The Islamic (Hijrī) calendar is the standard measure of time in the Qur’an and Sunnah, and plays an integral role in the lives of Muslims. It is used for annual ritual worship such as paying the alms-tax (zakāh), fasting during the month of Ramadan, and performing the pilgrimage (ḥajj). While the Islamic calendar is actively used for religious purposes, its role as one of the cornerstones of Islamic identity has waned over time to the point that many Muslims are unaware of the current month, day, and year under the Hijrī system of dating. This paper aims to understand the historical development of the Hijrī calendar and to identify the factors that caused it to decline. The goals are to encourage reflection on the current state of the Muslim community (ummah), and to encourage the revival of the Hijrī calendar.
Defining the Islamic Calendar
Recently, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Muhammad bin Salman, chose to call his transformation plan for the country Vision 2030 rather than Vision 1451 (the corresponding Islamic year), which was surprising given the Kingdom’s long history of adhering to the Islamic calendar for both civil and religious matters. The Kingdom has used the Islamic calendar ever since the country was founded in 1932, but as part of Vision 2030 switched to the Gregorian calendar for determining the pay schedules of public sector employees in 2016, effectively increasing the workload by eleven days per year.
Other countries have followed suit and have begun to relegate the Islamic calendar to religious matters, detaching it from civil life. How did the land where the Islamic calendar was first established and remained in use for more than fourteen centuries come to such a decision? Why have so many Muslims become unaware of the months and years of the Islamic calendar? The purpose of this article will be to examine the history of the Islamic calendar, and to understand how its role as a marker of Islamic identity has diminished.
The names and order of these months existed before Islam but were tampered with over time; however, it was according to Allah’s divine will that they would be recalibrated by the time the Prophet ﷺ gave his Farewell Sermon. The Prophet ﷺ said: “Time has come back to its original state which it had when Allah created the heavens and the earth.”
In addition, the Islamic lunar calendar runs ten to eleven days behind the Gregorian solar calendar yearly and as a result does not synchronize with the seasons, a feature that distinguishes it from the lunisolar Hebrew (Jewish) calendar, which offsets the difference every two or three years by inserting a 13th leap month to synchronize the lunar months with the seasons.
