NAME¶
ical - A Hijri/Islamic calendar (and converter)
SYNOPSIS¶
ical [
--gregorian yyyymmdd] [
--hijri yyyymmdd]
[
--umm_alqura] [
--fixed_view] [
--dual] [
--help]
DESCRIPTION¶
The
ical program is a Hijri/Islamic calendar displayer. It utilizes and
includes a Gregorian to Hijri (and vice-versa) date converter. The application
uses and offers multiple calculation methods with not all of them agreeing at
all times. The reason for this multiplicity is due to not having one agreed
upon method and so various entities develop and advocate their calculations.
ical is able to comprehend and calculate both pre-epoch or pre-Hijrah,
denoted as "B.H", as well as post-epoch or post-Hijrah, denoted as
"A.H", dates.
ical also utilizes Gregorian's pre-epoch
"B.C" and post-epoch "A.D" dates and notes them per its
output. When entering pre-epoch years, negative numbers ought to be utilized.
ical when run without any command-line options uses the host machine's
Gregorian date and converts it to Hijri to display that month's view. Entries
enclosed by [] denote exact day specified.
OPTIONS¶
ical follows the usual GNU command line syntax, with long options
starting with two dashes (`-'). A summary of all options is noted below:
- -h, --help
- Show summary of options
- -g, --gregorian yyyymmdd
- Specify the Gregorian date to be converted where 'y' stands for year, 'm'
for month and 'd' for day
- -hi, --hijri yyyymmdd
- Specify the Hijri date to be converted where 'y' stands for year, 'm' for
month and 'd' for day
- -u, --umm_alqura
- Specify to use the Umm Al-Qura calculation method (used mostly in Saudi
Arabia)
- -f, --fixed_view
- Show a fixed week view (ie. start on Sun and end on Sat) else default to
showing the preferred week view of the resulting calendar (Gregorian
starts on Sunday, Hijri starts on Saturday)
- -d, --dual
- Show both converstion from and to calendar months simultaneously
BACKGROUND¶
The Hijri calendar is used in most of the Arab world and is the symbolic
calendar of the Islamic faithed worldwide. This calendar is known as the
"Hijri" (based on the word "Hijrah" - denoting migration
in Arabic) to signal Prophet Mohammed's (PBUH) migration from Makkah to
Medinah on Thursday, July 15, 622 AD (Julian).
The Islamic Hijri calendar is strictly lunar (ie. moon-based) with twelve lunar
months which do not correspond or track their solar counterparts (the
Gregorian calendar is a solar or sun-based calendar). Lunar years and thus
Hijri years are, on average, about 354 days long resulting in a Hijri year
being roughly about 11 days shorter than its Gregorian counterpart.
There is much discussion and confusion regarding how best to track the Hijri
calendar. A great deal of that confusion is based on the fact that many relay
on a human moon sighting to denote the start (or end) of a month (each month
of the Hijri calendar starts when a new moon's crescent is observed or is made
visible at sunset) as opposed to using an empirical mathematic certainty. The
methods presented in this application and its underlying ITL library are
strictly arithmetic in nature and do NOT take moon-phases into consideration
(in short, observational approximation is not used).
LIMITATIONS¶
There is currently no Umm Al-Qura support.
REPORTING BUGS¶
Report bugs on the web using
http://bugs.arabeyes.org
AUTHOR¶
Written by Nadim Shaikli as part of the Arabeyes.org project.
COPYRIGHT¶
ical is subject to the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Copyright © 2005, Arabeyes, Nadim Shaikli.
SEE ALSO¶
The ITL (Islamic Tools Library). It is the underlying requirement for
ical to function. The ITL library was created and is hosted at
www.arabeyes.org.