Mawlid

Mawlid is the observance of the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, kept by many Muslims on the twelfth of Rabi al-Awwal (many Shia keep the seventeenth). Unlike the two canonical Eids, it is not part of the earliest Islamic calendar; it arose several centuries after the Prophet's lifetime. Court celebrations are recorded under the Fatimids in Egypt, and the first great public Mawlid festival is generally attributed to the ruler Muzaffar al-Din Gokburi at Erbil (in modern Iraq) in the early thirteenth century, an occasion described by contemporaries as lavish, with feasting, sermons and poetry. From there the observance spread widely, carried in part by the growth of Sufism, and it is now a public holiday in much of the Muslim world.

This history is the root of a live disagreement. Because the Prophet and the first generations did not keep his birthday, some scholars, and above all the modern Salafi and Wahhabi movements, regard the Mawlid as an unwarranted bid'a, an innovation in religion, and decline to mark it; the criticism is associated with the medieval jurist Ibn Taymiyya and his heirs. Its defenders, the majority tradition, hold that honouring the Prophet in this way is a praiseworthy expression of love and does not add to the obligations of the faith.

Where it is kept, the Mawlid and its surrounding season are marked by public and domestic celebration: processions, the decoration of homes, streets and mosques with lights and banners, communal meals and gifts to children and the poor. Its devotional heart is the recitation of poetry in praise of the Prophet, above all the mawlid poems that narrate his birth and life; the thirteenth-century Qasidat al-Burda ("Poem of the Mantle") of al-Busiri and, in South Asia, the singing of na't, are performed, and accounts of the Prophet's birth are read aloud, with the audience often standing at the moment of the birth.

Regional forms vary widely. In parts of the Arab world, Turkey, South and Southeast Asia and West and East Africa the day is a major public festival; in Sufi settings it may include dhikr and sama'; among communities that reject it, it passes unmarked or is actively discouraged. The uneven map of observance, from national holiday to quiet omission, makes the Mawlid one of the clearest illustrations within Islam of the boundary between the two canonical feasts, which all keep, and the many later devotions, which the traditions weigh differently.