Developer Builds Indonesia-Specific Hijri Calendar API After Government Website Showed Wrong Date

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An Indonesian developer created mabims.dev, a free Hijri calendar API tailored to the Indonesian context, after noticing a gap in available tools for local developers. The project was inspired by a viral incident in which Indonesia's Ministry of Religious Affairs (Kemenag) website displayed a Hijri date that contradicted its own official printed calendar. The developer later realised the likely cause was that most Hijri libraries and APIs default to Saudi Arabia's Umm al-Qura calendar, which can differ from Indonesia's official date by one day. The API uses Kemenag RI's official calendar as its primary source, falling back to Neo MABIMS astronomical criteria where official data is unavailable. It requires no API key or authentication, aiming to give Indonesian developers a reliable, context-accurate Hijri date without scraping or manual calculation.

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