The Islamic New Year is upon us from tonight.

In a lecture by Shaykh Zulfiqar Ahmad Naqshbandi,  a scholar with leanings towards the Deobandi School of Thought, I came across a description of why different days of the week are considered holy in different cultures. The context of discussion was the event of the Prophet’s (sallallahualaihiwasallam) birth, and he restricted himself to only talking of the Abrahamic School of Religions. According to the three religions, the universe was created in six days and the seventh day of the week was free. The idea of days and weeks that we apply to creation and the way they happen to pass in our modern world are different and hence it would be not entirely appropriate to look at the story as an analogy. Rather, it suits us better to think of it as an allegory.

Jews came to value the day when nothing was done, which was a Saturday. Hence they celebrate their Sabbath, or Shabbat, every Saturday and a lot of activities are prohibited on that day. For Christians, Sunday took special significance. This led to the Mass in churches being held on Sundays. The idea of birthdays so prevalent in the Christian world also derives itself from the idea of beginning being held sacred, since a child’s birth is its beginning. In the Islamic world, Friday assumed special significance and since it was the last day of creation, Muslims hold deaths very dear to them. This is reflected in the fact that most Muslims remember their loved ones on the day of their deaths. The Friday Prayers, or Jumuah, also adds special significance to the occasion. It stands for the celebration of a human being’s successful completion of the aim of her or his life.

The reasons behind these days being auspicious are historical as well as traditional. Historical significance can be traced to the practices of the people of the era and their traditional significance can be gotten from the law-givers of each of the religions citing reasons and providing laws to honour the sanctity of the days they had to deem as important. There is also a practical significance to these days as can be seen from the followers right up to these days. Most of the countries where any of these religions is practised by a critically important number or set of people generally institute these days as the day of an official holiday.

This serves two purposes. The first of them has to do with work planning and the necessary break from work. Organisations organise their primary tasks and mostly internal deadlines according to the weekly holiday they follow and their employees generally plan their relaxation and other activities according to the same. The second purpose it serves is of social bonding at various levels including family, friends, and other social groups one is a part of. According to an article in The Independent, 1.46 million families in UK cannot afford a single day together because of the crumpling of the holiday system at workplaces. It is important to realise the importance of holidays in our daily life, especially in today’s world where the discourse surrounding hard work being its own reward and learning being the aim of work have made employee rights secondary in the minds of employees themselves.

Talking of Islamic New Year, we have two major systems of calendar years – solar and lunar. Anthropologically speaking, it is very tough to speculate how the idea of a week would have formed. What are easier are the ideas of a month and a year. A month was dependent on the moon phases and a year would be the changes in seasons. The more popular story is the flooding of rivers every year that made people count days and develop the idea of a year. However, in the absence of exact calculations, the period of 12 lunar months would have been similar to the seasonal reappearances and hence the lunar calendar developed. Similarly, with the advent of calculations, the exact time for a solar revolution, the reason behind seasonal variations, would have been understood and thus the solar calendar would have been understood. The idea of 12 months would have been applied to arrive at the 30 day Julian philosophy of each month.

The calendar that we follow now, the Gregorian Calendar, is a solar one, designed on the older Julian Calendar and accounts for the astronomical inaccuracies present in the Julian Calendar. The Islamic Calendar, on the other hand, is a lunar calendar, starting from the year of the fortuitous migration of the Beloved Prophet (sallallaahualaihiwasallam) from the blessed sanctuary of Makkah Mukarramah to the blessed sanctuary of Madinah Munawwarah. The months and dates were already in existence. Since the methodology of the calendar was sighting the moon, the old calendar was adopted to be the new Islamic Calendar from the hijrah, or the migration, year.

In its present form, the Islamic calendar has the following months in order: Muharram, Safar, Rabi ul Awwal, Rabi uth Thaani, Jumaad al Awwal, Jumaad ath Thaani, Rajab, Shabaan, Ramadhaan, Shawwaal, Dhul Aqdaa, Dhul Hijjah. The current year, from today, is 1437, which means it has been 1437 lunar years since our Beloved (sallallahualaihiwasallam) crossed the Arabian Deserts and the hills of Sinai to transform the land of Yathrib into Madina. On this occasion, we Muslims don’t do anything that other cultures would expect to be done on a New Year’s day. Traditionally, we don’t even have special food on this day. The marked differences from the traditional celebrations aside, I would just like to look at two customs of the non-Muslim cultures – Reflection and Resolution. Both these acts aren’t specific to cultures and have been a part of Muslim culture as well. However, I intend to talk of them because we do not apply them to us as often as we should.

Reflection is the act of looking back at the previous year, understanding what went right and what went wrong. We look back on the gone year on what was with us and is no longer there, what was and will be with us, and also the hope of many things that weren’t there with us but we want to be. This act of reflection was common to the practice of many Muslims scholars and saints and other holy people to such an extent that they inspired even common women and men used to take account of how they spent their day every night before sleeping, seeing what harm they caused and what good they effected.

“In today’s tough and hectic life” is a catch-phrase I would avoid using. The world that those people inhabited was in no way easier than ours; simpler is what it was. However, the troubles that people faced were no less profound, the work they had to do was no less hard. Therefore, I personally wouldn’t like to justify my lack of reflection or stock-keeping on the “fact” that my life is tougher than the life of someone a few centuries ago.

Resolution stems from the desire to bring about a positive change in one’s life. The objective of the good, the one who were rewarded, was always to be better than what they were every passing moment. They did not need the boundaries of time and space to decide when it was time to repent for any mistake they may have made and try to make their lives better. For us, we generally wait for “good times” to start picking up good habits. If the act that we are hoping to take up is that good, then the auspiciousness of the occasion shouldn’t matter a least bit. So as to speak, we shouldn’t start our prayers from “next friday” but from the very moment we are in, given other conditions are met.

The power of resolutions is strengthened first of all by repentance for the bad that preceded them and then the correction that their non-fulfilment may have caused. For some acts, the two are mandatory conditions to be fulfilled. The concept of tawbah and qadhaa or kaffaaraa in Islamic jurisprudence are what take care of these two important reparations of a successful to make up for something wrong that we were doing. The act of taking up something good the negation of which isn’t sinful doesn’t need any of these.

The Muslim canon hasn’t defined any day for the specific purpose of reflection and resolution. Therefore, it’s in no way a suggestion that we should wait for the end of the year to do any of these. It’s just that if one hasn’t been doing it so far, today, or any other day when the thought occurs, will be a good time to start.