The Bahá'í calendar has 19 months of 19 days each with 4 or 5 intercalary days. The first day of the month is marked with a gathering of Bahá'ís called Feast.
Growing up a Bahá'í, I always felt that Bahá'í months and holy days happened in a random fashion. 19 days is a strange number of days to keep in one's mind. It's more than two weeks but less than three. It about two-thirds of a standard month but not quite. It always seemed to catch me on the off-foot. Even the calendars that had all of the Bahá'í dates were normal (Gregorian, i.e. Christian) calendars that just had an extra star on a Feast day or Holy Day. They did nothing to illustrate the inherent logic and beauty of our calendar. This formed the inspiration for this project.
The Bahá'í calendar, also known as the Badí' calendar, was actually envisioned by the Báb, the forerunner of Bahá'u'lláh. This remains as one of few teachings of His that we continue to practice as Bahá'ís. The primary structure of the Badí' calendar is that it comprises 19 months of 19 days with the first day beginning on the spring equinox. This brings us to 361 days. Bahá'u'lláh introduced the four or five day Festival of Ayyám-i-Há (which literally means days of 'H') as intercalary days leading into the last Bahá'í month. This allows the year to always begin exactly on the spring equinox.
The list of months and their respective meanings can be found here.
So 19 months of 19 days each sounds simple, and simplicity is always a great place to start. I chose to begin with the most obvious shape: a square. Days can be arranged vertically and months can be horizontal.
Next, I needed to also include the intercalary days, so that would form its own column as well.
I then wanted to integrate the days of the week because they continue to be the most prevalent way of keeping track of the passage of days. It's always easy to tell what day of the week it is, but it's pretty hard to tell what day of the month it is. So having a calendar without that is pretty much a non-starter.
This is where I began to run into some unique challenges about how to efficiently display information. Up until this moment, I was efficiently using the x and y axes to inform dates and months. Without going 3D (maybe a design for another year?), how might I include days of the week? That is how I ended up with the current parallelogram shape. By introducing a slight vertical offset from month to month, it drew the similar days of the week close enough to each other to create a diagonal alignment to communicate the day of the week on the bottom right.
Once the general structure of the Bahá'í elements were established, it was time to add in the Gregorian elements. While the Bahá'í months had been visualized as columns, the Gregorian months were depicted as regions across the calendar allowing for them to shift in shape across columns and to accommodate their varying lengths. I also chose to mark the new Gregorian year with a bold dashed line to make it clear that this Bahá'í year straddles 2020 CE and 2021 CE.
Along the way, I learned a thing or two about time is measured, how it’s different for Bahá'ís, and even a few odd things about how its done using the Gregorian calendar.
Naw-Rúz is the first day of the Bahá’í year which coincides with the spring equinox. On Naw-Rúz in 2014, the Bahá'í community around the world, at the direction of the Universal House of Justice, adopted a new version of the Bahá'í Calendar. There had actually been two versions of the calendar in use (one used in the Middle-East and the other used in the rest of the world), and this new version would unify the international Bahá’í community and their keeping of Bahá’í dates. The new version provided some clarifications and resolved some of the requirements set by Bahá'u'lláh that hadn't yet been observed. Of these clarifications, the one that has the greatest impact (in my opinion) is the way that Naw-Rúz is determined. Bahá'u'lláh states:
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.
This is an astronomical way of determining the equinox or more specifically, the location of the earth in relation to the sun. This means in practice that Naw-Rúz can end up occurring on either the 20th, 21st or 22nd of March as a result of the way that the Gregorian calendar deals with the 6ish extra hours that exist in each year. This illustrated to me that the calendar in use by the world has several inaccuracies built into it, but because it's so widely-accepted, we tend to assume that 21 March is the equinox no matter what. Pegging Naw-Rúz to an astronomical event completely untethers the Badí' calendar from the Gregorian calendar and creates a greater connection to the natural universe.
Another aspect that benefited from clarification is the way that we celebrate the Twin Holy Birthdays. In the calendar most Bahá'ís used to use, the birthdays of the prophet Bahá'u'lláh and His forerunner the Báb were celebrated on 12 November and 20 October respectively. This failed to show that, despite being offset by two years, these two days occurred consecutively according to the Islamic calendar which is lunar in nature. As a way of preserving this relationship, in our current calendar, the celebrations of the Twin Holy Birthdays now occur after the eighth new moon in the Bahá'í year. This allows them to travel a little bit, but never beyond the length of a lunar month.
This header may be a bit misleading, but in essence, the Bahá'í calendar does not have leap years at a regular interval. While the Gregorian calendar mostly has a leap year every 4 years, over the course of a century. The inaccuracy of a 4 year interval builds up enough to require a skipped leap year. This skipped leap year happens if the year ends in 2 zeroes, i.e. a new century year. This also requires a correction that occurs every 400 years with a “non-skipped” leap year. While this makes it somewhat easier to know which years are leap years and which aren’t, it produces accumulated inaccuracies over time in relation to the earth’s position around the sun, resulting in the range of days that the equinoxes and solstices land on. Because Naw-Rúz is tied to an astronomical event, the pattern of years having 365 days vs 366 days will occur in a more organic fashion, typically every 4 years and occasionally after a 5 year gap with the first day of the year always landing on the equinox.
In making this calendar, learned a great deal about how time is measured by Bahá'ís as well as those who framed the Gregorian calendar. Something as basic as the day of the year has assumptions built into it that we don't think about. Perhaps most surprisingly of all, in addition to gaining an appreciation for the symmetry and idiosyncrasy of the Bahá'í calendar, I found a few features about the Gregorian calendar that I can now appreciate. By understanding it as a designed system, as all calendars and timekeeping methods are, I can appreciate the beauty of it and its ways of managing the complexities of tracking the days of the earth’s trip around the sun.
There are some other important elements to the calendar that I wanted to highlight.
One of the unique features of the Bahá'í calendar is that every day of the month has a unique name. Perhaps as a way of reinforcing the symmetry of the number of months and number of days, the names of the days are the same as the names of the months and in the same order.
For example:
The Bahá'í calendar also has its own names of the week. It similarly follows a seven day week, but the Bahá'í week begins on Saturday and ends on Friday, the day of rest. The names of the week are:
In addition to the names of the weekdays, days of the month, and months, the Bahá'í calendar also names each year! Each year is part of a 19-year cycle that is called a Váḥid. Váḥid are also grouped together in 19-Váḥid cycles called Kull-i-Shay'. 177 BE is the year of Váv of the tenth Váḥid of the first Kull-i-Shay'.
The names of the years can be found here.
For instance, the date of the 21st of April, 1930…which fell this year (1930[CE]) on Monday, would according to the system of the Badí' Calendar, be described as follows:
The day of Kamál, the day of Qudrat, the month of Jalál, of the year Bahháj, of the fifth Vahid, of the first Kull-i-Shay'.
