بـسم الله الرحمـن الرحيـم
Central Moon Sighting Committee of Great Britain
(Jamiatul Ulama Britain, Darul Uloom Bury, Hizbul Ulama UK).....................................................................................................................................
Clarification about Martin Elsassers and our position
Misrepresentation of Central Moon Sighting Committee / The Hizbul Ulama UK position
Recently there has been some debate about CMSCG.Britain's stance on the accuracy of visibility predictions, moonrise/set times. Email exchanges have taken place between individuals with us and articles posted on other websites often misrepresenting our position.
In particular some people have sought to misrepresent the use of Martin Elsassers position on moonrise/set times issue. From an email response received many months ago from Martin we have sought to argue that the visibility predictions are generalisations and cannot be used to reject testimonies. This is what Martin said to us in an email:
"Hello,
The calculations apply a average visibility model. They do NOT take local weather conditions into account and they do not consider local elevation. You can easily see that from the perfect curves in the visibility graphs.
Climbing a mountain is just like climbing to better and better weather. Climbing a mountain can drastically improve the local seeing conditions in terms of dust and humidity and thus greatly improve your chances to see the more difficult crescents.
On the other hand, your own body will have more and more problems with the reduced air pressure at great elevations and thus going to high to fast might not be useful. Example: Driving from sea level to 4000m of elevation can be quite a problem for most people.
Regards,
Martin Elsasser."
What some people have done is to suggest that we hold the view that Martin questions the accuracy of moonrise/set calculations when this has not been the case. We differ with Martin on this point and believe that the calculations are not always precise. They are calculated using a number of variables and apply to a given altitude etc. The calculations can therefore be a general guide only and not for use to reject testimonies that may be valid.
We have never said about Martin`s thinking for the moonrise and set times. There was no need therefore to write to Martin and give the totallly incorrect impression that we are using him to suggest this is the case.
One email was received admitting the misrepresenetation and misinterpretation but this was not broadcast generally. This is part of the email received:
"Apologies, I have indeed mis-read your email and I do apologise for that!"
One perticuler website continues to give the misleading impression and this message is to make it absolutely clear what our position is and to say that we have never used Martin to suggest other than what Martin has said in the above quotation. This is clear for all to see. The visibility predictions are not precise enough to allow us to reject testimonies.
We hope this clarifies our position on this issue.
Wassalam,
Molvi Yakub Miftahi
(HGS)