Jumada al-Ula, the First Month of Drought

Jumada al-Ula is the fifth month of the Islamic (Hijri) calendar. Its name is glossed with the sense of dry or parched land, or of freezing, recalling the season it marked when the lunar month names were fixed. It is the first of a pair, followed by Jumada al-Akhirah. It is not among the four sacred months and carries no major prescribed observance. The Islamic calendar is purely lunar, its twelve months following the moon and its year of about 354 days making no leap adjustment to the solar seasons, so each month falls about eleven days earlier by the solar reckoning from year to year, and the descriptive season-names no longer track the weather. These are the features of the Islamic calendar tradition, in which Jumada al-Ula falls in the middle stretch of the lunar year.

Jumada al-Ula, the first month of Jumada, takes its name from a root associated with dryness or freezing, reflecting, like the Rabi months before it, the season in which the pre-Islamic Arabian calendar once fixed this position before the Quranic prohibition of intercalation permanently detached the twelve lunar months from the solar seasons. Jumada al-Ula carries no major fixed religious observance shared broadly across the Muslim world. Some Shia communities mark the third of the month as the traditional date of the death of Fatimah, daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, though the exact date is a matter of some historical disagreement among different sources and traditions.