Holidays in Saudi Arabia

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Saudi Arabia

The Clock That Tried to Replace Greenwich

In 2004, construction began on a complex of seven towers beside the Grand Mosque, built on the site of the demolished Ajyad Fortress, an eighteenth-century Ottoman citadel whose removal drew international protest from Turkey. Partway through construction, in late 2006, the architects were asked to add something not in the original plan: a clock. The result, unveiled in 2012 atop what is now called the Makkah Royal Clock Tower, carries four faces roughly 35 times the size of Big Ben's, each visible after dark from many kilometres away and lit by over two million LEDs.

The clock was conceived with an ambition well beyond telling local time. At a 2008 conference in Doha titled "Mecca: the Center of the Earth, Theory and Practice", a group of Muslim clerics and scholars argued that the city, rather than Greenwich, deserved to anchor the world's prime meridian, on the reasoning that Mecca sits at the Earth's geographic centre. The Egyptian cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi went further, claiming the site lay in perfect alignment with magnetic north, an area supposedly free of ordinary gravitational effects that left visitors "charged with energy." Basic geography undercut the claim, since the magnetic north pole actually lies on a longitude running through North America, and when the tower's clock finally started, it was set not to any new Mecca Mean Time but to ordinary Arabia Standard Time, UTC+3, the same offset the kingdom had used all along.

The Month That Refused to Stay Still

For roughly two centuries before the rise of Islam, the calendar followed in Mecca appears, according to most classical Arab historians, to have kept a lunar year loosely tied to the solar seasons through an inserted extra month, a practice known as nasi'. The insertion was reportedly overseen by a specific lineage within the tribe of Kinanah, who held the customary authority to announce when a year would receive its additional month, keeping the pilgrimage season fixed to roughly the same point in the agricultural and trading calendar year after year.

That system ended abruptly during Muhammad's Farewell Pilgrimage in the tenth year after the Hijra, when a Quranic revelation, in the ninth chapter, condemned the practice as an unlawful manipulation of sacred time and fixed the year permanently at twelve lunar months with no further adjustment. Because a purely lunar year runs about eleven days shorter than a solar one, the consequence has played out ever since: Islamic months migrate steadily backward through the Gregorian calendar, roughly a third of a month earlier each year, so that Ramadan or the Hajj season, fixed at the same point in the lunar year, cycles slowly through every solar season across roughly a thirty-three-year span. Historians studying the period also caution that this same abolition makes exact solar dating of very early Islamic events, including the Hijra itself, genuinely uncertain, since the number and placement of intercalary months used in the years just before the reform are not precisely known.

Two Calendars, One Government

Modern civil life in the kingdom runs on a calendar calculated well in advance rather than observed month to month. The Umm al-Qura calendar, maintained by astronomers at the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, fixes the start of nine of the year's twelve months by astronomical calculation alone, publishing dates decades ahead for use on government documents, employment contracts, school terms and court paperwork. The current version of the calculation was last substantially reformed in 2002.

Three months are treated differently. For Ramadan, Shawwal and Dhu al-Hijjah, the months governing the fast, the holiday that ends it, and the Hajj, the kingdom's Supreme Court still calls for the physical sighting of the crescent moon before confirming the new month, even though the pre-calculated Umm al-Qura date is already sitting in every printed calendar. Since 1999 the practical rule compares the setting times of the sun and moon on the twenty-ninth day of the outgoing month: if the moon sets after the sun, the new month is declared to begin the next evening. In practice the sighting announcement and the pre-calculated date almost always coincide, though independent moon-sighting observers outside the kingdom have long noted that Saudi announcements tend to fall a day earlier than sightings recorded elsewhere in the world, a discrepancy still debated among astronomers and religious scholars and a reason several other Muslim-majority countries have declined to adopt the Umm al-Qura calendar as their own.

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