Happy Ramadan to all who observe it
Could someone Eli5 how a calendar that is less time than the time it takes the earth to travel around the sun used outside of a religious context?
I understand it’s connected to the stages of the moon and that the date for Ramadan moves in relation to the Gregorian calendar every year, was the ever a time when the Islamic calendar was used without the Gregorian calendar?
If so, how did that work logistically? I have a friend who was born during the month of Ramadan, and that year Ramandan was in the summer. Was it never an issue that the months don’t always corelate to seasons? Were seasons not really thing in the part of the world where the calendar was developed?
In: 5
> was the ever a time when the Islamic calendar was used without the Gregorian calendar?
Strictly speaking, yes, since the adoption of the Islamic calendar predated the adoption of the Gregorian. But the Gregorian was a minor tweak on the much older Julian calendar, with a new way of choosing leap years. But the Islamic was also a tweak on an older calendar, with a new Year 1 and no extra months. So … [shrug glyph].
The designers of all these calendars understood that the solar year is not an integral number of either days or lunar months long; they dealt with that in various ways: Give up trying to match the length of the calendar month to the lunar month; give up trying to match the length of the calendar year to the solar year; whatever.
> In almost all countries where the predominant religion is Islam, the civil calendar is the Gregorian calendar, with Syriac month-names used in the Levant and Mesopotamia (Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine) but the religious calendar is the Hijri one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_calendar
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