Why Have the Baha’is Created a New Calendar?
After all the preaching for the Oneness of Humanity, why have the Baha’is created a new calendar and created further divisions in a world they are apparently trying to unite?
The Baha’i calendar is defined like this:
The Bahā’ī year consists of 19 months of 19 days each (i.e. 361 days), with the addition of certain “Intercalary Days” (four in ordinary and five in leap years) between the eighteenth and nineteenth months in order to adjust the calendar to the solar year. The Bāb named the months after the attributes of God. The Bahā’ī New Year, like the ancient Persian New Year, is astronomically fixed, commencing at the March equinox (usually March 21), and the Bahā’ī era commences with the year of the Bāb’s declaration (i.e. 1844 A.D., 1260 A.H.) . . . It seems, therefore, fitting that the new age of unity should have a new calendar free from the objections and associations which make each of the older calendar unacceptable to large sections of the world’s population, and it is difficult to see how any other arrangement could exceed in simplicity and convenience that proposed by the Bāb.[1]
What advantage does this have over the Persian or Gregorian calendar? Or what problems or miseries did the adherents of the two aforementioned calendars have met that required a new “simple” and “convenient” calendar to be proposed. We will leave it to the readers to judge the justification and rationality behind this calendar, and see for themselves why the same flaws and objections attributed to non-Baha’i calendars are equally applicable to the Baha’i system.
[1] J. E. Esslemont, Bahā’u’llāh and the New Era, pp. 178–179.