Dhu al-Hijjah

Dhu al-Hijjah is the twelfth and final month of the Islamic (Hijri) calendar and one of its four sacred months; its name means the master of the pilgrimage, for it is the month of the Hajj to Mecca, the great pilgrimage that is one of the five pillars of Islam. Its rites reach their height on the ninth, the Day of Arafah, and the tenth is Eid al-Adha, the feast of the sacrifice, commemorating Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son, kept by pilgrims and by Muslims everywhere with the sacrifice of an animal and the sharing of its meat, the greater of the two Islamic feasts. The Islamic calendar is purely lunar, so the Hajj season moves through the solar year over time. These are the observances of the Islamic tradition, in which the year closes with its holiest pilgrimage and feast.

Dhu al-Hijjah, the last and one of the four sacred months, holds the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca obligatory once in a lifetime for every Muslim who is physically and financially able, concentrated in the first ten to thirteen days and centred on the Day of Arafah, the ninth, when pilgrims gather at the plain of Arafat in what is widely regarded as the pilgrimage's central rite. The tenth opens Eid al-Adha, the Festival of Sacrifice, commemorating the willingness of Ibrahim to sacrifice his son at God's command, a narrative the Quran recounts without naming the son directly, though most Islamic tradition identifies him as Ismail, in contrast to the Genesis account's naming of Isaac.

The name is glossed as the one of the pilgrimage. It is one of the four sacred months. The twelve month names are Arabic and predate Islam, retained from the calendar of the Arabian peninsula when the Hijri reckoning was established.

Four of the twelve are the sacred months, al-ashhur al-hurum, in which warfare was forbidden in pre-Islamic Arabia and which the Quran confirms at sura 9 verse 36: Dhu al-Qadah, Dhu al-Hijjah, Muharram and Rajab. Three run consecutively and the fourth stands alone in the middle of the year, an arrangement that fitted the pilgrimage season and the trading truces that went with it.

The Hijri calendar admits no intercalation. The verse immediately following the one that names the twelve months condemns nasi, the pre-Islamic practice of postponing or adding a month, and the calendar has run as a strict lunar reckoning since. The consequence is a year of 354 or 355 days that moves against the seasons by about eleven days annually, so any month passes through the whole solar year in roughly thirty-three years.

Dhu al-Hijjah is the month of the Hajj, whose rites fall between the eighth and the thirteenth, with the standing at Arafat on the ninth and Eid al-Adha on the tenth. It is the only month whose name states its function, and it is the reason the Hijri calendar cannot be replaced for religious purposes by a solar one.