Hijri Dates in Indonesia Were a Pain to Get Right. Not Anymore.
If you've ever built a website for Indonesian users and needed to show today's Hijri date, you probably know the pain. Most Hijri calendar APIs and libraries default to Umm al-Qura (Saudi Arabia's calendar), which can differ by a full day from what's actually observed and announced in Indonesia. It's not just a theoretical mismatch. In my own community, this got bad enough that nobody trusts…
The article discusses the challenges of accurately displaying Hijri dates on websites for Indonesian users. Most Hijri calendar APIs and libraries default to the Umm al-Qura calendar, which can differ by a full day from the one observed and announced in Indonesia. This leads to a lack of trust in online dates, with people relying on official government announcements instead.
The issue stems from Indonesia using a different visibility standard called MABIMS, not Umm al-Qura. To address this, mabims.dev was created as an open-source Hijri calendar API for Indonesia, using the country's official MABIMS criteria instead of Saudi Arabia's Umm al-Qura standard. The API provides a simple way to display today's Hijri date, convert dates between calendars, and render a full month grid.
It sources its dates from Kemenag RI's official tables and falls back to computed Neo MABIMS criteria for dates outside that range.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
