The most sacred day of the following month--the moon of Zú-’l-ka’dah--is the twenty-fifth. On that day Adam was created; Abraham, Ishmael, and Jesus were born, and the Shiah Messiah, the concealed Imám, will come again to judge the world. A Muslim, if he keep fast on the twenty-fifth of Zú-’l-ka’dah, will earn the rewards of a man to whom Allah in his mercy should grant the privilege and the power of praying for nine hundred years. On the first of Zú-’l-hijjah, which is the month of pilgrimage, Abraham received from God the title of Al-Khalíl, or the Friend of Allah. It is accounted a good deed to fast from the first to the tenth day of this the last journeying month; it is also wise to do so, for it is not every month in the year that the Mussulman can win, by nine days of fasting, the fruits of a whole lifetime of self-denial. Another tradition deserving of mention in connection with this month is that Jesus, in the company of Gabriel, was sent to earth by God with five prayers, which he was commanded to repeat on the first five days of the pilgrims’ moon; but the two holiest days of the moon of Zú-’l-hijjah are the ninth and the tenth. On the ninth, after morning prayer, the pilgrims, in olden times, departed from the Valley of Mina, whither they had come on the previous day, and rushed in a headlong manner to Mount Arafat, where a sermon is preached, and where they performed the devotions entitling them to be called Hájís. But nowadays they pass through Mina to Mount Arafat without stopping on the outward journey; and at sunset, after the sermon is over, they betake themselves to Muzdalifah, an oratory between Arafat and Mina, and there the hours of the night are spent in prayer and in reading the Kurán.