Clarification 37 - The Calendar Scorecard

Part of Alban Fejza: Refutations - The "Clarifications"

I. His Conclusions, and How He Reaches Them

Clarification 37 grades the world's calendars. The correct calendar is "God's calendar (10:5, 55:5); it's written in the sky," and it works like this: "we use the sun to calculate the years, and we use the moon to calculate the months (10:5)." From that division of labor comes a verdict on three religions: "the Christians have changed the months incorrectly, and the Muslims have changed the years incorrectly, because they both wanted the months and the years to synchronize with each other." Synchronizing, he explains, is the sin - we do not stretch weeks to fit months, so no one should stretch months to fit years. The scorecard closes: "A week is 7 days, a month is 29 or 30 days, and a year is 365 days. This means that one year has 12 months." Christians got the years right, Muslims got the months right, and the Jews got the weeks right - "their Sabbath is the seventh day (4:154)." Three verses cited in total; each one, checked below, points somewhere other than where he aims it.

II. His Proof Text Points the Other Way

The entire sun-for-years, moon-for-months division hangs on 10:5. Here is 10:5 in the translation he claims to defend: "He is the One who rendered the sun radiant, and the moon a light, and He designed its phases that you may learn to count the years and to calculate." The phases belong to the moon - and what the verse says you learn from them is the count of the years. His proof text assigns year-counting to the moon; he read it and assigned year-counting to the sun. The verse contains no division of labor at all: the sun appears as radiance, the moon as light, and the counting clause names years and calculation together. His second citation does the same work against him: 55:5 reads, in full, "The sun and the moon are perfectly calculated" - both bodies, one clause, no job assignments. And when the Quran does describe the two as timekeepers, it deals them in together: "He rendered the sun and the moon to serve as calculation devices" (6:96). A sun-counts-years, moon-counts-months statute exists nowhere in the Book - and neither does his other load-bearing premise, for no verse anywhere prices the year at 365 days. The one calendar rule God states with a number is 9:36 - twelve months - and the one thing 10:5 ties the count of years to is the body he ruled out.

III. The Arithmetic That Fails Only His Calendar

Take his closing sentence on its own terms: a month is 29 or 30 days, a year is 365 days, "this means that one year has 12 months." Multiply his own numbers. Twelve months of 29 to 30 days come to 348 to 360 days - at the astronomical value, 12 x 29.53 = 354.4 days, eleven days short of his year. Divide instead: 365 days of 29.53-day months is 12.37 months, not twelve. His three premises cannot coexist; "this means" is doing work no arithmetic supports. And the casualty is the one number God fixed. Rashad's header over 9:36 reads "God's System: Twelve Months Per Year" - and every calendar on his scorecard delivers it: the Hijri year contains exactly twelve lunar months, the Gregorian year exactly twelve civil months. The only system in the discussion whose year does not hold twelve months is his own hybrid, where every solar year contains twelve lunar months plus eleven leftover days, so the months drift through the year and a thirteenth new moon lands inside roughly every third year. He built the one calendar on the table that breaks the verse he calls God's system. The supporting rhetoric fares no better. "A year is 365 days" is itself a rounded year - the sun's year runs 365.2425 days, which is why the calendar he awards to the Christians inserts leap days, the exact kind of correction his argument forbids. "A month is 29 or 30 days" quietly defines only the lunar month as a month - the Gregorian months run 28 to 31 and never claimed a lunar anchor, so the premise assumes the verdict it was hired to prove. And the weeks analogy inverts itself: the week is the one unit with no astronomical anchor - there is no sky-object it could drift against, which is precisely why nobody has ever needed to synchronize it. The units that do drift are the ones his calendar leaves loose.

IV. The Scorecard Is Inverted

Now grade the graders. His charge against the Muslims is that they "changed the years incorrectly, because they... wanted the months and the years to synchronize with each other." The Hijri calendar is pure lunar: twelve moon-months, roughly 354 days, no leap months, no correction, drifting eleven days a year through the seasons - which is why Ramadan visits summer and winter alike. It is the only calendar on his scorecard that synchronizes nothing. The Arabs who did force the moon to track the sun were the pre-Islamic intercalators, whose Nasi' the Quran condemns by name: "Altering the Sacred Months is a sign of excessive disbelief" (9:37) - and the Islamic calendar exists in its pure-lunar form precisely because that practice was abolished. So the people he faults for synchronizing are history's non-synchronizers, obeying the verse against synchronizing. And the people he awards? The Jewish calendar he salutes through the Sabbath is the most heavily synchronized calendar in religious use: to pin Passover to spring it intercalates a thirteenth month seven times every nineteen years, on the ancient observation that 235 lunar months and 19 solar years agree to within a tenth of a day. By his own stated rule - months and years "don't have to synchronize" - the calendar he grades highest commits the offense most systematically, and the calendar he grades lowest never commits it at all. As for the citation itself: 4:154 records the covenant command "Do not desecrate the Sabbath" - it names no weekday, ranks no calendar, and in the translation he claims to defend it walks straight into a header he never mentions: 16:124, "The Sabbath Abrogated" - "The Sabbath was decreed only for those who ended up disputing it." The one scorecard entry he marks fully correct is the one Rashad's translation marks decreed-for-someone-else and abrogated.

V. The Verdict That Cancels the Miracle

Here is what "the Muslims have changed the years incorrectly" costs the messengership he claims to continue. Appendix One, on the discovery of the Quran's mathematical miracle: "The momentous discovery that '19' is the Quran's common denominator became a reality in January 1974, coinciding with Zul-Hijjah 1393 A.H. The Quran was revealed in 13 B.H. (Before Hijrah). This makes the number of years from the revelation of the Quran to the revelation of its miracle 1393 + 13 = 1406 = 19x74... The correlation between 19x74 lunar years and 1974 solar years could not escape notice." Appendix Two repeats it: the miracle "remained hidden for 1406 years (19x74)." The sign Rashad published is a correlation between the two calendars - 1406 counted in the Hijri years Alban calls incorrect, 1974 counted in the Gregorian years, and the arithmetic checks in both directions: 1974 minus 610 is 1364 solar years, and 1364 solar years is 1405.9 lunar years. Strike either calendar and the sign dies. If lunar years are a human error, then 1393 A.H., 13 B.H., and the 1406 built from them are measurements in a broken unit, and 19x74 is numerology performed on a mistake. And the Quran itself refuses him the premise: 18:25 counts one duration in both currencies inside a single verse - "They stayed in their cave three hundred years, increased by nine" - with Rashad's footnote spelling it out: "The difference between 300 solar years and 300 lunar years is nine years." Three hundred solar years is 309.2 lunar years; God states the count both ways and calls both the same stay. This series has already watched that footnote carry Rashad's end-times arithmetic in Clarification 22 - 1980 AD rendered as 1400 AH in the same breath. A calendar verdict that outlaws lunar year-counting outlaws 18:25's idiom, Rashad's footnote on it, and the 19x74 unveiling of the miracle itself. He graded the Hijri year an error; the translation he defends uses it as a divine signature.

VI. What Survives - and What the Rest Is For

Peer review, honestly given. The moon does govern the worship months - 2:189: "They provide a timing device for the people, and determine the time of Hajj" - and the count of months is twelve (9:36), and the week is seven days. All true, all uncontested, and all already in the Quran's own bookkeeping: Rashad's footnote on 9:36 reads "The word 'month' is mentioned in the Quran 12 times, and 'day' 365 times" - the Book carrying both the lunar month-count and the solar day-count in its own word frequencies, and the month half is checkable in an afternoon: the bare singular form occurs exactly twelve times. The plural completes the set: "days" - ayyam, with the dual yawmayn - occurs exactly 30 times between them, the whole-number length of a civil month (365.2425 / 12 = 30.44). Days per year, months per year, days per month: the Book's own word-counts carry all three constants of the very calendar arrangement he calls corrupted. But notice what that means for this Clarification: everything true in it was already published, and already lived. Rashad fasted Ramadan by the new moon and dated the Submitters Perspective in Gregorian years; every submitter since has used sun-years for civil life and moon-months for worship. A "clarification" that hands out what everyone already practices contains exactly one novel ruling - that the Hijri year-count is an error - and that is the one ruling that misreads its own proof text (Section II), fails its own arithmetic (Section III), inverts its own scorecard (Section IV), and disarms the 19x74 sign of the messenger it invokes (Section V). The correct calendar is indeed written in the sky - "The sun and the moon are perfectly calculated" (55:5). The scorecard was not.

See also the pattern across his material: The Underlying Issue.