The Virtues of the Month of Muharram

When Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab (RA) needed a fixed starting point for dating official Muslim correspondence, some seventeen years after the Hijrah, it was Ali ibn Abi Talib (RA) who proposed anchoring the new calendar to the Prophet’s ﷺ migration from Mecca to Medina. The migration itself had taken place in Rabi’ al-Awwal, yet the year was set to begin with Muharram instead – the month, already sacred in Quranic terms, in which the decision to migrate had been made. That is how Muharram came to open the Islamic lunar calendar, a position it still holds.

One of Four Sacred Months

Surah at-Tawbah states that the number of months with Allah is twelve, four of which are sacred (9:36). Hadith identify these as Dhul-Qa’dah, Dhul-Hijjah, Muharram, and Rajab. Classical exegetes note that the pre-Islamic Arabs had already observed a customary restraint from warfare during these months; Islam kept the practice but reoriented its meaning, attaching specific religious weight to a custom that had previously stood on tribal convention alone.

Ashura and the Fast of Musa (AS)

Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim both preserve the account of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ arriving in Medina and finding the Jewish community fasting on the tenth of Muharram, commemorating Allah’s rescue of Musa (AS) and the Israelites from Pharaoh. “We have more right to Musa than you,” he is reported to have said on learning the reason – and he fasted the day himself, instructing his companions to do the same.

The reward attached to that fast is unusually large. Sahih Muslim has the Prophet ﷺ teaching that fasting Ashura expiates the sins of the entire preceding year, a scale of reward matched in the hadith literature by only one other voluntary fast – the Day of Arafah, which covers both the year before and the year after.

Why the Ninth Day Was Added

Near the end of his life, according to a hadith in Sahih Muslim, the Prophet ﷺ expressed his intention to fast the ninth of Muharram alongside the tenth the following year, specifically so that Muslim practice would no longer mirror the Jewish community’s fast of the tenth alone. He did not live to see that following year, but the intention itself is why scholars today generally recommend pairing the ninth with the tenth, or the tenth with the eleventh, rather than fasting the tenth in isolation.

A Fast Older Than the Instruction to Fast It

Aisha (RA), in a report recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari, adds a detail that pushes the practice back further still: the pagan Quraysh of Mecca were already fasting on Ashura before Islam, and the Prophet ﷺ fasted it himself while still in Mecca, before it was made obligatory and later, once Ramadan was prescribed, left as optional. Scholars reading these accounts together – a fast kept by the pre-Islamic Quraysh, a separate fast kept by the Jews of Medina for a different historical reason, and then the Prophet ﷺ adopting the day and anchoring its meaning to the story of Musa (AS) and Pharaoh – treat it as a case study in how Islamic teaching could retain a practice a community already knew while redirecting what that practice actually meant.

The Martyrdom of Husain (RA) at Karbala

Muharram carries a second, graver weight in Islamic memory. In 61 AH, on the tenth of the month, Husain ibn Ali (RA) – grandson of the Prophet ﷺ through his daughter Fatima (RA) – was killed at Karbala together with members of his family and companions, in the conflict over leadership that followed the death of Muawiyah. Historians and scholars across the Muslim world describe it as one of the most consequential and sorrowful episodes of early Islamic history, and it is commemorated today with varying degrees of mourning observance, its memory still shaping religious and political identity within the ummah.

Readers interested in this subject may also want to read about The Story of Prophet Ibrahim (AS) and His Trials, another account where an act of worship traces back to a specific moment of prophetic history.