Fwd: Interesting Day

[Ronn! Blankenship]

Good Friday! Happy Purim, Eid, etc...


Wednesday, Mar. 19, 2008 By DAVID VAN BIEMA WITH SIMON ROBINSON/NEW DELHI


On Friday more than a billion Christians around the world will mark 
the gravest observance on their Calendar, Good Friday, the day Jesus 
died on the cross. (To be followed in two days by Easter Sunday, to 
mark his Resurrection).

But unlike some holy days, say, Christmas, which some non-Christians 
in the U.S. observe informally by going to a movie and ordering 
Chinese food, on this particular Friday, March 21, it seems almost no 
believer of any sort will be left without his or her own holiday. In 
what is statistically, at least, a once-in-a-millennium combination, 
the following will all occur on the 21st:

Good Friday
Purim, a Jewish festival celebrating the biblical book of Esther
Narouz, the Persian New Year, which is observed with Islamic 
elaboration in Iran and all the "stan" countries, as well as by 
Zoroastrians and Baha'is.
Eid Milad an Nabi, the Birth of the Prophet, which is celebrated by 
some but not all Sunni Muslims and, though officially beginning on 
Thursday, is often marked on Friday.
Small Holi, Hindu, an Indian festival of bonfires, to be followed on 
Saturday by Holi, a kind of Mardi Gras.
Magha Puja, a celebration of the Buddha's first group of followers, 
marked primarily in Thailand.

"Half the world's population is going to be celebrating something," 
says Raymond Clothey, Professor Emeritus of Religious studies at the 
University of Pittsburgh. "My goodness," says Delton Krueger, owner 
of www.interfaithcalendar.org, who follows "14 major religions and 
six others." He counts 20 holidays altogether (including some 
religious double-dips, like Maundy Thursday and Good Friday) between 
the 20th (which is also quite crowded) and the 21st. He marvels: 
"There is no other time in 2008 when there is this kind of concentration."

And in fact for quite a bit longer than that. Ed Reingold and Nachum 
Dershowitz, co-authors of the books Calendrical Calculations and 
Calendrical Tabulations, determined how often in the period between 
1600 and 2400 A.D. Good Friday, Purim, Narouz and the Eid would occur 
in the same week. The answer is nine times in 800 years. Then they 
tackled the odds that they would converge on a two-day period. And 
the total is ... only once: tomorrow. And that's not even counting 
Magha Puja and Small Holi.

Unless you are mathematically inclined, however, you may not see the 
logic in all this. If it's the 21st of March, you may ask, shouldn't 
all the religions of the world celebrate the same holiday on that 
date each year?

No. There are a sprinkling of major holidays (Western Christmas is 
one) that fall each year on the same day of the Gregorian calendar, a 
fairly standard non-religious system and the one Americans are most 
familiar with.

But almost none of tomorrow's holidays actually follows that 
calendar. All Muslim holy days, for instance, are calculated on a 
lunar system. Keyed to the phases of the moon, Islam's 12 months are 
each 29 and a half days long, for a total of 354 days a year, or 11 
days fewer than on ours. That means the holidays rotate backward 
around the Gregorian calendar, occurring 11 days earlier each year. 
That is why you can have an "easy Ramadan" in the spring, when going 
without water all day is relatively easy, or a hard one in the 
summer. And why the Prophet's birthday will be on March 9 next year.

Then there is the Jewish calendar, which determines the placement of 
Purim. It is "lunisolar," which means that holidays wander with the 
moon until they reach the end of what might be thought of as a 
month-long tether, which has the effect of maintaining them in the 
same season every year.

Good Friday, meanwhile, like many of the other most important 
Christian holidays, is a set number of days before Easter. The only 
problem is that the date of Easter is probably the most complicated 
celebratory calculation this side of Hinduism, which has a number of 
competing religious calendars. The standard rule is "the Sunday after 
the first full moon on or after the day of the vernal equinox." But 
in fact, the actual divination of the date is so involved that it has 
its own offical name: "computus." And so challenging that Carl 
Friedrich Gauss, one of history's greatest mathematicians, devoted 
the time to create an algorithm for it. It goes on for many 
lines.  And, of course, it doesn't work for Eastern Orthodox Easter 
(about one month later than the Western Christian one this year, on April 27).

So, should we celebrate all these celebrations? Yes, says William 
Paden, the author of Religious Worlds: The Comparative Study of 
Religion and a professor at the University of Vermont ? at least to 
the extent that we revere the drive to carve out sacred time in the 
middle of the day-by-day profane. "Each of these religions is 
creating its own world, with its own time and space and memory 
system," he says. They recognize what's of real value, and they 
encode it, and it forms an architecture of memory." Yes, says Bruce 
Lawrence, the head of Islamic Studies at Duke University, who was 
invited to speak at a nearby synagogue when the beginnings of Rosh 
Hashanah and Ramadan happened to coincide last year.

But be cautious, since human nature is as fickle as coincidence. 
"When one group is grieving and one is jubilant there are some 
unfortunate tensions," says Anand Kumar, with the Centre for the 
Study of Social Systems at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, 
a city with considerable experience with multiple faiths. Such 
conjunctions have led to conflicts and even riots, not just when 
moods clash, but because "the public sphere is being contested." 
Kumar is convinced, however, that "a new generation is emerging that 
is more pluralistic and they don't feel threatened just because 
someone is from another religion."