In 1986, the last time Ramadan and the midnight sun overlapped so closely, the city of Tromsø barely had a Muslim population to speak of. The establishment of a refugee center that same year encouraged the first Muslims to begin arriving, primarily from Iran. Today, Tromsø's Muslim population numbers roughly 1,000 and consists largely of refugees from Somalia, but it also includes immigrants from elsewhere around the globe and a handful of local converts.

As Hassan Ahmed, a Muslim resident who came to the city from Somalia and works at the Islamic Center of Northern Norway told me, "the sun doesn't set. For 24 hours it's in the middle of the sky." Faced with the impossibility of adhering to the sunrise/sunset rule, Tromsø's Muslims must find alternative ways of determining when to fast. "We have a fatwa," or clerical decree, Ahmed said. "We can correspond the fast to the closest Islamic country, or we can fast with Mecca."

Sandra Maryam Moe, a Norwegian convert to Islam and manager of Tromsø's community center and mosque, Alnor, echoed Ahmed's statement: "since we have midnight sun during Ramadan this year, we've chosen to use the timetable for Mecca." This means that if the sun rises in Mecca at 5:00 am, residents of Tromsø will begin the fast at 5 a.m. (Norwegian time). In addition to being a good symbolic choice, adhering to Mecca's timetable, according to Moe, also provides a practical benefit: "they have very stable times for sunrise and sunset so that makes the prayers and the fasting quite balanced."

So tonight at 7:07 -- the time of the would-be-sunset -- Muslims in Tromsø will gather at Alnor's mosque, one of the northernmost in the world, and with the afternoon sun still shining through the windows, break the fast. Typically, this involves a combination of cuisines -- from traditional dates to the rich, thick bread Norway is famous for. A nightly ritual during Ramadan, Moe says the gathering is very popular. "It's full every night with people coming to join and break fast together and pray together. It's a very social time throughout Ramadan."

But though this may be the sunniest Ramadan many of Tromsø's Muslim's have experienced, it won't in actuality be the first time they've had to get creative with scheduling. In the winter, they have the opposite problem.

Moe says they prefer to just stick to the Saudi schedule year round. "In wintertime we have polar nights, so it's the same problem here. There's no sunrise."

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