In this feature by our colleague Nitin Nair of WatchTime’s Middle East edition, we explore the recently launched Parmigiani Hjiri Perpetual Calendar, the first watch that follows the lunar Islamic calendar and displays the months of the year in Arabic.
Parmigiani has created the first watch with a Hjiri perpetual calendar.
In haute horology?s Hall of Fame, a special place is reserved for the perpetual calendar complication. While the tourbillon escapement has a flashy, exhibitionist quality to it, the perpetual calendar is considered the trickiest to make by watchmakers. A perpetual calendar launch is still a major flex by a watchmaker and Parmigiani Fleurier has flexed hard by unveiling the first wristwatch to use the Islamic Hijri Perpetual Calendar. The watch is cased in platinum and 44.5 mm wide.
The seeds of this perpetual calendar were sown in 1993 when Michel Parmigiani, the founder of the eponymous brand, restored an oval-shaped pocketwatch with an Islamic calendar indicating the hour, day, date, and month, in Arabic calligraphy, and the phases of the moon. He used this as the inspiration to create a table clock featuring a Hijri Calendar in 2011, the world?s first such calendar. In 2016, he restored another pocketwatch dating back to the late 18th or early 19th Century, which featured a solar calendar translated into Arabic.
The starting point of Islamic time calculations is the “Hijri” or journey of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), from Mecca to Medi...