Badi (Baha'i) Calendar

The Badi calendar is solar and geometrically simple by design: nineteen months of nineteen days each give three hundred sixty one days, closed by Ayyam-i-Ha, four intercalary days extended to five in a leap year, so the count reaches three hundred sixty five or three hundred sixty six and the calendar tracks the true solar year without ever needing a corrective month. Each of the nineteen months, and each of the nineteen days within a month, carries the name of an attribute of God: Splendor, Glory, Beauty, Grandeur, Light, Mercy and so on, so the calendar itself is a devotional recitation rather than a neutral grid. A given date can be read as, for instance, the day of Mercy in the month of Might.

The year opens at Naw-Ruz, the spring equinox, a choice inherited from the older Iranian solar calendars this reckoning replaced for Baha'i purposes. Since 2015 the Universal House of Justice has fixed Naw-Ruz to the astronomically determined equinox at the meridian of Tehran, so its Gregorian date can fall on the twentieth or twenty first of March depending on the year, rather than being pinned to a single civil date. The nineteen day month named Ala, Loftiness, is the last of the year and is preceded immediately by Ayyam-i-Ha, so the intercalary days function as a hinge between ordinary time and the fast that follows rather than a stray correction tucked away at the calendar's edge.

The calendar was inaugurated by the Bab, the prophet herald of the Baha'i Faith, in the middle of the nineteenth century, and Baha'u'llah gave it its binding form in the Kitab-i-Aqdas, so its epoch, year one of the Baha'i Era, is fixed to 1844, the year of the Bab's declaration in Shiraz. Ayyam-i-Ha, the four or five days before the final month, has no fixed liturgical content of its own; Baha'i communities keep it instead as a period of hospitality, charity and gift giving, visiting friends and preparing for the discipline that follows immediately.

The month of Ala is a nineteen day sunrise to sunset fast, paralleling Ramadan in structure though rooted in its own scriptural instruction, and it ends precisely at Naw-Ruz. Baha'i communities also mark the first day of every nineteen day month with a Nineteen Day Feast, a combined devotional, consultative and social gathering that is the calendar's most frequent point of contact with ordinary life rather than an annual one.

None of this is historical description. The calendar is in daily use by Baha'is worldwide today, coordinated globally by the Universal House of Justice in Haifa, and it is this administrative body, not local custom, that has adjusted details such as the Tehran meridian equinox rule in living memory, which is why the calendar's mechanics have continued to be actively refined well into the twenty first century.