The ancient peoples who invented rituals to be performed at dawn most definitely didn’t live above the 49th parallel, that vindictive wintery place where malaria moskies won’t dare go. Thanks to the internet, research shows Islam’s holy city of Mecca to have slightly over an hour time difference between dawn in summer versus winter. Here near Edmonton it nears 5 hours and in Yellowknife it approaches a full 10 hours. So a northern climate is more liveable for the mentally flexible sort of human.
The fast of Ramadan takes on a whole new meaning to a Muslim in Yellowknife. In midsummer, were he to follow the mandates of the ancients, dished out before the more recent phenomena of people shifting all about the globe, he could only resupply the physical body for a couple of hours around midnight. Much further north and those bodies would perish. We’re not like the mammals of Hiber Nation, although there are many Januarys when I and many others of the wimpy ilk would want to be. Let’s just say I don’t believe the Inuit practised anything remotely similar to Islam. If they did, they turned a blind eye, not that difficult in midwinter, to certain tenets. (For those thinkers pondering this in reality, not silliness, the protocol is to go by the times of the nearest metropolis with a significant Islamic population.)
The Hindu rite of welcoming Surya the sun as it comes above the horizon would either encourage ridiculously early rising or equally ridiculous long bouts of sleeping in. And that’s not mentioning the – 40 temperatures. The Lena and McKenzie are pathetic Ganges substitutes. The Brahmin’s Sanskrit slokas would be said in haste, that’s for sure. The morning dip in a sacred river is out of the question – ice ain’t for dipping. But chai is still chai, even in Inuvik.
