ROVANIEMI, Finland — How do you observe dawn-to-dusk fasting when there is neither dawn nor dusk?
It’s a question facing a small but growing number of Muslims celebrating the holy month of Ramadan on the northern tip of Europe, where the the sun barely dips below the horizon at this time of year.
In Rovaniemi, a northern Finland town that straddles the Arctic Circle at 66 degrees north, the sun rises around 3:20 a.m. and sets about 11:20 p.m. That means Muslims who observe Ramadan could be required to go without food or drink for 20 hours.
In a few years, Ramadan will begin even closer to the summer solstice in late June, when the sun doesn’t set at all.
“We have to use common sense,” said Mahmoud Said, 27, who came to Finnish Lapland from Kenya three years ago.
To Said, that means following the fasting hours of the nearest Muslim country: Turkey.
“It involves 14 or 15 hours of fasting, which is OK, it’s not bad,” said Said, who works for a nongovernmental organization helping immigrants settle in the area. He estimates there are a little over 100 Muslims in Rovaniemi, mainly from Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan.
There is no unanimity on how to deal with the issue, which is becoming more pressing as more Muslim immigrants find their way to sparsely inhabited areas near the Arctic.
In Alaska, the Islamic Community Center of Anchorage, “after consultation with scholars,” advises Muslims to follow the fasting hours of Mecca, Islam’s holiest city.
The Dublin-based European Council for Fatwa and Research, however, said Muslims need to follow the local sunrise and sunset, even up north.
“The debate on how to do this in the north has been going on for a few years,” said Omar Mustafa, chairman of the Islamic Association of Sweden. “We fast according to the sun. As long as it is possible to tell dusk from dawn. This applies to 90 percent of Sweden’s Muslims.”
The few Muslims who live so far north that they are awash in 24-hour daylight should follow the daylight hours of the closest city in Sweden where they can tell dawn from dusk, he said, noting it is permitted to break the fast for health reasons.
Kaltouma Abakar and her extended family of nine relatives came to Finland from Sudan’s Darfur region four years ago. She opts to observe the local Lapland sunrise and sunset times before breaking the fast in her downtown Rovaniemi apartment.
Kaltouma explains that she gets up early and works until the afternoon, then starts cooking the family’s iftar meal around 5 p.m.
“The time of Ramadan fasting is very long, and breaking the fast can be around 11:30 in the evening. The time you’re supposed to eat your breakfast is 2 o’clock in the morning,” the 31-year-old said.
Apart from the late sunset times, Kaltouma said the lack of Muslim food locally in Rovaniemi can be a challenge. She sometimes has to wait several days for halal meat and other traditional ingredients to come from the larger cities of Oulu, or Helsinki in the south.
The dates of Ramadan change according to the lunar calendar, moving back 11 days each year. That means by 2015 there will be no sunset for a month when Ramadan falls closer to midsummer.
Still, Kaltouma said, “There is going to be at least 10 minutes for us to break the fast.”