Calendars: Traditional method of keeping time
lives on
Technology may be ascendant but is no competition for life on paper Mohammed Zaatari
Daily Star correspondent
Computers and the internet may be making a bigger impact on
people’s lives, but the end of the year still sees people rushing to buy plain old
paper calendars.
The manager of the Modern Bookshop in Sidon, Mahmoud Qablawi, said his institution had
been printing calendars for more than 40 years, and sales have yet to drop, even with the
advent of the internet.
“We sell 30,000 calendars every year in Sidon and its surrounding areas,”
Qablawi said.
A number of charity organizations or other institutions order their own calendars,
choosing their own photographs to adorn them.
Costing anywhere between LL3,000 and LL5,000, they often consist of a large photograph
with a small stack of 365 papers in the middle, to be torn off as each day ends.
Some calendars sold in Sidon carry the picture of local landmarks, like the medieval
citadel on the Mediterranean coast, while others carry photographs of the holy cities of
Jerusalem or Mecca and Koranic verses.
Calendars sold in the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp, meanwhile, often feature
pictures of Jerusalem or photographs of the young Palestinian boy Mohammed al-Durra, who
was killed last year during the intifada.
In Christian localities, calendars carrying photographs of Our Lady of Harissa and Pope
John Paul II are also sought out.
The calendar market, Qablawi pointed out, does not necessarily show life at the end of the
year and the first part of January: Lebanese expatriates who visit their homeland often
buy them as souvenirs, meaning that sales might pick up in mid-summer, in what would
normally be a dead season for calendars.
Lebanese from the diaspora then take them back to their homes abroad, using them as a
guide to the major national holidays back in “the old country.”
Hajj Abdo Habli, a resident of Sidon said that he had been buying calendars since the days
of his late father.
“I buy a calendar because I wake up every morning and I tear away a page of it and I
feel that a new day has begun. And my 15-year-old employee reminds me every Thursday, by
looking at the calendar, that it’s time for his weekly pay,” Qablawi said.
The calendars pack a considerable amount of information on the daily pages, such as times
of sunrises and sunsets, the phases of the moon, jokes and riddles, words of wisdom,
religious sayings, and occasionally, cooking suggestions.
Roznama, the Arabic word for calendar, comes from Nowrooz which means “new day”
in Farsi.
Talal Majzoub, a researcher in Arab and Islamic history, said the “old-style”
calendars recall the days when they were used as a guide for sunsets and sunrises and for
other important events.
He said that Egyptians and peoples living between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers had
also used various calendars that were “not completely accurate.”
Most calendars are based on the revolutions of both the sun and the moon, with most
Eastern countries basing their calendars on the moon’s cycles.
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