Hijri Date (Islamic Date)

The problem of Hijri Date is that it differs from country to another depending on the view of the moon, for more info click here, I work in a project in Saudi Arabia and they want to use Hijri date for documents dates that came from others but in that project we use Gregorian date.

To solve this problem we want to convert Hijri dates to Gregorian and also get them back to Hijri from Gregorian, but we should have a valid conversion method that is legal in Saudi. We found Saudi research center provides a table with dates from year 1420 to 1450 and this table is approved from Saudi Government, for more info about this table.

I reached here to the reason of writing this post, First thing I noticed in this table is that it is too difficult to get data from it, it is an excel sheet in which to convert from Gregorian to Hijri and vice versa is too hard.

Our way of thinking in Middle East needs some change, we try to prove to ourselves we can do the complex things, while there are easy solutions. Instead of making dates table hard when we didn’t make it simple. Instead of making it a table why we didn’t make it a webservice that convert dates between Hijri and Gregorian and updated every new month. I wish we, in Middle East, change our way of thinking about technology soon.