Happy Prophet’s birthday! May it return to us with health, happiness and remembrance of a great man.
Bahrain, once again is celebrating this auspicious day by announcing it as a holiday, but as this time it will fall on Saturday and as Saturday is already the second day of the normal weekend, public sector employees will be compensated and given Sunday too as a holiday!
Nothing new there. It’s a de facto standard.
But not so for our friends in the UAE:
The UAE Government announced in a circular today that Sunday April 1st 2007 is a working day for the Federal Ministries, according to a WAM report.
“As Saturday will be a public holiday to mark the Prophet’s birthday, Sunday will be a normal working day and there will be no compensation or extension of the holiday,” said the statement.
ArabianBusiness.com
Once again, the UAE is leading the Gulf (especially) in forging ahead and breaking with tradition. Good for them. Maybe, just maybe, this will rub on us too before too long.
Comments
I’m giving my self a holiday on sunday 😉
I’m Bahraini, and it’s a holiday there!
Mahmood
I hope that nobody from our governmnet officials will check your website today :biggrin:
I celebrate everytime we have a holiday 😉
All national holidays are compensated for, I don’t see why this one should be an exception. Either abolish the holiday altogether or leave it.
I was also wondering, are there any activities in the island marking the Prophet’s Birthday?
All national holidays are compensated for. I do not see why this one should be an exception. Either abolish the holiday altogether or leave it.
Mahmood: As a state employee, we always hate when we have a holiday that falls on a Thursday, like Thanksgiving Day did here, and they made us claim vacation or overtime to cover it (since they did know no one would be crazy enough to be out Thursday, work Friday, and then be off Saturday an d Sunday.
but, since parliament, we are going in the opposite direction.. we didn’t have these holidays before. they probably think this is a good way to gather public support from the street
Author
Cradle, I am not against holidays per se, although we do have too many of them (browse the link provided in the main article) I am against the compensation of a holiday with another day if the holiday falls on a weekend or another holiday. Those, I think, are a waste of time and costs business a lot unnecessarily.
The practice of compensating holiday is a common practice across the world. In principle I agree with the compensation practice but I think in Bahrain we have too many holidays and the compensation magnifies that, especially that a lot of these follow the lunar calendar, meaning that they can coincide with other Gregorian calendar ones (like the Adha Eid & New Year’s scenario).
Holidays like Hijri New Year are very artificial, since Hijri New Year is not celebrated by anyone in the island and can be abolished.