And naturally too. With Muslims around the world -- and they stretch from America to Saudi Arabia to Indonesia -- already on the second day of the obligatory fast (and that was on Sunday), the Muslim population of Bangladesh keeps getting told that the moon has not been sighted anywhere in the country.

Hence, Ramadan will commence on Monday. It is a unique situation here. While previously our Muslims were a mere day behind other Muslims in beginning the fast, now they have fallen a good two days behind. You can be sure that if conditions develop the way they have so far, a time might soon come when our clerics, those who keep us behind those other Muslims, could very well inform us that we can observe Eid-ul-Fitr a day after the twenty-seventh day of Ramadan, if only to catch up with the world's other Muslims. How would that affect the lifestyle of Bengali Muslims? It is, you can bet, a good question. Now try fashioning an answer to it.

And even as you do that, you might want to inquire into the objective reality as it pertains to the observance of Ramadan this year. Quite some years ago, the Islamic Foundation, under more enlightened leadership, suggested, most wisely, that all occasions of religious significance for Muslims, especially those related to the sighting of the moon, be brought into scientific uniformity with the rest of the Islamic world.

The reasoning was simple: if the Saudis, whose monarch remains the custodian of the Kaaba, could devise a scientific method of noting the appearance of the new moon and then go on to observe the related religious occasions, what reason could Bangladesh's Muslims have not to follow the guidelines of the Makkah authorities?

But, no. Here in Bangladesh we have a pretty strange, insular body known as the national moon-sighting committee, whose members have traditionally remained adamant that unless they see the moon with their own eyes (and it does not matter if thousands of others around the world have already spotted it), nothing will happen.

There are now a couple of things which need to be said here. In the first place there is, in the sense of science, nothing called the appearance of the moon. The moon is always out there, in broad daylight and in the deep dark night. It is just that the power of the sun blots out the moon during the day; and cosmic configurations take it out of our range of vision on some nights. So all this talk of the appearance of the new moon, or otherwise, is a matter of relativity.

In the second place, the very modalities upon which the moon sighting committee operates militate against everything modern that has been coming into the Muslim world elsewhere. If Muslims outside Bangladesh decide to go by uniformity, go along with others, and observe Ramadan and other religious occasions together, it simply does not make sense for a handful of clerics to keep Bangladesh's Muslims hostage to their own way of interpreting the way the stars conduct themselves in the heavens. And yet that is precisely what these gentlemen have been doing.

An extremely undeniable fact of life for Muslims today is the positive change that has been coming into their view of faith, and of the world, of late. You may not agree, for your own reasons, to be led in prayer by a woman preacher. Honestly, though, you might sit back, relax and then ask yourself: Why not? Every preacher of the Islamic faith keeps telling you, at every available opportunity, that women hold a place of respect in Islam, that they are indeed equal to men in the eyes of Allah. That being an accepted principle, why can Muslims not have women as preachers?

And then there is this small bit about men and women not being part of one and the same religious congregation. There are seminars on Islam in Indonesia and Malaysia where women take part with men in the academic debate that goes underway, with the result that much good comes from the interaction. In Bangladesh, unfortunately for Muslims who know all there is to know about the faith they pursue, women have carefully been kept in the shadows.

That is not the way in which you pursue faith. You cannot be a follower of a religion and yet persist in giving out all those signs which point to obscurantism. A religion is supposed to be an embodiment of the life force in an individual. It celebrates all the good that takes form and substance in men and women, something the nondescript emperor whom Pope Benedict XVI quoted last week simply forgot in his assessment of Islam.

It is that idea of good which now appears to be caught in a web here in this country. When the fundamentals of faith are subjected to whimsicality, as in the case of when Ramadan begins and when it ought to end, there is something seriously remiss about the system followed by those clerics entrusted with locating the moon somewhere in the sky above our heads. There are, therefore, all the taboos we need to break.

The fiasco over the appearance, or otherwise, of the Ramadan moon ought not to have been there at all. The meteorological department had indeed served notice that the new moon would make an appearance for a couple of minutes on Saturday, a happening that could not be experienced by the naked eye. And, naturally, the naked eye in our state of nature is quite helpless owing to the many turbulences which rush across the heavens.

But why must our clerics assume, only because they have been unable to spot the moon through all those rain-clouds in our skies, that the earth's satellite did not make its expected appearance? Some die-hard, illiberal advocates of the Islamic faith might now point to the injunctions about these religious issues put forth by the Prophet of Islam in his time. Are their interpretations substantive? And there is the other reality as well, which is that it is easy to see the crescent in the skies over Arabia because there are hardly any clouds obscuring the view.

In Bangladesh, weather patterns are quite removed from what they happen to be over Makkah and Madina. The moon, be it noted, does not make its appearance subject to the presence, or otherwise, of dark clouds in the sky. Besides, there is the other unequivocal truth, which is that if in the land of the Prophet modern, and therefore scientific, ways of deciding when religious occurrences must take place can be adopted, who are we to take issue with them? If the Indonesians and the Malaysians, and everyone else, can take the cue from the Saudis, what moral superiority withholds us from joining them? If Islam is a faith the foundations of which are based on a strict upholding of discipline, why must Muslim clerics in Bangladesh seek to opt out of such discipline?

You may or may not observe faith. You may be an agnostic, or you can even abjure religion altogether. That is your personal choice. But what you cannot accept, as you survey the history and principles of religion all around you, is the authority which some men arrogate to themselves where an interpretation of religious principles is concerned.

Bangladesh's Muslims perform Hajj on the same day that other Muslims perform the rite. The birthday of the Holy Prophet is observed in unison all over the globe. If these occasions follow the injunctions of the Islamic faith, why must Ramadan be subjected to things of the bizarre sort? There is, in light of the scandal (for so it is) that has now arisen around the sighting of the Ramadan moon, a clear need for a rethink on the work and composition of the moon sighting committee.

Better still, all Islamic observances should be brought in line with the system which other countries with predominantly Muslim populations have been following across the years. If the centre of Islam is Makkah, it logically follows that everyone who believes he is a Muslim should base his convictions on the essentials of faith as ordained by the Prophet in the land of his birth and death. And that includes this mundane matter of spotting of the Ramadan moon in the sky.

The conclusion is, therefore, brief and sharp: disband the moon sighting committee, for if it stays there is a very real possibility of Ramadan getting increasingly truncated for the Muslims of Bangladesh. When Muslims outside Bangladesh observe Eid ul Fitr this year, their co-religionists here will still be fasting. The peculiarity of the situation is unprecedented.

One last word. If people in government do not take the word of the meteorological department seriously, if a few clerics who keep confusing matters of faith go on being pampered, then why have a meteorological department at all?

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Executive Editor, Dhaka Courier.