Ruet-e-Hilal Committee

Central Ruet-e-Hilal Committee (مرکزی رویتِ ہلال کمیٹی ) of Pakistan is the department which announces the sighting of the new moon. Its head is Mufti Muneeb-ur-Rehman, assisted by 150 observatories of the Pakistan Meteorological Department.

The Central Ruet-e-Hilal Committee was set up in 1974 under a resolution passed by the National Assembly of Pakistan, and so far no rules and regulations for the functioning of the committee have been drafted in writing.

Since its creation in 1974, the status of the Central Ruet-e-Hilal Committee has been controversial as it refused the "Witnesses" (Shahadats) from other sects. Every year at the beginning and at the end of the month of Ramzan, the decisions of new moon sighting by Central Ruet-e-Hilal Committee is criticized in Pakistan. Mufti Shahabuddin Popalzai of Qasim Ali Khan Mosque separately announces the new moon of Ramazan and Shawal every year in Peshawar . Pakistani journalists have on many occasions demanded for adopting new mechanism for the sighting of new moon.

Controversies over moon sighting have plagued Muslim history since the very beginning. Al Majmu, a treatise written by the 13th century Arab scholar Muhyi ad-Din Yahya al-Nawawi, shows the founders of various Islamic schools of jurisprudence, including Imam Shafi and Imam Ahmad bin Hanbal, respectively from the eighth and ninth centuries, to have expressed different opinions on the issue. Shafi put his entire trust in arithmetic and astronomical calculations; Hanbal deemed the physical sighting of the moon mandatory, although he did not see local sighting as necessary — once the moon is sighted anywhere in the Muslim world, every follower of the faith must accept that. Ibn-e-Taymiyya, another 13th century scholar, writing in his Risala fi’l-Hilal (Tract on the Crescent), “...categorically rejects the use of astronomical calculation in determining the lunar month.” Yaqut ibn Abdullah al-Hamawi, a 12th century Arab biographer and geographer of Greek origin, gives the government complete authority in making such decisions. He cites a legal maxim: “Hukm al-hakim ilzamun wa yarfa’ al-khilaf” (decision by a ruler is decisive and erases differences). In the 1920s, the grand mufti at Jamia al-Azhar in Cairo, Shaykh Mustafa Maraghi wrote in a paper that personal testimony of moon sighting cannot be accepted if scientific calculations conclusively prove that a moon sighting was not possible.

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