“Estimate it” meant calculation based on the moon’s stations. It is reported that Muhammad ibn Sīrīn said: “I went out on the day of doubt, and everyone I visited from whom knowledge was taken was eating, except one man who performed calculations and relied on them. He would have been better off not knowing how to do so.”

It has been said that this man was Mutarrif ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Shikhkhīr, a man of great standing. Yet if this is authentically reported from him, it is one of the lapses of scholars. This view has also been attributed to Abū al-ʿAbbās ibn Surayj. Some Mālikī scholars attributed to al-Shāfiʿī the view that someone whose method was to draw inferences from the stars and the moon’s stations, who had not established from the stars that the crescent would appear that night, and for whom it was obscured, could resolve to fast, form that intention during the night, and have his fast count as valid. This attribution to al-Shāfiʿī is false and has no basis. Rather, what is reliably transmitted from him is the opposite, in agreement with the scholars generally. It was Ibn Surayj—one of al-Shāfiʿī’s leading followers—who had reported its attribution to him, being the one who championed his school.

These people’s use of Ibn ʿUmar’s hadith as evidence is utterly unsound, especially since Ibn ʿUmar himself narrated that the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said:

“We are an unlettered nation: we neither write nor calculate.”

How, then, could his hadith entail reliance on calculation? These people calculate the moon’s course during that month and its nights. None of them has any consistently reliable method whatsoever. Rather, whatever method they follow is also subject to error. Allah, glorified is He, has not made the crescent’s appearance subject to a uniform calculation; indeed, for sighting it there can be no