[Empowered vol 8, definitely spoilers]

While I'm on the subject, fuck you Adam Warren for having Mindf██k actually burning in Hell. She was a good person who was actively trying to counteract anything bad she might have done in the past, and gave her own life so that others might live. She in […]

@1up-gaming.bsky.social Didn't that one copy a bunch of stuff fro the fan wiki without proper attribution? Or am I thinking of something else?

@lety Interesting, but have you considered BSD?

Not all Arabs did this. Some divided the month into waxing and waning fortnights, akin to the Indian division of time (and basically every culture that uses synodic months attaches significance to the day on which the full moon falls).

Here ends the thread. Thank you for reading.

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This is a practice also seen in early Jewish timekeeping and Greek lunisolar calendars, and a version of it is seen in Egyptian 30-day months. The 10th day of each month thus took on special significance, which is why Ašura, Eid al-Adha, Yom Kippur, and Asarah BeTevet all fall on the 10th day of […]

But before I end this thread, some bonus stuff about months! At least some Arabs divided the month into three décades (not to be confused with the English word decade). The first two décades were each 10 days long, while the last could be nine or ten days, and was counted backwards (this seems […]

In conclusion, the calendar(s) of central western Arabia prior to Islam were lunisolar, and the beginning of the year was theoretically anchored to the northern solstice.

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This, then, informs our inquiry into when the year began. De Blois does not address that issue, but we can definitely draw conclusions from Abad's work. In Abad's model, the holy season begins with the first visible crescent after the northern solstice; thus, the solstice falls in Shawwāl. For […]

This is satisfying, but it means that Ramadan, which means 'scorching', falls around the northward equinox, while in Abad's model, it more reasonably falls in early summer. Both models thus have some etymological issues, but I believe de Blois' is more likely to reflect how the pre-Islamic Arabs […]

Under de Blois' model, the Rabīs fall in mid-to-late autumn and the Jūmādās fall in early-to-mid winter (I'm a Celt, and so I consider the solstices and equinoxes to mark the midpoints of the seasons; based on the structure of the Himyar calendar, this seems to have also been the case in Yemen) […]

De Blois instead equates Rabī al-awwal with Tishrei on etymological grounds. He suggests that Ašura was originally celebrated in Rabī al-awwal and was later moved to Muharram. Abad is forced to conclude that Muslim and pagan Arabs used the same month names but with an offset for his calendar to […]

So the pre-Islamic Arabs definitely anchored the beginning of the year to the northern solstice. Identifying the correct model hinges on that fact that, when Muhammad arrived in Medina, the local Jews were observing Yom Kippur. Muhammad famously declared that he had more claim to Moses than Jews […]

(By the way, contemporary accounts describe pagans at the Farewell Pilgrimage, who were only banned from performing the Hajj afterward; this, coupled with the fact that Muhammad only recided the verses banning intercalation during the Farewell Pilgrimage, puts paid to the notion that Muslims […]

Moreover, Abad cites two hadiths that clearly place the beginning of the year around summer. The Sahih Muslim records that, when Muhammad undertook the Farewell Pilgrimage, the sun shone so brightly that Bilal and Ūsama had to take turns holding up a cloth to shield him from the sun. al-Bukhari […]

However, the Biblical creation story describes the world being created in autumn, not spring, and Tishrei, not Nisan, was the first month of the Jewish civil calendar.

Zein, Ibrahim, and El-Wakil, Ahmed. “On the Origins of the Hijrī Calendar: A Multi-Faceted Perspective Based on the Covenants […]

The other is that, when Muhammad formally ended intercalation, he declared that the heavens and earth had returned to the positions of creation, which Ioh and Zein & Wakil take to mean that Muharram fell in spring; Zein & Wakil further extrapolate this to mean that Muslims had been using a […]

As I already mentioned, Hideyuki Ioh says that Muharram fell just after the northward equinox, a position that Zein and Wakil agree with. This, however, is based on two fallacies. First, it assumes that Rabī refers to spring, when the evidence from other sources is that it refers to autumn […]

I have come across a few models for how the pre-Islamic Meccan year was supposed to work. One, suggested by Abad, equates Muharram with Tishrei; Ben Abrahamson agrees with him, but in a paper written with Joseph Katz, he instead equates Safar with Tishrei. Finally, de Blois equates Rabī al-awwal […]

The Qu'ran describes intercalation as "an increase in unbelief" and how months are declared sacred and mundane willy-nilly; thus, the motivation behind ending intercalation may have been to end such confusion once and for all.

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