Islamic New Year

The Islamic New Year falls on the first of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic (Hijri) calendar. The calendar counts not from the Prophet's birth or the first revelation but from the Hijra, the migration of the Prophet and his followers from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE, the event that marks the founding of the first Muslim community; the epoch was established under the caliph Umar. Because the year is purely lunar, of about 354 days with no intercalated month, its months and festivals move backward through the solar seasons by roughly eleven days a year.

The day itself is observed quietly by comparison with the two Eids; there is no prescribed festivity, and it is marked in many places with reflection on the meaning of the Hijra as a turning point. Its tone is shaped above all by what follows: the tenth of Muharram, Ashura, which for Sunni Muslims is a day of voluntary fasting linked to Moses and the Exodus, and for Shia Muslims is the solemn commemoration of the martyrdom of Husayn, grandson of the Prophet, at Karbala in 680, kept with mourning rather than celebration. The new year thus opens for many into a season weighted more toward mourning and remembrance than rejoicing.

Because the Islamic calendar traditionally depends on the physical sighting of the new crescent moon rather than on a fixed astronomical calculation applied uniformly everywhere, different countries and religious authorities can and regularly do declare the first of Muharram, and every other lunar month, on different Gregorian dates in the same year, depending on whether local moon-sighting committees report a sighting, whether they accept sightings reported from other countries, or whether they instead follow a pre-calculated civil calendar such as Saudi Arabia's Umm al-Qura calendar, used for administrative purposes even though religious authorities there also maintain their own moon-sighting procedures for religious observance.

This lack of a single global authority for lunar sighting means Muslims in different countries, and even different mosques within the same country in some cases, can begin the Islamic New Year, and more consequentially Ramadan and the two Eids, on different days from each other, a recurring practical inconvenience for a globally interconnected Muslim population that international Islamic organisations have periodically proposed standardising through calculated astronomical methods, proposals that have not achieved universal acceptance because a significant body of Islamic legal opinion holds that actual physical sighting, not calculation, is what the tradition specifically requires.