Arabic MONTHS OF THE YEAR – Arabic Beginner Lesson- 47 – Learn Arabic Free Online

Arabic MONTHS OF THE YEAR – Arabic Beginner Lesson- 47 – Learn Arabic Free Online

Arabic Months

Hijri (هِجري) months:

1. المُحَرَّم (Muḥarram)
2. صَفَر (Ṣafar)
3. رَبيع الاوَّل (Rabīʿ al-Awwal)
4. رَبيع الثاني أو رَبيع الآخِر (Rabīʿ al-Thānī or Rabīʿ al-Ākhir)
5. جُمادى الأولى (Jumādá al-Ūlá)
6. جُمادى الثانية أو جُمادى الآخِرة (Jumādá al-Thāniyah or Jumādá al-Ākhirah)
7. رَجَب (Rajab)
8. شَعبان (Shaʿbān)
9. رَمَضان (Ramaḍān)
10. شَوّال (Shawwāl)
11. ذو القَعدة (Dhū al-Qaʿdah)
12. ذو الحِجّة (Dhū al-Ḥijjah)

Now for the Arabic names for our Gregorian calendar months. But there’s another complication! There are at least four different versions of the Gregorian calendar in use depending on what part of the Arabic-speaking world you find yourself in. Iraq and the Levant (Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine) use a calendar based probably on a very old Babylonian calendar with Aramaic names for the months. The Gulf states (Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrayn, Qatar, the UAE, and Oman), along with Egypt, the Yemen, and the Sudan, use a fairly straightforward transliteration of the Gregorian months. Algeria and Tunisia also transliterate, but because they were French colonies for so long, their transliterations are slightly different. Finally, Morocco also has its own system of transliterating the months, maybe an artifact of Tamazight (Berber) pronunciations of the Roman/Julian calendar months. A fifth variant, a unique system imposed upon Libya by Gathafi (read this if you’re wondering why I render his name that way), was abolished in 2011 and I haven’t bothered to include it. The table below lists the months with  all four Arabic variants:

Gregorian calendar months used throughout the Arab World

One might ask, why didn’t the Muslims just adopt a solar calendar from the beginning? Islam was founded in a decidedly pastoral and agrarian environment, and lunar calendars are generally quite unhelpful in terms of gauging planting and harvesting seasons, because the dates don’t consistently match up with particular seasons (they are conversely very good at gauging the passing of the months, since they are directly based on the moon’s movement through its phases). It does appear that there were several calendars in use around Arabia before the rise of Islam, and that many followed a “lunisolar” system in which the months are reckoned according to lunar phases but are spaced apart from one another through intercalation, the Arabic term for which is نَسيء (nasīʾ, “postponement”). Extra days, either in one unit or spread through the year, would be inserted into the calendar to insure that the lunar months also corresponded to the same solar times each year. This made the calendar useful for farming and was particularly helpful in a pilgrimage center like Mecca, where regularizing the calendar in this way ensured that the pilgrimage always took place at the same solar time each year, which (not coincidentally) just happened to be the time of the year when Meccan merchants were likely to have their stocks at their fullest. For whatever reason, maybe simply to keep the new community distinct from its neighbors, God (or Muhammad, or later officials, depending on your perspective on Quranic origins) expressly forbade nasīʾ in سورة التَوبة (“Sūrat al-Tawbah”), the ninth sūrah of the Quran.