Hijri Calendar 1448 — Month Starts and Key Dates

Why two calendars can show different dates

The Hijri calendar is lunar, and a month begins when the new crescent moon is first seen. Seeing is local: the same evening, the moon may be visible from one country and not from another, so two places can genuinely start the month on different days. That is not an error in anybody's calendar — it is what a sighting-based calendar means.

Because waiting for a sighting makes it impossible to print a diary in advance, several calculated calendars exist. Saudi Arabia's Umm al-Qura is the one most software uses, including this site's converter. The tabular calendars follow a fixed arithmetic rule instead, repeating over thirty years. All three are shown side by side below, and on any given day they typically sit within a day of each other.

So a date here is a good prediction and not an announcement. For anything that has to be right — a fast, a flight, a deadline — check what has actually been declared where you are.

The twelve months of 1448 AH

The Gregorian date each Hijri month begins, and how long it runs. A lunar month is either 29 or 30 days, which is why the year comes to 354 or 355 rather than 365 — and why these dates move about eleven days earlier each Gregorian year.

Ramadan, Eid and Ashura

The dates people actually look up, for the next three Hijri years. The last column is the widest disagreement between the three calculated calendars — a day, almost always, which is a fair measure of how precisely any of this can be stated in advance.

How these were worked out

Nothing on this page was copied from another table. Each date is computed from the calendar implementations built into the browser and into Node, by asking for the first Gregorian day that falls on the wanted Hijri date — the same three calendars the standard library exposes, queried directly rather than reimplemented.

That matters because a hand-copied date table inherits whatever was wrong in the table it came from, and a wrong date looks exactly like a right one. The figures here are checked in both directions: every date is converted back to confirm it returns the day it came from, month lengths are confirmed to be 29 or 30, and the year is confirmed to come to 354 or 355 days.