The Twelve Months of Ramadan

On a particularly damp Christmas Eve in London, I found myself nursing a pint of Mr Young’s (are we now to call it Mr Wells’?) finest at an over-lit, over-priced and rather less-than-sexy wooden pub in Wimbledon Village. Into pint number more-than-two, my weary companion finally cottoned on that I wasn’t going to move on quickly to the restaurant, and so remarked, why for I don’t understand, on the juxtaposition of Eid Al Adha so close to Christmas this year.

Islamic history can be a touchy subject at the best of times, and the slightly tipsy state I was in wasn’t going to make things any easier, but, like a dutiful faqih educating the benighted infidels of this piss-drenched city, I began to explain how this was well and truly a coincidence; no, like a coincidence that could only happen every three and a half decades or so. While in my current state of existential indecisiveness about the big questions in life means it is unlikely that I will appreciate this cosmic coming about at anything other than face value, the very fact of the constant change in the Islamic months—making Ramadan appear during the long summer days one year, and the bitter cold of winter in another—is worth studying in its own right.

It was on the Prophet Mohammed’s fateful last trip to Mecca, better known for the injunction to treat Arab and non-Arab alike as they were in the eyes of God, that the good man of Quraysh declared that there should be only 12 months. In fact, Islam goes one further: “For God”, the Koran tells us, “there can only be 12 months”. If the injunction had remained within the more contestable hadith tradition, then, like many others, it might have found itself on the dusty shelf of unused Islamic rules. Finding its way into the canonical Othmani text, however, its finality has been sealed.

But wait! I can hear you think, what has the number of months got to do with the way they’re arranged? Well, as I explained to my by now more confused friend at the pub, the pre-Islamic Arabs used the same type of calendar then in use throughout the region, counting months by lunar cycles, but substituting a thirteenth month every seventh year in order to bring the 12-month cycles in line with the rotations about the Sun. While the months did of course fall on different points in the solar cycle, they stayed in the same season of the year, at least. By doing away with the crucial thirteenth month, we are now in the rather bizarre pickle of wherea month called Rabi’ (in the “Islamic” calendar), meaning Spring, could be in August, or December, and only rarely during the actual Spring. This is a rather difficult thing to explain to an 11-year-old.

Of course, the obvious motivation behind the calendar shift, or so it seems to me, is to do away with the then-important class of oracles, magicians astrologers and sooth-sayers, who monopolised the understanding of celestial affairs in those times and posed a serious threat to the burgeoning new religion. Shaker Nabulsi has written about how many of this group shaped Islam from its earliest and can be credited with some of Islam’s tenets; the curious reader is invited to make enquiries.

The problem with undermining the magicians and learned astronomers is that their role had to be taken by a whole cast of completely questionable freaks. How could you synchronise a harvest cycle to your calendar, when the month named under the photo of the busty beauty tells you nothing about whether or not you should sow, harvest or feast? Given Islam’s mercantile bent, it is also hard to square this with the thought of multi-year commercial contracts, surely something of a headache. Of course, while the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia continues, uniquely, to insist on printing official documents and observing official anniversaries according to the Hejri dates, nobody else really bothers. When asked for their birthday, nobody ever says “oh, 25 Ramadan”. You might choose to call it innocuous, another word for a completely useless way to keep dates.


Epilogue:

We ate at the new Limon Shish restaurant closer to Wimbledon station. A satisfactory one course meal—well-seasoned skewer of chicken, very well considered mezze, with some individual character—can be had for around £10. Not quite as good as Patogh, which boasts similar prices, but in the Middle Eastern desert that is the London Borough of Merton, it is a new gem.

As for the calendars, the more attentive of my readers will probably now point out that the Jewish calendar, which, of course, was inspired by the same Babylonian/Assyrian/Chaldean sources as the pre-Islamic Arabic calendar, has continued to thrive to this day. Well I already knew that. Some, perhaps fewer, will point out the funny story about what happened when a Saudi man stuck in Kuwait had his ID card checked by an Iraqi soldier at a checkpoint during the 1990 conflict (“What the hell do you think you are telling me you’re that old?”). I’ve heard it already.

On a final note, to those who take issue with my description of London as “piss-drenched”, I invite you to read the thoroughly enjoyable Clerkenwell Tales by my new-found friend Peter Ackroyd. In it, you can find out that your favourite city and mine has in fact quite a good pedigree of being piss-drenched, going back some centuries.

Good night.


18 ذو الحجة 1428 هجري
27 December 2007