How this site works out its dates

What the countdown targets

It targets Maghrib on the eve, 7 February 2027, not the first day of fasting. A day in the Islamic calendar turns at sunset, so the month begins the evening before. The first fast is kept from dawn the next morning, 8 February 2027.

Where each Maghrib time comes from

Two sources, and the page always says which. Where an authority has published its own time for a confirmed year, that published time is used. Everywhere else the figure is calculated sunset for that country's reference city, computed fresh per country and per year.

It is never carried forward from another year or copied from a neighbour. That rule exists because the site broke it once: Brunei shipped roughly Jakarta's sunset for every year, so its countdown fired about eighteen minutes early.

The calculation is checked against the two authorities that publish a time we can compare, on the last confirmed year. It reproduces JAKIM's 19:28 for Kuala Lumpur and MUIS's 19:21 for Singapore exactly. The script that fetches these refuses to write anything if either check stops matching.

Why 14 countries can share one date this year

Most years they cannot. A single date is only honest when the crescent is comfortably visible everywhere, and whether it is comes down to one number: the astronomical new moon, which for 1448 AH falls on 6 February 2027 at 15:56 UTC.

Measured from that instant, this is how old the crescent is at Maghrib on the eve in each country, youngest first:

The range runs from 18.6 hours in Brunei to 25.7 hours in Nigeria. For comparison, a crescent younger than about 15 hours cannot be seen at all, and one past roughly 20 hours is routinely reported by observers in good conditions.

Nothing in the table sits near the impossible end, and the countries added on the strength of this reasoning all carry an older crescent than Malaysia, whose date two authorities agree on independently. Brunei and the other MABIMS members sit slightly lower because their criterion is calculated rather than sighting-dependent, so their date does not rest on an observation being made on the night.

This argument is specific to 1448 AH and has to be redone every year. In 1447 the crescent was marginal and the world genuinely split: Saudi Arabia and the Gulf began a day before Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan. A year like that cannot carry one shared date, and this site would not pretend otherwise.

Countries deliberately left out

Some are missing on purpose rather than by oversight, because the honest answer is that there is no single national date to print.

• Iraq. More than one body announces the month independently and they routinely land on different days, so no one figure would describe the country.
• India. Regional committees rather than a national one. Some follow Saudi Arabia while others sight locally, so a single row would misstate it.
• Oman. Announces a day later than the rest of the Gulf by criterion rather than by visibility, so the reasoning above does not reach it.

Each of these sends real traffic to this site. They are absent because listing them would mean inventing a date, which is the one thing this page exists to avoid.

What "Projected, not announced" means

Exactly what it says. The date has been calculated but no authority has declared it. Projections are usually right and they are not binding, and a calculated sunset is never published under an authority's name as though that authority had announced it. When an announcement comes, the date is corrected here and reaches the app automatically.