UNTIL he was about 35 years old Mohammed led a quiet, rather unexciting life and achieved moderate success in business. Then he took to meditation and became convinced that he was destined to be the prophet of righteousness, ordained by God to bring his degenerate countrymen back to ancient ways - to the worship of the one true Allah. Mohammed's ministry was a difficult one at first; indeed, the inhabitants of his native city of Mecca, particularly the merchant classes, were so hostile to his message chat he was compelled to leave and flee to the neighbouring city of Medina.
Mohammed and his friend Abu Bakr took to their camels on July 16th 622 by the old Julian calendar and headed north across the Arabian desert. They had a narrow escape on the first night. They had been followed by soldiers from Mecca - led, it is said, by Satan in a blue robe with a quiverful of arrows - but their devilish pursuers failed to find them in the cave in which they had taken refuge, because Allah caused a spider's web to be spun across the entrance - a clear indication that no one had recently passed in or out.
This flight - or the Hejira, as it is called - was a blessing in disguise. In Medina the prophet was able to establish the first Muslim community and the Hejira was recalled as such an important event in the history of Islam that, after Mohammed's death in 632, Muslims built their entire calendar around it. Just as most of the Western world reckons the passage of time from the birth of Christ and those of the Jewish persuasion from the presumed date of the creation of the world, Muslims number their years from the Hejira.
Each Muslim year consists of 12 months, containing alternatively 30 or 29 days. The first month is Muharram, the second Safar and so on up to the 12th month, Dhu'l Hijja. The best known, perhaps, is the 9th month, Ramadan, during which believers are forbidden either to eat or drink or indulge in any worldly pleasure during daylight hours.
The problem with this chronology is that it adds up to a year that is only 354 days long, so the date of Al Hijra, or New Year's Day, keeps slipping backwards by about 10 days or so per year as reckoned by our Gregorian calendar. Consequently, although only 1,374 of our years have elapsed since the Hejira, 1416 Muslim years have filled the intervening time. And indeed it is 1416 Muslim years exactly: today is Al Hijra, the first day of Muharram of the Islamic year Anno Hegirac 1417.