Fact #192
Strange but true
Turkey, Pakistan, Tunisia, Algeria, Malaysia, Singapore, Mauritania, Azerbaijan and several others fly a crescent, and Nepal flies both a moon and a sun.
The crescent predates Islam by a long way — it was a symbol of Byzantium, on coins, centuries before the Ottomans took the city and the emblem with it. Nepal's is the only non-rectangular national flag in the world, and the moon on it originally carried a face.
Source: Constitution of Nepal, Schedule 1; standard vexillological references · checked Sep 2026