IDATE(1) User Commands IDATE(1)
NAME
idate - A Gregorian/Meladi to/from Hijri/Islamic date converter
SYNOPSIS
idate [--gregorian yyyymmdd] [--hijri yyyymmdd] [--simple]
[--umm_alqura] [--help]
DESCRIPTION
The idate program is a Gregorian to Hijri (and vice-versa) date con-
verter. The application uses and offers multiple calculation methods
with not all of them agreeing at all times. The reason for this multi-
plicity is due to not having one agreed upon method and so various enti-
ties develop and advocate their calculations.
idate 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. idate 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.
idate when run without any command-line options uses the host machine's
current Gregorian date and converts it to Hijri.
OPTIONS
idate follows the usual GNU command line syntax, with long options
starting with two dashes (`-'). A summary of all options is noted be-
low:
-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
-s, --simple
Specify a simplified output mode
-u, --umm_alqura
Specify to use the Umm Al-Qura calculation method (used mostly in
Saudi Arabia)
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) or July 19, 622 AD (Gregorian).
The Islamic Hijri calendar is strictly lunar (ie. moon-based) with
twelve lunar months which do not correspond or track their solar coun-
terparts (the Gregorian calendar is a solar or sun-based calendar). Lu-
nar years and thus Hijri years are, on average, about 354 days long re-
sulting 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 rely 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 cres-
cent is observed or is made visible at sunset) as opposed to using an
empirical mathematic certainty. The methods presented in this applica-
tion 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
The Umm Al-Qura option doesn't function with pre-epoch settings.
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
idate is subject to the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Copyright © 2005, Arabeyes, Nadim Shaikli.
SEE ALSO
The ITL library (libitl) from the Islamic Tools and Libraries project.
It is the underlying requirement for idate to function. The ITL library
was created and is hosted at www.arabeyes.org.
idate January 05, 2005 IDATE(1)
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