Dhu al-Qadah

Dhu al-Qadah is the eleventh month of the Islamic (Hijri) calendar and one of its four sacred months, in which warfare was traditionally forbidden; its name means the master of truce or of sitting, from the season when people refrained from war and travel. It is the first of three months connected with the pilgrimage season, leading toward Dhu al-Hijjah. It carries no major prescribed festival of its own but is honoured as a sacred month and a time of peace. The Islamic calendar is purely lunar, its year of about 354 days drifting steadily against the solar seasons. These are the features of the Islamic calendar tradition, in which Dhu al-Qadah is one of the four inviolable months and the threshold of the pilgrimage season that culminates in the month that follows.

Dhu al-Qadah, one of the four sacred months, takes its name from a root meaning sitting or truce, consistent with its traditional status, alongside Rajab, Dhu al-Hijjah and Muharram, as a month in which warfare was forbidden among pre-Islamic Arabian tribes, a custom the Quran affirms. Dhu al-Qadah is also the first of the three months, together with Dhu al-Hijjah and the first ten days of Muharram, traditionally recognised in Islamic jurisprudence as the "months of Hajj," ashhur al-hajj, within which the rites of pilgrimage may be initiated, even though the pilgrimage's main rites themselves are concentrated in the following month, Dhu al-Hijjah.

The name is glossed as the one of sitting, the month of truce. 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-Qadah is the first of the three consecutive sacred months and its name means the one of sitting, that is, of refraining from war. It precedes the pilgrimage month, and the truce it carried allowed pilgrims and traders to travel safely toward Mecca.