EID holiday

I decided to write about EID in general as many of you who are following this may not be familiar with this Muslim holiday.

Eid ul-Fitr or Id-ul-Fitr ( عيد الفطر ‘Īdu l-Fiṭr‎), often abbreviated to Eid, is a holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting. Eid is an Arabic word meaning "festivity", while Fiṭr means "to break the fast" (and can also mean "nature", from the word "fitrah"); and so the holiday symbolizes the breaking of the fasting period. It is celebrated starting on the first day of the Islamic month of Shawwal. Eid ul-Fitr is a three day celebration and is sometimes also known as the "Smaller Eid" (Arabic: العيد الصغير al-‘īdu ṣ-ṣaghīr‎) as compared to the Eid ul-Adha that lasts four days and is called the "Greater Eid" (Arabic: العيد الكبير al-‘īdu l-kabīr‎). (From Wikipedia)

First of all, let's talk calendar. It is called the “hijira.” It starts in our year 622 CE on July 16^th. The Muslim calendar is not our calendar in much the same way as the Jewish calendar is not. It is shorter, only 354 days and therefore holidays move unlike being on a specific date because the calendar year is actually shorter and the months are based on lunar cycles, exactly 12 of them in a given year. So your seasons change too and that is on a 34 year cycle. I have a very funny story about my visa because I didn’t understand the dates on all my papers are done in this calendar and not in the western calendar. Funny now but not funny at the time.

So anyway, it is a really big Holy Day here and our offices were closed from December 3-13, hence a holiday break. (Next post I'll talk about where we went and what we did.) So anyway, part of EID is that all Muslims if they can afford it and are in good health are obligated to go to Mecca and partake in the hajj. The picture is of the Ka’Ba, considered to be the core places of Islam and the place where the divine revelations began. There are 5 pillars of Islam (declaration of faith, prayer, almsgiving, fasting, and pilgrimage to Mecca.) There are a series of rituals that take place and they can cover 3-6 days. Literally millions of people come through Jeddah to do this during this time. There is a huge multi-acre site which is near the airport which is built to accommodate these travelers even though it is only once a year. The number of people are almost unbelievable.