Why Pakistan celebrates two Eids every year?

September 12th, 2010 by Shakir Lakhani

For some reason, a cleric in Qasim Masjid in Peshawar has been able to collect about twenty men (having remarkably good eyesight) who claim they saw the moon, when it wasn’t there. This has been going on for over fifty years. I was in Peshawar in 1973, and saw even Eid-al-Azha being observed on two days (the same thing will happen this year).
Can anyone explain how a few people saw the moon when all scientific calculations said it wouldn’t be there? And why it happens every year? I thought this idiosyncrasy would disappear after renaming the province, but apparently it didn’t work. These illiterate clerics simply can’t accept the fact that the sighting of the moon can be predicted accurately (just like solar and lunar eclipses). A lunar calendar (known as the Egyptian calendar) has been in use for 1400 years, and it usually coincides with the actual moon sighting in Makkah every month. Why can’t we use this calendar and dissolve the useless Ruet-e-Hilal committees and save a lot of money?
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