Aqeeqah planner

A week is not very long

The aqeeqah is associated with the seventh day after a birth, which arrives while a family is at its least organised. This is a planner rather than a guide: it gives you the dates, the number of animals under each of the readings held, and what it will cost at whatever price applies where the sacrifice will be made.

Which day counts as the first

This tool counts the day of birth as day one, so the seventh day falls six days later, a child born on a Sunday has their seventh day the following Sunday. That is the common reckoning, but some count from the day after the birth, which shifts every date here by one.

Worth settling with your family early. It is exactly the sort of thing that surfaces on the morning itself, when nobody has slept.

Two animals, or one

The position most widely held is two for a boy and one for a girl. Others hold that one suffices for either, and that is also the usual course where two would stretch a family too far. Both are offered here and neither is marked as the correct one.

If the seventh day has gone

The fourteenth and the twenty-first are the days usually named after it, which is why all three are listed. Beyond that, views differ on whether the aqeeqah can be made up, by whom, and until when, including whether an adult may do it for themselves. The tool marks the days that have passed and stops there.

Where the animal actually is

Many families arrange the sacrifice in another country, through a charity or through relatives, which is usually a fraction of the cost of doing it locally. That is why the tool asks for the price of one animal instead of assuming one, enter the figure for wherever it will really happen, not where you live.

What this page will not tell you

Whether the aqeeqah is obligatory or recommended, what should be done with the meat, how the naming and the shaving of the hair are performed, or what to do in an unusual situation. Those belong with someone qualified. This counts days and multiplies a price.