Shaban

Shaban is the eighth month of the Islamic (Hijri) calendar, its name glossed with the sense of dispersal or division, from the season when people once scattered in search of water. It is the month of preparation for Ramadan, which follows, and the Prophet is recorded as fasting often within it. For many Muslims its fifteenth night, the mid-Shaban, is kept as a night of prayer and seeking forgiveness, though the observance varies across communities. The Islamic calendar is purely lunar, its twelve months following the phases of the moon and its year of about 354 days making no adjustment to the solar seasons. These are the observances of the Islamic calendar tradition, in which Shaban leads directly into the great fasting month of Ramadan, and the sighting of the new moon at its end begins the fast.

Shaban precedes Ramadan directly and is traditionally treated as a month of preparation for it; the Prophet Muhammad is recorded in hadith collections as having fasted voluntarily more often in Shaban than in any month besides Ramadan itself. The fifteenth of Shaban, Laylat al-Bara'ah or Nisf Sha'ban, is observed with special prayer and, in some regional traditions, festive customs in parts of the Muslim world, particularly in South Asia and among some Sufi communities, though its religious status and the authenticity of hadith supporting its specific observances are debated among Islamic scholars, with some schools treating it as a recommended night of worship and others regarding the elaborate customs attached to it as later, unwarranted innovation.

The name is glossed as to scatter or disperse. 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.

Shaban is glossed from a root meaning to separate or disperse, on the reading that the tribes scattered in search of water once the sacred month of Rajab had ended. The middle of the month is marked in many places as a night of prayer, an observance that varies considerably between regions and schools.