The Peace on The Horizon - 75 Years after The World War 2 in the Middle East (118)

 

(Japanese Version)

(Arabic Version)

 

(contents)

 

Chapter 5: Two calendars (Gregorian & Hijri)

 

118 Gregorian overcomes Hijri (4/4)

Thus, the Muslim society has kept the traditional lifestyle for 1400 years. However, from the beginning of 15th century of Hijri corresponding to 1980s of AD, Muslim society was swallowed in the wave of globalization. They were forced to adjust the year and month scale to the Gregorian calendar. In order to trade with non-Muslim countries in the world, it became indispensable to conform with the Gregorian calendar as the de facto standard.

 

Financial business was the first field of de facto standard. In the modern financial business, the annual, monthly or daily transaction are based on Gregorian calendar. And trading day is from Monday to Friday. And Saturday and Sunday are holidays. In contrast, Thursday and Friday were holidays in Islamic world, and trading days were from Saturday to Wednesday. The duplicated working days with other world are only three days on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. This is extremely inefficient. Sunday is the Sabbath day in non-Muslim countries, while Friday is the praying day in the Islamic countries. They cannot change the praying in the mosque on Friday. Finally, the Islamic countries made compromise with Western style. Now Middle Eastern Islamic countries have changed two-day weekend from Thursday and Friday to Friday and Saturday.

 

It looked like a simple change of rule. But the biorhythm in Muslim society began to go wrong. Muslim was forced to obey the Gregorian calendar for business purpose, though their mind was belonging to Islam. Muslim was teared between Hijri and Gregorian. Hijri has been overcome by Gregorian.

 

(To be continued ----)

 

 

Areha Kazuya

(From an ordinary citizen in the cloud)