The curious business of moon sighting
When does the holy month of Ramadan begin and end? Who decides? And why is there so much disagreement on the matter?
“Around 20 years ago, my father and I were fasting on the 29th day of Ramadan,” remembers a young Iranian man called Amir. “It was announced that Ramadan would end at noon, right in the middle of the day. I still don’t know how they could see the moon at noon.”
From Beirut to al-Quds: pilgrimage of the soul
The road from Beirut to Jerusalem is long. 235 kilometers of political hurdles, thorny detours, a highway of unbroken history, checkpoints, and an impossibility. But we travel anyway. The city of prayer awaits us with burning candles, incense, the sobs of a church and the lamentations of a mosque.
A phone app will not solve Turkey's domestic abuse problem
A new phone app developed by Vodafone Turkey made headlines this past week. Called the Easy Rescue app, it is designed to allow a woman (or a man, for that matter) who is being threatened or attacked to call for help without alerting her attacker. Although Turkey was the first country to ratify the Council of Europe’s treaty on violence against women, Turkish women are at a depressingly high risk of experiencing domestic violence. An estimated 42% of women over the age of fifteen in Turkey have suffered some kind of domestic abuse of a physical nature.
