Jumada al-Ula

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.

The name is glossed as the first of the dry or frozen months. It is not 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.

Jumada al-Ula is the first of the second pair, and its name is connected with jamada, to freeze or to be hard and dry, describing standing water. Like the two Rabis it names a season the strictly lunar calendar cannot hold it to.