Ittihad-e-Matla is a short Urdu treatise arguing that the whole world cannot share one horizon for the moon. It answers the case for a single global date on two grounds at once, the sayings of the imams and the position of the moon, and closes on the Saudi and Turkish calendars.
Since Saudi Arabia raised the question of ittiḥād-e-maṭlaʿ and tawḥīd-e-ahilla (one horizon and one moon for the whole world), the case for a single global date has been made over and over, and this is his answer to it. Thirteen pages, and the argument is that the position is wrong twice: by the sayings of the imams, and by the position of the moon.
The astronomical half is the part he can settle himself, and he settles it with a case anybody can follow. Suppose the moon is sighted in America at maghrib there, at six or seven in the evening. It is already six the next morning in China, with the sun up. So how are those people to pray tarāwīḥ, take saḥrī and keep the fast that a sighting on the other side of the earth has just obliged them to; and at ʿīd, how are they to leave tarāwīḥ and announce a festival for a moon they could not have seen? And if the answer is that calculation tells us in advance that the moon will be sighted in America, the same calculation says that over China’s own horizon at that hour the moon was still hours short of being visible at all. A moon that cannot yet be seen is not a moon to announce on.
He closes on the two calendars that press the question hardest. Saudi Arabia’s runs a day ahead of sighting and Turkey’s a day and a half, because Turkey computes from the mean noon at Greenwich and the new moon precedes visibility by about that much. Set against ṣūmū li-ruʾyatihi and the hadiths beside it, he asks what is left of them. And the closing point is not about dates at all: a fast is an obligatory act of worship, like a prayer, and is discharged at its own time. A prayer read before its time is not performed, and a fast kept before its time is not either.
What is not in it. This one carries no title page, no publisher and no date. It is a treatise rather than a printed book, and it is among the pieces he had himself set aside for a website.
The dawn-and-ʿishāʾ side of praying at this latitude is Subh-e-Sadiq, and the fifteen years of dates worked on the moon’s own position are in the calendar for England.