u/Amazing_Deer_899

You can already see the points in the info-graphic diagram picture above, but I would like to write my thoughts as well.

Lately I’ve been looking more into the old Arab calendar system and the whole discussion around the Nasīʾ (intercalary/leap month), and honestly the more I look into it, the more I feel like a lunisolar calendar makes far more sense for Ramadan than the purely lunar calendar we use today.

Before anyone misunderstands me: I’m not a Quranist. I’m Sunni. I’m not claiming “everyone got Islam wrong” or saying I reject Ramadan as Muslims practice it today. I’m just talking about something I genuinely find intellectually interesting and difficult to ignore once you start thinking about it. Even Mufti Abu Layth has discussed the topic and pointed toward the old Arab calendar possibly being lunisolar before the Nasīʾ (leap month) system disappeared (despite him being a Sunni just like me).

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One thing that always puzzled me is how Ramadan today completely rotates through every season. Sometimes it falls in winter with short, cool fasting days. Other times it falls in peak summer where people fast 18–20+ hours. During the Summer solstice, In some northern countries like Norway or Sweden the sun barely sets at all and you have to fast for around 20 hours, while in some southern regions like Australia, Argentina, South Africa fasting can be shorter than 12 hours at the exact same time.

That creates a situation where Ramadan can become radically different depending on geography and historical timing. One generation experiences relatively moderate fasting for most of their lives, while another generation experiences extremely long and exhausting fasts for decades.

And then there’s the polar issue. During parts of the year, regions near the North and South poles can experience 24 hours of daylight or darkness. Modern scholars have had to create all kinds of workaround fatwas because the calendar itself no longer aligns naturally with balanced daylight conditions. That alone makes me wonder whether something about the original system changed historically.

The theory is basically this:

The pre-Islamic Arabs used a lunar calendar, but every few years they inserted an additional month (Nasīʾ) to realign the lunar months with the solar seasons (it was the leap month, just like February being the leap year in contemporary Gregorian calendar). Similar systems existed among other ancient peoples too. This would keep months tied to consistent seasons instead of endlessly rotating backward through the solar year.

If that’s true, then Ramadan may originally have remained around the same seasonal window every year instead of drifting across all seasons.

And honestly, when you think about Ramadan specifically, that actually solves a huge number of problems.

If Ramadan stayed around the September–October equinox period, fasting conditions globally would become far more balanced. Day and night around the world become much closer in length during the equinoxes. You don’t get the massive seasonal extremes you see during summer or winter solstice periods.

Instead of some Muslims fasting 8 hours while others fast 20 hours, most of the world would be fasting something closer to a relatively moderate and stable range.

It would also largely avoid the absurd polar daylight problem where entire regions have almost no sunset or sunrise at certain times of the year.

And also from a practical perspective, a stable Ramadan season also creates a much more predictable rhythm for life, worship, sleep, work, travel, and community practices every year instead of Ramadan constantly shifting into entirely different climatic realities.

• What makes this even more fascinating to me is that many of the Arabic month names themselves seem seasonal in nature. Rabi‘ literally relates to spring. Ramadan is often linked linguistically to intense heat or the end of summer heat. Some researchers argue these names only really make sense if the months originally stayed attached to particular seasons.

I’m not saying I know for certain that this theory is correct. But I do think it deserves way more discussion than it gets.

Because when you compare the two systems side-by-side, the lunisolar model seems dramatically more coherent for Ramadan from both a practical and global perspective.

Even Hajj becomes interesting to think about under this lens. Under the current purely lunar system, Hajj rotates through every season imaginable, including periods of brutal Arabian summer heat. But under a lunisolar system, pilgrimage would remain anchored to a stable climatic season every year.

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So why don't we revert back to that Luni-Solar calendar system?

This guy is so annoying

Extreme gender segregation was not originally a defining feature of the earliest Muslim community. The historical evidence shows something much more gradual and complex: early Islam emerged in a society where women were visibly present in communal religious life, while stricter forms of segregation developed over centuries through changing political, urban, and legal cultures.

During the Prophet Muhammad’s lifetime, women attended the mosque regularly. They prayed in the same mosque as men without walls, curtains, or separate rooms dividing them. The rows were organized, with men in front and women behind, but that is very different from the later idea that women should be hidden away entirely or excluded from public religious participation. Women asked questions publicly, debated legal matters, transmitted hadith, participated in trade, and even accompanied military campaigns as medics and support staff.

A historical study by Nevin Reda examining women in mosques states that for the period 610–634 CE, meaning the Prophet’s lifetime, “there does not appear to be any evidence of segregation.” The study instead concludes that women had “full access” to the mosque during this earliest period. https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/view/504

This aligns with the Qur’an itself. Qur’an 9:71 describes believing men and women as mutual allies who collectively uphold moral and religious responsibility:

“The believing men and believing women are allies of one another. They enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong…”

https://quran.com/9/71

That is not the language of total social separation. It presents men and women as participants in a shared religious and moral community.

The hadith literature also reflects this atmosphere. In Sahih Muslim, the Prophet reportedly said:

“Do not prevent your women from going to the mosque.”

https://sunnah.com/muslim:442b

This is significant because it directly contradicts the later assumption that women’s presence in mosques or communal religious life is somehow inherently improper. Even when some later narrations recommend prayer at home for women, the foundational principle in the early sources remains permission and participation, not exclusion or disappearance from public space.

The stronger culture of segregation becomes much more visible later, especially during the Umayyad and Abbasid periods. As the Muslim empire expanded into Byzantine and Persian territories, elite urban customs surrounding women, seclusion, and class status increasingly influenced Muslim society. Historians have long noted that upper-class Byzantine and Sassanian societies already practiced forms of female seclusion before Islam, and these customs gradually became absorbed into parts of Muslim imperial culture.

Historian Leila Ahmed argues that the earliest Muslim society was socially far more open toward women than the later Abbasid world. She writes that the Abbasid social order became “markedly more negative toward women” and that these later social attitudes strongly shaped Islamic legal interpretation and gender norms.

https://islamicstudies.stanford.edu/sites/islamicstudies/files/womengenderislam.pdf

Another important study by historian Leor Halevi identifies 8th-century Kufa as one of the major centers where a new and unusually strong concern with separating men and women began appearing in religious discourse. Halevi describes this as a “novel and unprecedented concern with the segregation of the sexes.” He explains that scholars in this environment increasingly promoted narrations and legal opinions discouraging women from participating in funeral processions and public ritual spaces.

https://www.academia.edu/13926853/Wailing_for_the_Dead_The_Role_of_Women_in_Early_Islamic_Funerals

That phrase — “novel and unprecedented” — is historically important. It means that this intense concern with segregation was not being treated as an ancient unquestioned practice inherited directly from the beginning. It was emerging and developing in a particular historical environment.

Over time, these attitudes became embedded into sections of Islamic jurisprudence and social norms. In many later Muslim societies, especially among urban elites, female seclusion increasingly became associated with respectability, status, and morality. What began as regional and class-based customs gradually became moralized and presented as “Islamic.”

Even then, Muslim societies were never uniform. Women continued to serve as scholars, business owners, poets, patrons, and teachers throughout Islamic history. There were female hadith scholars who taught men. Women owned property, funded institutions, and participated in intellectual life. The historical reality was diverse and constantly changing, not one monolithic system of total segregation.

Modern forms of extreme segregation — especially systems involving rigid social isolation, discouraging women from mosques, banning ordinary interaction between genders, or treating women’s public presence itself as dangerous — are often more connected to modern revivalist and Salafi movements than to the earliest Muslim community itself. Some historians trace the modern systematization of strict segregation to 20th-century Islamist movements that transformed older conservative ideas into comprehensive ideological programs.

The historical record therefore does not support the simplistic claim that Islam began with extreme gender segregation as a central social principle. What it shows instead is a gradual historical evolution: women participating openly in communal religious life during the Prophet’s lifetime, followed by increasing restrictions shaped by later political, imperial, urban, and juristic developments.