Clarification 39 - The Back-Door Almanac

Part of Alban Fejza: Refutations - The "Clarifications"

I. His Conclusions, and How He Reaches Them

Clarification 39 publishes a Ramadan calendar for the century, and behind it, a discovery: "the exact definition of the new moon" has been sitting in 2:189 all along. To reach it, he retranslates the verse: "it is not right (for the new moons) to enter nights from noon, but right is to be cautious, and enter nights from their (night entrance) sunset." The translators who render the verse's second half as houses, back doors, and front doors are, he explains, reading "out of context... relying on common Arabic language," whereas "the best Arabic Standard is the Quran" - so buyut should be read via bayatan ("night," 7:4 and others), zuhur via 24:58 ("noon"), and bab via 15:14 ("sky gate"). Out of this comes the rule: Ramadan starts on the first night when the moon sets at least 3 minutes after sunset, the "be cautious" clause means "choose the later date when you are unsure," and the rival "Lunar Conjunction definition" is dismissed as "imaginary lines in deep space... measured from noon, not from sunset." The method he demands - the Quran as its own dictionary - is a good method. Below, it is applied to his verse, word by word, with the concordance open.

II. The Verse Already Has a Header

Here is 2:189 in the translation this ministry claims to defend, under Rashad's header "Do Not Beat Around the Bush": "They ask you about the phases of the moon! Say, 'They provide a timing device for the people, and determine the time of Hajj.' It is not righteous to beat around the bush; righteousness is attained by upholding the commandments and by being straightforward. You shall observe GOD, that you may succeed." And here is Rashad's footnote on the same verse: "The literal Quranic idiom says: 'Do not enter the homes through the back doors.' The question about the phases of the moon is an example of beating around the bush; there were bad ulterior motives behind this question." Note what the footnote does: it certifies, in writing, that the homes and the back doors are the literal text - and then explains the idiom. So when Clarification 39 announces that translators who see houses and doors are reading "out of context," the translator in the dock is Rashad Khalifa, footnote and all. This series has seen the pattern before, but rarely this clean: a "clarification" whose entire yield is a rewrite of one verse, against the rendering, the header, and the explicit footnote of the very translation its author claims to be continuing. The verse's first half - a timing device for the people and the Hajj - is not in dispute; Clarification 37's refutation quoted it approvingly. Everything new in this Clarification lives in the second half, behind the back doors.

III. The Grammar Refuses the Job

Before the dictionary, the verbs. His translation makes the new moons the actor: "it is not right (for the new moons) to enter nights." The Arabic is an ta'tu al-buyut - and ta'tu is a second person plural verb: "that you enter." The corpus morphology tags it plainly - the verb ata with the plural-you suffix - and the verse then repeats the act as a direct command: wa'tu al-buyut min abwabiha, an imperative, "and enter them by their doors." Commands are addressed to people; nobody commands a moon. To make his reading work, the verse's "you" must quietly become "the new moons" - a subject swap no parsing of the Arabic permits. The possessives collapse next: the text says zuhuri-ha and abwabi-ha - "their backs," "their doors," the pronoun pointing at the houses just named. In his reading the anchor evaporates: nights that possess noons, night-entrances that possess sunsets - his own gloss has to insert "(night entrance)" in parentheses to hold the sentence together. And the clause he converts into scheduling advice - "be cautious, meaning choose the later date" - is ittaqa, which the verse itself repeats three words later with a direct object: wa-ttaqu Allah - "You shall observe GOD," in Rashad's rendering. Caution toward a calendar cannot take God as its object; taqwa can, and does, in the same breath.

IV. His Own Dictionary, Run Honestly

Now run his announced method - "the best Arabic Standard is the Quran" - through the concordance, honestly. Buyut: the word in 2:189 is the plural of bayt, house - a lemma the Quran uses 69 times. It is the spider's home in 29:41 - "the flimsiest of all homes is the home of the spider" - the "settle down in your homes" of 33:33, the house whose doors the lady locked in 12:23. His counter-citations - 7:4, 4:81, 27:49 and the rest - are a different word: the verb bayyata and its noun bayatan, "by night," a lemma occurring three times. Two dictionary entries; he read one through the other. Zuhur: the word in 2:189 is the plural of zahr, back - 25 occurrences, as in 6:31, "They will carry loads of their sins on their backs." The noon-word he cites from 24:58, al-zahirah, occurs in the whole Quran exactly once - he defined the 25-times word by the once-word. Bab: door or gate in all 27 occurrences - Joseph's closed doors (12:23), the gates of Hell (39:72), and yes, 15:14 - where the "sky" belongs to the next word in the verse, min al-sama', not to bab itself. He harvested an adjacent noun and grafted it onto the word. By his own standard, applied without a thumb on the scale, 2:189's second half reads: you, people, enter the houses by their doors - exactly what every translator, Rashad included, has always found there.

V. Precision Theater, and the Method He Mocked

The rule itself then needs a patch within a paragraph of being declared "calculable, precise, Quranic": three minutes are added so the whole lunar disc clears the horizon. The moon's half-degree disc takes about 2.1 minutes to set at the equator, 3.0 at latitude 45°, 4.2 at 60° - his "about three minutes" is a mid-latitude approximation dressed as a constant, in a definition sold as exact. His dismissal of the alternative is stranger: lunar conjunction, he says, is "imaginary lines in deep space... measured from noon, not from sunset." Conjunction is not measured from anything - it is an instant, the moment sun and moon share a celestial longitude; the only noon in its vicinity is the astronomers' old convention of starting the Julian day at noon, a bookkeeping habit with no role in defining the event. But the real cost of that jab is who it hits. The published rule of Rashad's own community, on the masjidtucson site, reads: "A lunar month always starts from the night which starts at sunset... If the new moon is born before the sunset of the day it is born, the new month begins from the sunset of that day. If the new moon is born after the sunset... the new month begins from the sunset of the next day" - with sighting expressly not required: "there is no need for trying to sight the crescent of the moon to start fasting." The method he mocks as deep-space imagination is the calculated, sunset-anchored conjunction rule of the messenger he claims to continue - possessing, by name, both virtues his video advertises. And what does his replacement compute? Moonset lagging sunset is the oldest crescent-visibility proxy there is - a calculated version of the sighting camp he opens by deriding. Between the two camps he mocks, he has built the compromise: sighting's criterion, calculation's tools - and a century of "unified" dates delivered as regression maps whose twenty boundary points per year exist precisely because his rule gives different dates in different places, while the conjunction rule he ridiculed yields one astronomical moment for the whole planet.

VI. What Survives - and What the Rest Is For

Peer review, honestly given. The months are lunar and the moon is the timing device - that is the undisputed first half of 2:189, affirmed across this series. Calculation over sighting is also right - and already the standing position of Rashad's community, published at Masjid Tucson long before this video; the true parts of the Clarification are, once again, the borrowed parts. The fasting frame he mentions matches Rashad exactly - "You may eat and drink until the white thread of light becomes distinguishable from the dark thread of night at dawn. Then, you shall fast until sunset" (2:187) - and the data engineering in the acknowledgments (USNO and HM Nautical Almanac data, fitted maps) is respectable work. But it is respectable work downstream of a manufactured premise. The one new thing this Clarification contains is a retranslation of a single verse - against its rendering, against its header, against a footnote that certifies the literal text he calls a mistranslation, against the verse's own second-person grammar, and against the Quran-as-dictionary method he himself announced, which, run honestly, returns houses, backs, and doors at 69, 25, and 27 occurrences. The verse he rebuilt into an almanac spends its second half teaching one lesson: come at things straight - through the front door. Rashad put it on the header line: Do Not Beat Around the Bush. A calendar that can only be reached through the back of a rewritten verse has answered its own question.

See also the pattern across his material: The Underlying Issue.