Safar

Safar is the second month of the Islamic (Hijri) calendar. Its name is glossed with the sense of empty or void, said by some to recall houses left empty when their people went out, whether to travel or to war, in the season the name once marked. It is not among the four sacred months and carries no major prescribed observance, though some popular traditions came to regard it as an unlucky month, a view that orthodox teaching discourages. 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 year, so each month falls about eleven days earlier by the solar reckoning from one year to the next. These are the features of the Islamic calendar tradition, in which Safar follows the sacred month of Muharram.

Safar's name is often glossed as connected to a root meaning empty or yellow, referring in one traditional explanation to houses left empty during travel or plague, and in another to the yellowing of vegetation associated with the season in which the pre-Islamic calendar once fixed it, though because the Islamic calendar is purely lunar and unanchored to the solar seasons, the second explanation would only have applied before the reforms attributed to the Prophet Muhammad. Some pre-Islamic and folk traditions regarded Safar as an inauspicious month, associated with misfortune, a belief the Prophet is reported in hadith literature to have explicitly rejected, stating there is no such thing as inherent ill omen (la ʿadwa wa la tiyara) attached to any month, including Safar.

The name is glossed as empty or yellow. 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.

Safar is glossed as empty, on the reading that the houses were left empty when people went out to travel or raid once the sacred month of Muharram had passed. That etymology is traditional and, like most of the twelve, is reported by the lexicographers rather than being independently established.