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Eid mubarak to everyone who's been observing Ramadan this past month. Today's topic is one I've been thinking about writing about for a while, and I guess Eid is the excuse I needed to actually do it.
Maida is from Mars, of course, and as we know, there are Muslims on Mars.
So how do things like keeping track of time and space for religious purposes work, in space? Well, the Islamic calendar is based on the moon's orbit around the Earth, so there's no reason for that to change. Muslims celebrate Ramadan at the same time everywhere (or NEARLY the same time everywhere, with some variation based on what time of day it is where you are, and when the new moon can be observed in your area). Elsewhere in the Solar System you won't be able to rely on direct observations of the moon's phases, but it only takes between 3 and 22 minutes for news to arrive on Mars from Earth, so a declaration from Mecca will have to do. Mars' days are 25 hours long, and except for near the poles where weeks without sunrise or sunset would mess everyone up, everyone on Earth uses their local sunrise and sunset to determine their daily routines of prayer and fasting (and eating). Ramadan on Mars will be a day or two shorter, but otherwise the local day cycle should work just fine. Prayers can be directed towards the Earth, which it does take some extra effort to track from a planet where Earth is not always in the same place in the sky, but this shouldn't be difficult. It will impact the architecture of masjids, though, in ways that will probably be interesting.
As for maintaining the calendar in the rest of the Solar System, we'll get to that in a minute.
There is a book that I read a few years ago, Artemis, by Andy Weir, author of The Martian and Project Hail Mary. It lives up to Andy Weir's reputation for his books being the most realistic when it comes to describing the physics and practicalities of near-future space travel. The only way to get a more accurate depiction of how to grow potatoes on Mars, or how to mine aluminum on the Moon, is for someone to try it. The main character in Artemis is a (nonpracticing) Muslima. Her father, who also lives on the Moon, has a scene where he is building a device to help him pray facing Earth, deciding of his own accord, without consulting anyone, to set a new precedent for the right way to do this. This is... not how this works.
Now I am not in any position to criticize a non-Muslim author for choosing to write a Muslim protagonist, when I am literally doing the exact same thing. But reading Artemis I get the strong impression, even with my limited perspective, that Andy listened even less to his sensitivity reader than I did to mine. Jazz, the main character, reads to me like an American rather than someone from Saudi with no American ties. Except for her father, she reads like being Muslim was an afterthought, not a main ingredient of her character design. A quick google search confirms that that's not just me. I think it's fair to say that only a Muslim writer is likely to do a good job of writing a character whose dominant trait (or most important trait to the story) is being Muslim. But I believe there can be a middle ground where an amateur outside observer, a white science fiction author for example, can make being Muslim a part of a fictional character, one that informs who they are, on the way to writing about other things, and without treating it like a palette swap you can make that will have no other impact. A character should be able to be Muslim, without that being their only thing, and without it being nothing.
But more to the point of this current essay, we don't need to invent from whole cloth how to be Muslim in space. Muslims have already done that. Muslims have BEEN in space. At least nine of them, so far. So when I say "the correct way to pray is to face the Earth, if you can, prostrate on the ground unless you're in microgravity, in which case just do your best, maybe tie your feet to the wall so you can make the correct motions without floating away," that's not just me speculating. That's based on precedent. Specifically, the case of Malaysia's first astronaut, Dr. Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, and the fatwa that was written for his benefit by a team of Islamic scholars (so he could be free to "focus on the science" when he was up there). The only original scholarship I'm willing to suggest, and only because it seems self-evident, is that on Mars you should be able to use the planet's own day cycle rather than using the clock from whichever time zone you launched from, which is what the current fatwa says to do.
There is another fatwa, apparently, written by other scholars, warning Muslims not to go to Mars, but it seems to me that that's based on our current technology level making such a mission "suicidal" (their words), and I can't say that's wrong. Don't let Elon Musk put you on a spaceship to Mars. Some day in the far future, when it's safe to do so, I trust that everyone should be able to go to Mars. As the Qu'ran says, “O assembly of Jinn and men! If you can pass beyond the zones of the heavens and the earth, then pass!” (Q. 55:33)