Ramadan & Eid Emoji

The crescent moon 🌙 is the Ramadan emoji people reach for first, and for a good reason: the Islamic calendar is lunar, and Ramadan, the ninth month, begins when the new crescent (the hilal) is sighted after sunset. The thin waxing crescent 🌒 is the most literal picture of that sighting, while the moon faces 🌛 🌜 add a softer, sleepy-night feeling that suits suhoor and late prayers.

The star and crescent ☪️ is the general symbol of Islam on most keyboards. It came into wide use through the Ottoman flag rather than from the Qur’an, and some Muslims prefer not to use it as a religious sign, which is why many Ramadan messages lean on 🌙 and 🕌 instead. The mosque 🕌 stands for taraweeh, the extra night prayers of Ramadan, and the Kaaba 🕋 in Mecca stands for prayer direction, Umrah and Hajj.

The red paper lantern 🏮 is the closest thing on the keyboard to the fanous, the lantern that lights Egyptian streets and homes during Ramadan; people search for it as the “Ramadan lantern emoji”. The hands held open 🤲 are the dua emoji, prayer beads 📿 are the misbaha or tasbih used for dhikr, and the open book 📖 is how most people point to reading the Qur’an during the month.

Eid Mubarak emoji: what to send for Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha

Eid al-Fitr closes Ramadan, so its emoji are about joy after the fast: 🎉 🎊 🎈 for the celebration, 🫂 and 🤗 for the Eid hugs, 👪 for family visits, 🎁 and 💵 for eidi, the gift money children collect, and 🍪 🍬 for the cookies and sweets that fill every table. The new clothes of Eid morning show up as 👗, 🥻 and 🛍️, which is where the popular “Eid outfit emoji combos” come from.

Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, falls about seventy days later during the Hajj. Its emoji are the animals of the qurbani: the sheep 🐑, the ram 🐏, the goat 🐐, the cow 🐄 and the camel 🐪, which is why South Asian “Bakra Eid” combos are full of goats, plus 🍖 for the meat shared with family, neighbours and people in need.

Eid Mubarak means “blessed Eid” and works for both Eids. Green 💚 is a colour long associated with Islam and appears in a lot of Eid greetings; white 🤍 reads as peace and purity.

Iftar and suhoor emoji

Fasting runs from dawn to sunset, so the day has two meals and two moments. Sunrise 🌅 and the alarm clock ⏰ mark suhoor, the pre-dawn meal; the hourglass ⏳ is the long afternoon countdown; the sunset 🌇 and the plate 🍽️ mark iftar. In Egypt, Turkey and elsewhere a drummer still walks the streets before dawn to wake people for suhoor, which the long drum 🪘 captures nicely.

The keyboard has no date fruit, the traditional way to break the fast, so people use the palm tree 🌴 instead. For the rest of the table there are milk 🥛, tea 🍵 ☕ 🫖, soup 🍲, falafel 🧆, flatbread 🫓, shawarma 🥙, biryani-style rice 🍛 and honey 🍯 for the sweet pastries.

Ramadan symbols to copy and paste in text

When an emoji looks too loud, plain text symbols give a quieter Ramadan look: the crescents ☾ and ☽, the stars ★ ☆ ✦ ✧, or a line like ☾ ⋆ Ramadan Kareem ⋆ ☽ for a bio or a caption.

For Islamic text there are real Arabic characters too: ﷽ is the whole Bismillah (“In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful”) in a single character, ۞ marks the quarter divisions of the Qur’an (rub el hizb), ۩ marks the verses where the reader prostrates, the ornate brackets ﴾ ﴿ frame quoted verses, and ﷾ and ﷿ are the honorifics written after the name of God. They need a font with Arabic support, which most modern phones have, though ﷾ and ﷿ (added in 2021) can still show as boxes.