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Information about the Badí' calendar

The Badí' calendar, like the Common Era calendar most widely used in the world, is a solar calendar tied to the sun’s position relative to Earth, the length of a year is based upon the amount of time it takes Earth to orbit around the sun (365.256363004 days). The structure and usage of the calendar were revealed by the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh, the Twin Manifestions of the Bahá’í Era. Currently the calendar is used by Bahá’ís to determine the correct dates and times for their Feasts and Holy Days throughout the year.

Key Facts

First Day of the Year

Date Conversion

Holy Days

Documents

Videos

Key Facts about the Badí' calendar

• The name Badí' means Wondrous.
• The first year of the Badí' Calendar is the year in which the Declaration of the Báb took place (1844).
• Each year consists of 19 months of 19 days, each day starts and ends at sunset.
• The first day of the year, Naw-Rúz, is whichever day the sun’s position crosses Earth’s equator from south to north, on the Gregorian calendar this falls around 21 March.
• The last month of the Bahá'í year ('Alá') is the month of fasting and is placed immediately before the following year’s Naw-Rúz.
• 19 months x 19 days = 361 days, the remaining 4 or 5 days between each Naw-Rúz form the Ayyám-i-Há festival, placed before the last month of the year, between Mulk and 'Alá'.

• The months are all named after attributes of God and each day of the month is also named using the same pattern, so each day has both a weekday name and a monthday name.
• The week is 7 days long and the first day (Jalál) falls mainly on the western calendar’s Saturday. Istiqlál (mainly on Friday) is the day of rest.
• Every 19 years are collectively called a Váḥid (meaning unity), and each year of a Váḥid is given its own individual name, 173 BE is called Bá’.
• Each Váḥid starts with Earth, the moon and the Sun in an alignment that only repeats once every nineteen years, astronomers call this a “Metonic cycle”, representing the time it takes for the solar and lunar cycles to coincide with each other.
• 19 Váḥids are collectively called a Kull-i-Shay’ (meaning "All Things"). 172 B.E. started the tenth Váḥid of the first Kull-i-Shay’.
• The full title of a date can be given in the form: “The day of [weekday name] , the day of [monthday name], of the month of [month name], of the year [year name], of the [Váḥid number]st/nd/th Váḥid of the [Kull-i-Shay number]st/nd/th Kull-i-Shay”

The basic outline of the Bahá’í calendar was revealed by the Báb more than one and a half centuries ago,  but  the Báb left certain details to be clarified. Bahá’u’lláh officially adopted the calendar, clarified the year in which it started and explained where the festival of Ayyám-i-Há should fall, but Bahá’u’lláh also left certain details to later be clarified.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá elucidated on certain aspects of the calendar and clarified that of the 11 Holy Days that Bahá’ís must mark, work is only forbidden on the nine that pertain to Bahá’u’lláh and the Báb.

Shoghi Effendi made further clarifications on the calendar and introduced its usage to the Bahá’ís of the West. However this use was been left tied to the Gregorian calendar pending certain decisions that remained to be made by the Universal House of Justice.  

In a letter dated 10 July 2014 the Universal House of Justice announced these decisions, to take effect from 172 B.E. (21 March 2015). Two key decisions were announced, the place on Earth which would be used as the point of reference point for the astronomical start of the year, and how the Births of Bahá’u’lláh and the Báb, which fall next to each other on the lunar calendar and are intended to be celebrated as consecutive twin anniversaries, could be placed in the context of a solar calendar. The Universal House of Justice also announced some corrections to the dates on which certain Holy Days are celebrated, in accordance with the proper implementation of the Badí' calendar.

The First Day of the Year

Solar calendars are based on the position of the sun relative to Earth, and this is effected by both the rotation of Earth on its own axis (creating day and night) and the planet's orbit around the sun.

Because Earth tilts on its axis the position of the sun relative to the equator (and the height the sun reaches at noon) change throughout the year. For half of the year the sun brings spring and summer to the northern hemisphere before crossing the equator to provide the extra heat to the southern hemisphere for the remainder of the year. The moments when the sun is furthest from the equator are called solstices, these are the longest and shortest days of the year. The moments when the position of the sun crosses the equator are called equinoxes, these mark the starts of spring and autumn.

Bahá'u'lláh stated that "The Festival of Naw-Rúz falleth on the day that the sun entereth the sign of Aries, even should this occur no more than one minute before sunset."

Aries is an astrological sign of the zodiac, these signs are based on twelve equal segments of the path that the sun takes relative to Earth, starting with the sign of Aries when the sun is at angle of zero degrees and rising north, which is the moment of the Bahá equinox.

At any given moment in time, what your clock says and where the sun sits are dependent upon your physical location on Earth. At the moment of the equinox it will be daytime in some of the world's cities and nighttime in others, and on opposite sides of the international date line the day of the month will also be different. In order to fix "the day that the sun entereth the sun of Aries", the last sunset in the city of Tehran (Bahá'u'lláh's birthplace)  before the Bahá equinox is considered to be the start of the day of Naw-Rúz in that location, and that same day is the Festival of Naw-Rúz around the world, wether the equinox falls on that day, in that location, or not.

The image used in the site header, and shown more fully to the left, is published by NOAA and shows the Bahá equinox from space at the start of 172 B.E. (March 2013). The position of the sun is moving northward over the equator, which has been drawn on, horizontally, across Earth’s centre.