Dar es Salaam. The Tanzania Muslim Supreme Council (Bakwata) has announced that the Islamic Holy Month of Ramadhan will begin on Sunday April 3.
"The first day of the holy fasting month of Ramadhan falls on Sunday corresponding to April 3," Bakwata said in a statement by the Mufti of Tanzania Dr. Sheikh Abubakar Zubeir that corresponded to that of the Mufti of Zanzibar.
The start date is set by both lunar calculations and physical sightings which determine when the last day of one lunar month ends and a new one begins.
Traditionally, many Muslim-majority countries have followed the dates set by Saudi Arabia religious authorities, but in recent years many have used their own astronomical calculations.
Elsewhere in East Africa, Muslims in Kenya and Uganda started observing the Holy Month of Ramadhan on Saturday April 2.
Ramadan is a holy month for the world's nearly 1.5 billion Muslims, many of whom practise the ritual of dawn-to-dusk fasting and prayers.
Tradition holds that it was during Ramadhan that the Prophet Mohammed started receiving revelations of the Muslim holy book, the Koran.
Ramadhan is one of the five "pillars" of Islam.
The others are the profession of faith ("there is no God but God and Mohammed is his messenger"), the obligation to pray five times a day, charity, and the pilgrimage to Mecca.
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