HEGIRA, in Chronology, a celebrated epoch among the Mahomedans. The word is Arabic, formed from hagira, flight, from h, to fly, to quit one's country, family, and friends. The event which gave occasion to this epoch was Mahomed's flight from Mecca. The magistrates of that city, fearing that his impostures would raise a sedition, resolved to expel him; and this, accordingly, they effected, in the year of our Lord 622, on the evening of the 15th or 16th of July. To render this epoch more creditable, the Mahomedans affect to use the word hegira in a peculiar sense for an act of religion, by which a man forsakes his country, and gives way to the violence of persecutors and enemies of the faith; and they add, that the Corashites, being then the strongest party in the city, obliged their Prophet to fly, because they were not able to endure his abolishing idolatry. This flight was not the first of Mahomed's, but it was the most famous. It happened in the fourteenth year after he had assumed the character of Prophet, and promulgated his new religion. The orientals do not agree with us as to the time of the hegira. Among
the Mahomedans, Amasi fixes it to the year of Christ 630, and from the death of Moses 2347; and Ben Cassem to the year of the world 5800. According to the Greek computation, among the Christians, Said Ebn Batik refers the hegira to the year of Christ 614, and of the creation 6114. Khondemir relates that it was Omar, the second caliph, who first established the hegira as an epoch, and appointed the years to be numbered from it. At the time he passed this decree, seven years had already elapsed. This establishment was made in imitation of the Christians, who, in those times, reckoned their years from the persecution of Diocletian. But there is another hegira, and that earlier too, though of less eminence. Mahomed, in the fourteenth year of his mission, was obliged to relinquish Medina. The Corashites had all along opposed him very vigorously, as an innovator and disturber of the public peace; and many of his disciples, not enduring to be reputed followers of an impostor, desired leave of him to abandon the city, from an apprehension of being obliged to renounce their religion. This retreat forms the first hegira. These two hegiras the Mahomedans, in their language, call hegiran. The years of the hegira consist only of 354 days. To reduce these to the Julian calendar, or to find what Julian year a given year of the hegira answers to, reduce the year of the hegira given into days, by multiplying by 354, divide the product by 365, and from the quotient subtract the intercalations, that is, as many days as there are four years in the quotient; and lastly, to the remainder add 622.