Happy Muharram, Happy New Hijri Year. But why today?

 

As a calendar maker, I am quite interested in calendar folklore and history, including the different start dates for the year. Many calendars have their origins in the agricultural cycle and thus begin the year in spring, with the vernal equinox, or in the fall, with the harvest season. Our calendar’s start date has its origins in the Roman practice of beginning the year shortly after the winter solstice, when the days begin to lengthen again. All of these traditions are based on the sun and what is called the solar year. 

Then there’s the Muslim calendar, which begins the new year on August 20 this time — but really this evening (August 19), because an Islamic day begins at sunset. Next year it will occur on Aug. 10, and in 2022 it moves into July. It will keep moving forward in the Gregorian calendar because the Islamic calendar is strictly lunar, without adjustments to make it align with the solar year. 

Whereas the traditional Jewish and Chinese calendars, and a few others, are luni-solar — a hybrid that inserts an extra (intercalary) month or two at regular intervals so that holidays move forward on the Gregorian calendar (the lunar part), but then move back again so as to stay in the same season (the solar part) — the Islamic calendar makes no such accommodation, perhaps because its basis is religious, not agricultural. Prior to that, the nomadic Arab people had been using a lunar calendar, which was adapted by Muslims to mark their founding event. 

The Islamic calendar began in the common year 622 (AD/CE) and the month of Muharram, when Muhammad and his followers migrated from Mecca, where they were persecuted, to Medina, where they established the first Muslim community. The migration is known as the Hijri, which is also the name of the Islamic calendar. 

The new year is called al-Hijri (or al-Hijra) or Muharram 1. (The different spellings reflect different transliterations from the Arabic.)

Addendum for nerds like me

This page started as a Facebook post on my business page, but quickly became unwieldy for that format. The information is based broadly on the various books and articles I have read over the dozen or so years I have been fascinated by calendars. But I did not wish to take the time to go back through my sources and notes to cite anything specific, so do take the foregoing with a grain of salt. I did check Wikipedia to refresh my memory and get a couple of details straight, though.

For those who want more information, the Wikipedia page on the Hijri year offers a nice concise explanation. 

For a broad history of calendars presented in an engaging format with photos and illustrations, visit the web museum Calendars through the Ages. 

These two sources don’t entirely agree on the details, and neither is reliable enough to use alone for fact-checking or term paper research, but they do provide some historical and cultural context for understanding the Islamic calendar (and others, in the second one).

I welcome corrections from those who know more than me about this topic, and other relevant comments. But I do moderate so I can delete the spammy stuff.

With apologies to the bees and goldfinches

I'm not the most fastidious gardener as a general rule, and when a relentless heat wave like we experienced for nearly all of July comes along, I'm even worse. There were a few days at the beginning of the month when I got out in the garden early in the morning (like, around 6 a.m.) intent on making at least the most public part of my front garden presentable, and I did accomplish that much anyway. But for the rest of the month I looked out through my windows at the rampant weeds and said, "mmmm ... maybe tomorrow."

I favor a not-too-tidy cottage garden look, with an emphasis on native plants balanced with and contained by a few old-fashioned staples, like peonies, disease-resistant roses, and a boxwood hedge. 

I planned the garden with birds, bees and butterflies in mind, and placed a bird feeder in the front yard where we could see it from our dining room windows. Knowing the spilled seed would mean a lot of weeds (mostly sunflowers), I tried to design it so that the messiest areas would be screened somewhat from the street view: there's a serviceberry (Amalanchier laevis) and then a row of boxwood between the feeding area and the front edge, with a "terraced" flower garden next to the sidewalk (shown here in August when it's mainly just the mums blooming).

("Terraced" is in quotes because the front edge of the yard is set off by a low retaining wall we made from chunks of concrete after taking up a sidewalk in the back. A second row of sidewalk chunks is arranged a few feet back from that, in front of the boxwood. Hence, it's a "terrace.")

Respectability isn't the only reason to weed and maintain a garden, of course. Weeds tend to hog water, nutrients and sunlight, and they'll take over everywhere if you don't yank them out once in awhile, such is their nature. 

But the birds and bees don't care about any of that. I have let bindweed get way out of hand after seeing a hummingbird nectaring from its small pinkish white flowers, and now we are struggling to untangle the bindweed from everything else, including the volunteer sunflowers around the bird feeder.

A mystery mint showed up in the flowerbed next to the front steps earlier this summer, standing out conspicuously as it loomed over the coral bells and low growing vinca surrounding it. I kept putting off doing anything about it until I had the time and inclination to weed that whole garden. Knowing how aggressive mints can be, I finally decided that I had to just go yank it out and leave the rest of the weeding for a cooler spell. 

Then one morning as I sat at the dining room table drinking my tea, I noticed goldfinches landing on the swaying mint plant and happily plucking something from it again and again. I don't know what, exactly, they were eating, but I didn't have the heart to spoil their fun, so I let it go a bit longer.

Finally I did yank it, and a few of the surrounding weeds. Not long after, the goldfinches had moved on, and were plucking petals from my neighbors' tall zinnias. 

I also cut back the catmint (Nepeta), which the bumblebees really love. Like other members of the mint family, it kind of over-grows itself and falls open at the center; the stems get too long and flop over, and the flowers fade and lose their charms. The bees continued to visit the blossoms even as I was cutting the whole think way back. I laid a blooming stem aside on the front step for a few moments because a bee wasn't finished with it yet. 

But the bees, like the goldfinches, moved on to other flowers. (They especially love my repeat-blooming Henry Hudson roses in the backyard, below.) And the catmint will be blooming perkily again by September.