Hijri Date Converter

The tabular or civil Islamic calendar: a purely arithmetic scheme in which months alternate between 30 and 29 days and eleven years in every thirty-year cycle carry an extra day. It is the standard basis for date conversion in software, it is reversible, and it never disagrees with itself.

Often, but not always, and it is important to know why. Pakistan begins each month on the sighting of the new moon, decided by the Ruet-e-Hilal Committee. Arithmetic cannot anticipate a sighting, so a converted date can be a day out — occasionally two, and sometimes in different directions in different countries on the same night. For Ramadan, Eid and Hajj, follow the announcement, not this page.

Because they are using different schemes — a different epoch, a different leap-year pattern in the thirty-year cycle, or an astronomical calculation rather than a tabular one. None of them is a moon sighting. Differences of a day between converters are normal and are not a sign that one is broken.

Year 1 begins with the Hijrah, the migration to Madinah. In the tabular calendar used here, 1 Muharram 1 AH corresponds to 19 July 622 CE in the proleptic Gregorian calendar — 16 July 622 by the Julian calendar in use at the time. Both describe the same day.

It is a lunar calendar of about 354 days, roughly eleven days shorter than the solar year. That is why Ramadan moves through the seasons and why a Hijri year does not map cleanly onto a Gregorian one — and why Zakat calculated on a lunar year comes round slightly more often than an annual solar cycle would suggest.

Yes, and it is the right tool for it: the Zakat year is lunar, so a date fixed by the Gregorian calendar will drift about eleven days each year against the actual obligation. Convert your Zakat date once and track it in Hijri.

A continuous count of days used to convert between calendars without ambiguity — every date in every calendar maps to one number. It is shown because it makes the conversion checkable: two dates with the same Julian Day Number are the same day, whatever calendar they are written in.

The arithmetic runs in both directions without breaking, but a converted date centuries away is a mathematical result rather than a historical or usable one. Treat distant dates with the same caution you would treat any extrapolation.