Sunnah Fasting Calendar 1448 AH

The voluntary fasts of the Hijri year in one place — the White Days of every month, Mondays and Thursdays, the days of Sha’ban, Arafah, Ashura and Tasu’a, and the six of Shawwal. Days on which fasting is forbidden are marked in red rather than quietly left out. Add a city and each day carries its local Fajr and Maghrib.

What the White Days are

The White Days, Ayyam al-Bid, are the 13th, 14th and 15th of every Hijri month. The name refers to the nights around the full moon, when the sky stays bright from dusk to dawn. Fasting these three days each month is a long-established voluntary practice, and because a good deed is rewarded manifold, three days a month is described as amounting to fasting continuously. In practice they are the simplest way to keep a regular monthly fast: three consecutive days, in the same place in every month, no calculation needed once you know when the month began. One month is different — in Dhul Hijjah the 13th falls inside the days of Tashriq, when fasting is not permitted, so only the 14th and 15th are fasted that month.

Why the dates move every year

The Hijri calendar is lunar. Twelve lunar months run about 354 days against the Gregorian year’s 365, so every Hijri date arrives roughly eleven days earlier each Gregorian year and works its way backwards through the seasons over about thirty-three years. That is why the White Days have no fixed Gregorian date, and why a calendar like this one has to be regenerated rather than memorised. The conversion here uses Umm al-Qura, the calculated civil calendar of Saudi Arabia, which fixes month starts astronomically in advance. Communities that begin each month on a local sighting of the crescent will land on the same day most of the time and a day either side of it often enough that no printed date should be treated as final.

The days fasting is forbidden

There are five days in the year on which fasting is not permitted: Eid al-Fitr on 1 Shawwal, Eid al-Adha on 10 Dhul Hijjah, and the three days of Tashriq that follow it on the 11th, 12th and 13th of Dhul Hijjah. These are described as days of eating, drinking and remembrance of God. Scholars recognise one narrow exception for the days of Tashriq — a pilgrim performing tamattu’ or qiran who cannot obtain the sacrificial animal may fast them as part of the substitute fast — but for everyone else the prohibition stands. This calendar marks all five in red and never exports them to your calendar file, even when they coincide with a Monday, a Thursday or a White Day.

Worked example

Key fasting dates for 1448 AH

The dates people plan around, in one table. Every Gregorian date is calculated and may shift by a day where the month starts on local sighting.

Where scholars differ

Two questions on this page have no single answer, and the calendar does not pretend otherwise. The first is the six days of Shawwal: they may be fasted consecutively from the second of the month, which is how they are laid out above, or spread across Shawwal in any pattern — both are held to be valid, and the majority position is that days owed from Ramadan should be made up first. The second is fasting on a Saturday alone, which some scholars discourage on the strength of a narration prohibiting it while others consider that narration too weak to establish a ruling, or read it as applying only to singling the day out in imitation of others; fasting Saturday as part of a habitual pattern, or alongside the Friday or Sunday, is not disputed. Fasting Friday by itself is the clearer case and is discouraged unless joined to an adjacent day. Where your own community or school of law takes a position, follow it — this tool lists the days, it does not adjudicate between the readings.

Common questions