslim months can be a different length

and a different time of year

to the months that we are used to?

How is this possible?

Well, it all comes about because

the seasons are linked to the way that the earth goes around the sun,

and the months in Scotland have different numbers of days

to make it work out that twelve months are the same length as a year.

Well, almost,

as we have to add an extra day every four years to make it work,

and we call those years with an extra day Leap Years.

You see, the muslim months don't follow the sun, but follow the moon

from which the months get their name,

they just lost an 'o' somewhere along the way.

But the moon is not a ball of fire like the sun,

but a ball of rock like the earth,

with no light of its own,

just reflecting the light of the sun back down upon the earth,

and we can see the difference in the sky each night.

Because

as the moon goes around the earth, sometimes the moon is between the earth and the sun

and all the light it gets from the sun is on the side that faces away from us,

so it has no light by which we can see it.

We call that time of the month New Moon,

when the night skies are dark apart from the stars.

And sometimes the moon is on the opposite side of the earth to the sun,

and the whole disc of the moon shines in sunlight,

and we call that the Full Moon.

And between those two events,

night by night, we can see the light slowly move

across the face of the moon in what we call phases.

From a thin crescent

to half-moon,

to full-moon,

down through the other half,

until the final thin crescent disappears into

the phase of the new moon.

And the muslim months change from one to another

each time the moon goes once around the earth,

but twelve of those months doesn't quite add up to the length of a year.

Twelve moon months are about eleven days short of an earth year,

which means that compared to earth years each muslim year starts eleven days earlier than the year before,

moving through the seasons until it returns to the season where it started thirty three years earlier.

Which sounds complicated, but is easy to see in the sky above us.

Each muslim month begins when the moon's first crescent appears after having been invisible during New Moon,

and all through their history muslims have looked to the night sky to tell which month it is.

And as they look to the sky, they remember the words of the Qur'an

that tell us that the sun, moon and stars, are more than just balls of rock and fire.

They are signs of God