The Sacred Nature of the Islamic Calendar

The Sacred Nature of the Islamic Calendar

Khutbah by Abdal Hakim Murad Cambridge Muslim College

Opening Prayers

"In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. Peace, mercy, and blessings of Allah be upon you."

Khutbah al-Hajah (Opening Khutbah)

"Indeed, all praise is due to Allah. We praise Him, seek His help, and ask for His forgiveness. We believe in Him, rely on Him, and seek refuge in Allah from the evils of ourselves and the wickedness of our deeds. Whoever Allah guides, there is none to misguide him, and whoever He misguides, there is none to guide him. I bear witness that there is no god but Allah alone, without any partners. To Him belongs the dominion, to Him belongs all praise, and to Him is the final return. And I bear witness that our master Muhammad is His servant and messenger, whom He sent with the truth as a bearer of good news and a warner before the Hour. Whoever obeys Allah and His messenger has been rightly guided, and whoever disobeys them has gone astray and has strayed far away. O Allah, send blessings and peace upon our master, our patron, and our beloved Muhammad, and upon his family and companions, and grant them abundant peace."

Main Body

"Thereafter, O believers, peace, mercy, and blessings of Allah be upon you."

The Sacred Nature of Time and Calendar

"Indeed, the number of months with Allah is twelve months. In the Book of Allah is the Day when He created the heavens and the earth, and of them four are sacred. That is the religion of uprightness, so do not wrong yourselves therein."

One of the concerns of Allah's Book is the rectification and the explication of the calendar. And in this noble verse, we are told or reminded that the calendar is not just a convenient way to divide our days, months, and years, but is something sacred. Humanity has always recognized that just as there are sacred places, there are sacred times.

Mecca is not Cambridge, Medina is not Halifax, Muharram is not Dhul Qa'dah, and Rabi' al-Thani is not Rabi' al-Awwal. We have this landscape, just as there is a spiritual topography of the world, with highs and places that are not so high, so also there is a kind of topography of time, places with particular qualities. And here we remember the famous saying:

"Truly Allah has in the days of your time exhalations, so be open to them."

The Divine Condemnation of Calendar Manipulation

The Quran speaks with strong language about those who tamper with the calendar:

"The intercalatory month is an increase in unbelief, by which those who don't believe are led astray. They allow it one year, the next year they don't, so that it can correspond with that which God has forbidden, thus they make permissible that which Allah has forbidden."

The Cosmic Order and Divine Signs

The Quran reminds us of the cosmic order established by Allah:

"The sun and the moon are for reckoning, and the stars and the trees prostrate."

"He has set it for mankind. Therein are fruits and date-palms producing sheathed fruit-stalks. And also corn, with its leaves and stalk for fodder, and sweet-scented plants."

Everything is in submission to Him: (كُلِّ لَهُ قَانِتُونَ - "Everything submits to Him.")

The Month of Rajab

We find now that we've entered into one of the special times of year, the month of Rajab, which is a kind of intimation of Ramadan. Rajab has a special quality. Again, the good fortune of the believer, that the months mean something.

The Holy Prophet ﷺ tells us that there are four holy months - three that come together and one which is on its own. The three that go together are Dhul Qa'dah, Dhul Hijjah, and Muharram. And also Rajab which is not surrounded by sacred months. So sometimes we call it Rajab al-Fard - Rajab the unique, the solitary, the lonely - or sometimes Rajab al-Assam. All the months have lots of names in Arabic. It's part of the beauty of it.

In the month of Rajab we know this is when Imam Ali (karamAllahu wajhah) is said to have been born. In India you'll know it's the Urs of Mu'aynadin Chishti. The Isra wal-Mi'raj and so forth. There are high points in this month which is itself a high point and the believer responds to that and is renewed because it is through passing through moments of sacred time that our enthusiasm and our spirituality are re- energised.

The Wisdom of Natural Rhythms

Ancient man perceived certain elemental realities about himself and is deeply conformed, even in his physiology, to those things. The rising and the setting of the sun, the circadian rhythms. The movements of the moon also seem to have an effect, that there is a certain lunar cyclicity to the human metabolism, which is probably something deep, which is important.

And with Islam, we see the new moon, and something begins that probably operates on a very ancient and timeless and natural way that we don't understand and perhaps the scientists will never understand. But if we're torn away from that, and this is the symbolic sin of Western civilization, torn away from that, and just given January, February, March that aren't related to the obvious phases of the moon, we are missing something and losing something.

The Sacred Calendar as Divine Gift

This is part of the privilege of iman. The unbeliever sees the whole world as being flat. They are the real flat earthers, because everything is equivalently secular. It's just matter. They are physicalists.

We believe that behind that matter, there are certain places of the manifestation of divine names, which even though everything is a manifestation of the divine names, are more perceived by us than other places. And this is universal human experience. Some places are special, but some times also are special.

When you move into a sacred calendar, the world feels different. There are peaks and there are lows. There is an experience of time which is richer than the experience of time known by the person who only looks at the surface of things.

The Story of Isra and Mi'raj

The beauty of the Seerah is that it takes us back to the beauty of membership of the world and to what we call the Fitrah. The Isra and the Mi'raj which we're coming to remember. We know that almost at the

culminating moment of that unimaginable vertical journey he is offered the wine and the milk and he chooses the milk and the angel tells him:

"You've been guided to fitrah (the primordial nature of human beings)."

There's all kinds of symbolism in that - milk comes from the purity of the natural world without mediation whereas wine is from the natural world but it's been fermented - there's been a process of corruption where human beings think they know best and try and turn it into something better than what it naturally is.

Conclusion and Call to Return

So let's try and get back to the operation of our months even though they haven't been official in the Islamic world. Egypt abandoned it in the 19th century, the Ottomans abandoned the Islamic calendar during the First World War and it's kind of just been replaced by this very strange flat, pagan thing.

But as we move through the month of Rajab, insha'Allah, let's try and orient ourselves once again towards the ground of all of this richness, the source of all of these gifts, the one whose names alone constitute time and space, and hope that we might perhaps be lifted up to a state where our hearts can perceive properly.

Through an awareness of the sanctity of space and an awareness of the sanctity of time, we can start to see things more properly, we can start to see beyond the meaningless surface of things and to start to see the geometry and the depth and the ocean of beauty that lies beneath.

Closing Dua

Final Dhikr and Establishment of Prayer