The Celestial Calendar: How the Stars Once Guided the Emirates

Long before the instruments of modern timekeeping, the people of the Emirates read the heavens as others read a map. The stars were not merely distant points of light but essential guides, marking the passage of seasons and the rhythms of migration, trade and daily life. This ancient knowledge, embedded in the official Emirati Hijri calendar, speaks to a profound understanding of the natural world and humanity’s place within it.

Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque Center continues to preserve and celebrate this rich intellectual heritage through Deira Al Duroor, a contemporary storytelling series that bridges past and present. The fourth episode brings the tradition to new audiences through a renewed aesthetic approach, yet one grounded in the same reverence for ancestral wisdom.

In this chapter, narrator Muhammad bin Saber Al Mazrouei recounts the arrival of Al Meia Al Oula, the first hundred days of the Safrawi season, as observed in the cycles known as the seventieth and eightieth Durr. He illuminates the celestial, terrestrial and maritime signs that the ancients studied with meticulous care, using them to understand and anticipate the transformations that each season would bring. These were the markers by which communities organised their lives and livelihoods, a sophisticated system of observation refined across generations.

By documenting and sharing these narratives, the mosque centre honours a heritage of intellectual inquiry that remains integral to Emirati identity. The series demonstrates that the wisdom of the past is not merely nostalgic remembrance but a living legacy, one that continues to inform how we understand our relationship with the natural world and with one another.