Page 53 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol V

1830 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

Seasons and the Islamic Calendar

After the Popular Revolution of 1973-1974, author twelve lunar months has 354 days, and lunar years
John Davis conducted fieldwork among the Zuwaya therefore pass more quickly than solar ones. But it is
tribe of Western Cyrenaica, Libya. His account describ- the sun, not the moon, which determines the seasons;
ing the Bedouin adaptation to state politics includes and harvests, sowing, the growth of new pasture,
specific references to Islamic cultural and religious life. these are all related to solar time. A consequence is
The following excerpt focuses on the marking of the that lunar months are unrelated to the passing sea-
passing year by the Islamic calendar in contrast to the sons; in relation to a fixed point in the cycle of sea-
Christian religious calendar. sons, the lunar months come two weeks or so earlier
in each successive year.
The way of counting the passing days is itself a set of
‘This year’, a man may say,‘Ramadan will be hot’;
symbols: a numbering and grouping system which
and since Ramadan advances each year, coinciding
carries with it particular connotations and reso-
with the maximum heat every twenty-five years or so,
nances.A lunar calendar with months named Jumadi,
he can reasonably expect to endure two or three hot
Ramadan, is Islamic because Muslims count the days
ones, two or three cool ones in his lifetime. Contrast
of feasts and fasts and pilgrimages by it. It connotes
that with the spiritual calendar of a Christian:
the spiritual life, the duties of salvation, the commu-
nity of the faithful whose religious life is ordered by Whan that April with his shoures soote
the same sequence of days and months. A year of
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

employer and employee, and created a new distinction time varies through the year because of the eccentricity of
between work and personal time. The second was the the Earth’s orbit and the tilt of its axis, sometimes in front
proliferation of clocks and watches; by the end of the sev- of and sometimes behind regular clock time.
enteenth century, timepieces were shifting from a luxury The shift away from the sun as primary timekeeper
affordable only by the wealthy to a convenience available began at the turn of the eighteenth century with the adop-
to all.The third factor was the rise of a work ethic which tion of mean solar time (averaging out the variations of
set a moral, commercial, and even theological value on apparent solar time with a clock) and accelerated with the
industry and deprecated idleness.This was most famously spread of the railways. Before rail, only mail couriers trav-
and succinctly stated by Benjamin Franklin as “Time is eled far enough in a single day to encounter the variety
money”: Not only is time a currency which we choose of local times. The railway age brought the advent of
how to spend, but wasted time is unearned money. Nev- rapid public travel, timetables, and telegraph cables
ertheless, one might argue even in the modern age that beside the tracks, providing both motive and means for
this sentiment enshrines a capitalist, predominantly mas- time to be standardized along the line. Railway compa-
culine view of time, and undervalues the continuing task- nies disseminated their own standards, which were
oriented round of domestic daily chores often carried out quickly taken up by public clocks; formal adoption of a
by women. single standard for legal purposes lagged decades behind.
The situation was especially complicated in countries
From Solar Time to such as the United States, which had many competing
Coordinated Universal Time interests and a wide geographical expanse.
As late as the turn of the nineteenth century, the only time We are so accustomed to time zones today that it is
that mattered was local time. Every town had its own hard to understand the fierce debate engendered by their
time: Solar noon, when the sun is highest, shifts around proposal as companies and cities fought for commercial
one minute later for every twelve miles moved to the west and political supremacy. Charles Dowd, an educator
(at the latitude of London). Moreover, this apparent solar fromWisconsin, proposed a zone system for U.S. railways