Rabi al-Thani, the Second Spring

Rabi al-Thani is the fourth month of the Islamic (Hijri) calendar, its name meaning the second spring, paired with the preceding Rabi al-Awwal from the season the lunar names once marked. It is not among the four sacred months and carries no major prescribed festival, though particular communities keep commemorations of saints and teachers within it. The Islamic calendar is purely lunar, its twelve months following the phases of the moon and its year of about 354 days making no adjustment to the solar year, so the months move about eleven days earlier through the solar seasons each year and the springtime names no longer match the actual season. These are the features of the Islamic calendar tradition, in which Rabi al-Thani follows the month associated with the Prophet's birth.

Rabi al-Thani, meaning the second spring, is the fourth month, its name, like Rabi al-Awwal's before it, inherited from the seasonal terminology of the pre-Islamic Arabian calendar rather than describing the month's actual season under the fixed, purely lunar Islamic calendar in use since the Quranic prohibition of intercalation. The month is also sometimes called Rabi al-Akhir, the last or final Rabi, a naming variant found across different regional and historical Islamic sources without a difference in meaning. Rabi al-Thani carries no major fixed religious observance shared broadly across the Muslim world, unlike the sacred months and the two months of Ramadan and Dhu al-Hijjah that surround the annual cycle of fasting and pilgrimage.