In a previous post, I mentioned that Ramadan may actually be in September. Ramadan is the ninth month of the Muslim year. It was Umar who changed the Muslim calendar to be the way it is today. There are arguments that before that, the Muslim people followed a 12-month calendar and used both the sun and moon as units of time.

If Ramadan were in September every year, fasting times around the world would be roughly the same. Nobody in Norway would have to pull off a 20 hour fastathon.

What is even more miraculous, is that Jesus (The Prophet Isa) may have done his 40 day fast around September.

Here’s an academic paper about it:

Ramadan, the Lost Christian Tradition: The correlation between the Islamic Ramadan Fasting and Jesus’s Temptation in the Wilderness.

The abstract of the paper reads as the following:

• [Western writers sometimes refer to Ramadan as “the Muslim Lent.” There are deep resemblances between Ramadan and Lent (and some differences). But Ramadan is the Holy month of fasting for Muslims, from sunrise to sunset, where they do not eat food or drink water for 30 days. Even deeper still, there is a claim by some Muslim Clerics that Jesus fasted during Ramadan. If this is true, that would mean Islam is the continuation and preserver of authentic Christianity. Therefore, I want to investigate if there is any validity to this claim.]

There is also a discussion on Biblical Hermeneutics that states Matthew situated Jesus’s fast sometime after the summer around the Fall.

We know that Lent (the Christian fast) isn’t in September, but apparently, the practice of Lent and fasting in the Christian tradition was changed over time.

The surprising truth about fasting for Lent (The Conversation)

The article states that there were a variety of fasting traditions among the early Christians, but it was only later that they developed a fasting tradition that would precede Easter.