By Daniyah Yaqoob
The month of Ramadan in the Islamic calendar has coincided with Daylight Saving Time this year, impacting Muslim students at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) and their fasting times.
Fasting is an integral part of celebrating Ramadan, a holy month for Muslims following the lunar calendar, as one of the five pillars of Islamic belief. During this month, Muslims begin their fast about an hour before sunrise—allowed to eat and drink fluids until this point but not after. This is called the suhoor or sehri meal. Following the calendar, at sunset each day when the sun dips below the horizon, Muslims break their fast in a practice known as iftar.
In between these times, Muslims are told to observe their daily prayers and recite from their holy book, the Quran, to reconnect with their faith in a busy world.
As daylight savings sprung some clocks around the world an hour forward, suhoor timings advanced to 6:30 a.m. and iftar to 7:20 p.m. in Eastern Standard Time, on average.
In Toronto, before daylight savings went into effect, Muslims generally began their fast around 5:30 a.m. and broke it around 6:15 p.m., following the rising and setting of the sun.
For Yusra Hasan, a second-year business management student, Ramadan is a means of self-improvement and connecting with God—one that she would never think to give up.
“It helps me so much every year, it teaches you discipline,” she said. “When I’m fasting, I am clearly a better person.”
Nudrat Mahmood, a second-year history student, added that, “It’s a chance for me to get rid of the bad habits I’ve developed over the semester, like prioritizing school over praying.”
For Mahmood, between her class ending at 4 p.m. and the one-and-a-half hour commute home, it was always a race to be back in time to break her fast. In the first week of Ramadan, she nearly missed a train home, which would have left her stranded downtown for iftar.
“I got home like 15 minutes before iftar… I think if [the train] was slightly more late or took slightly longer, if there was more traffic, I could have potentially missed [iftar],” said Mahmood.
Hasan’s schedule gave her a chance to begin her fast with her family at home and pray in between before she had to get on a 6:30 a.m. train to campus. On most days, she breaks her fast on campus, not having enough time to get home.
Mahmood said daylight savings would be “helpful” to her schedule, giving her more time to get home from campus before the sun sets. She said the later suhoor also meant her day would begin right away, eliminating the “weird nap” she would take between praying and catching the morning train.
For Hasan, things will only get more hectic. With 6:15 a.m. suhoors, she won’t have enough time to eat at home, pray and then make it to the station. Now, she is deciding whether to eat and pray on the train or to arrive on campus before dawn so she can start her fast from campus.
“[Daylight savings] hitting us in the middle of [Ramadan] is, I would say, annoying and inconvenient,” she said, after becoming used to her previous schedule. Hasan said the only potential benefit for her would be that she might have more time in the evenings to get home for iftar.
She said the university could do more, like providing iftar to students on a larger scale or creating more easily accessible prayer spaces, to make this month easier on Muslim students rushing to make it to meals and prayers on time.
“It is not a hard month,” Hasan said about balancing her fast with school and work. “It is just the factors around our lives that make it hard.”
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