Rabi al-Awwal

Rabi al-Awwal is the third month of the Islamic (Hijri) calendar, its name meaning the first spring, from the season it marked when the lunar names were fixed. It is the month in which the Prophet Muhammad is traditionally held to have been born, and for many Muslims his birthday, the Mawlid, is commemorated on or around its twelfth day with recitation, praise-poetry, and charity, though the observance is kept differently across communities and is not universal. The Islamic calendar is purely lunar, its year of about 354 days drifting steadily against the solar seasons, so that despite its springtime name Rabi al-Awwal now falls at any time of the solar year in its slow cycle. These are the observances of the Islamic calendar tradition, in which this month is bound above all to the memory of the Prophet's birth.

Rabi al-Awwal, meaning the first spring, is most widely known as the month traditionally associated with the birth of the Prophet Muhammad, commemorated by many Muslims, though not universally and not without theological controversy among some schools of thought, as Mawlid al-Nabi on the twelfth. Shia tradition generally places the date on the seventeenth instead. Because the Islamic calendar's months carry no fixed relationship to the solar seasons, the month's name, referring to spring, reflects its position in the older pre-Islamic Arabian calendar before the Quran's prohibition of intercalation (Quran 9:36-37) fixed the twelve lunar months permanently against the solar year, so Rabi al-Awwal itself now cycles through every actual season in turn over roughly a thirty-three-year span.

The name is glossed as the first spring. It is not one of the four sacred months. The twelve month names are Arabic and predate Islam, retained from the calendar of the Arabian peninsula when the Hijri reckoning was established.

Four of the twelve are the sacred months, al-ashhur al-hurum, in which warfare was forbidden in pre-Islamic Arabia and which the Quran confirms at sura 9 verse 36: Dhu al-Qadah, Dhu al-Hijjah, Muharram and Rajab. Three run consecutively and the fourth stands alone in the middle of the year, an arrangement that fitted the pilgrimage season and the trading truces that went with it.

The Hijri calendar admits no intercalation. The verse immediately following the one that names the twelve months condemns nasi, the pre-Islamic practice of postponing or adding a month, and the calendar has run as a strict lunar reckoning since. The consequence is a year of 354 or 355 days that moves against the seasons by about eleven days annually, so any month passes through the whole solar year in roughly thirty-three years.

Rabi al-Awwal is the first of a pair, with Rabi al-Thani following it, and the name refers to a season the month no longer keeps, since the calendar does not intercalate. It is widely observed as the month of the birth of the Prophet, commemorated on the twelfth in most Sunni tradition and on the seventeenth in much Shia tradition.