We return to our discussion of interesting days on the calendar, and this time we are joined by, apparently, a lot of people in the UAE.

The National has done an 11-11-11 story for Friday (November 11, 2011) noting how many weddings and big events have been scheduled for the day, including Caesarian sections so that children can be born on 11-11-11. Easy to remember, for sure.

The fascination with the date apparently crosses cultural divides, and the writer of the story found an academic who was ready to take a crack at explaining it.

Here is what the chair of the sociology department at the University of Sharjah said about it:

“People like these dates that don’t happen very often because they resemble luck and give people optimism that good things will happen. 

“This is something global; all human beings are optimistic for this date. Numbers have values and number one is considered to be of high value to people, being the beginning of numbers.”

What is perhaps most interesting is that Arabs and Muslims, who often prefer to use the lunar-based Hijri calendar, are recognizing the date despite its “western” origins — as the story points out.

11-11-11 on the Hijri calendar is “15 Thul-Hijjah” in the year 1433. That is, November 11, 2011 is nothing special on the Muslim calendar.

Calendars are an interesting concept; various nations and religions have their own, though not many of them are used for daily purposes of business/commerce.

The Gregorian calendar is the system that brought us 11-11-11 tomorrow, and it is a European/Christian/Roman Catholic concept, promulgated in February 1582 by, yes, Pope Gregory XIII.

It seems fairly obvious that for purposes of trade and commerce in the modern world that the globe eventually would have to use a calendar pretty much universally recognized — and the Gregorian is it.

Anyway, even in the culture of the Arabs of the UAE, 11-11-11 (Gregorian) apparently is a pretty big deal.