It is not righteousness that you should enter dwellings from...

It is not righteousness that you should enter dwellings from their backs but righteousness is this that one should guard himself (against evil) ; and enter the dwellings by their (proper) doors, and fear Allah: that you may be prosperous." The rising of the Moon at the beginning of each lunar month in the form of crescent, and then its gradual change, can be the source of many uses in the act of practising worship and the accomplishment of religious duties by people, and in their material career as well.

Every body can easily count days of the month and enumerate the month of the year by the help of the varying shapes or forms of the Moon when dealing with trading and writing agreements due to appointing the times of promises and contracts. Besides that, fasting , the performance of the great worship of Pilgrimage and festivals, etc., prescribed by Islam, are timed according to the lunar months.

The best way for people to recognize them and decide to arrange the affairs is this very form of the crescent in various shapes when they see them differently at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of the months. It is obvious that the regularity of the social life of man without a common and precise means of dating is impossible. So, the Moon, indeed, is a natural calendar for all human beings.

It is a natural phenomenom that the entire people, whether literate or illiterate, wherever in the world they are, can make use of it. For this reason, the Creator, the Great, has made this worldly calendar available for the use of the human race in their life system.

112 Natural Measures One of the advantages of Islamic laws is that their orders have usually been arranged corresponding with the natural measures, for these measures are some means that are available to all people and, besides that, the passing of time does not affect them. But, on the contrary, unnatural scales are not within reach to all human beings for every thing. For example, the population of the world have not been able to use of some international measures for timing the evening yet.

Therefore, we see that Islam has sometimes assigned the measure of a span, or a man's height and the like of it. And, for appointing a time, phenomena such as sunset, break of dawn, decline of sun from the meridian and the vision of the Moon are usually pointed out.