Qasidat al-Burda

The Qasidat al-Burda, the Poem of the Mantle, is the most widely recited devotional poem in the Sunni world, and its origin story is inseparable from its use.

Muhammad al-Busiri, an Egyptian poet of the thirteenth century, is said to have suffered a stroke that paralysed him. He composed a poem in praise of the Prophet, and dreamed that the Prophet passed a hand over him and placed a mantle over his shoulders; he woke healed. The title refers to that mantle, and it deliberately echoes an earlier poem of the same name by Kab ibn Zuhayr, a contemporary of the Prophet who was said to have received the Prophet's own cloak.

The poem runs to some hundred and sixty verses in ten sections, opening not with praise but with the poet reproaching himself, for love, for tears, for the passions of a soul he cannot govern, before turning to the Prophet's virtues, his birth, his miracles, the Quran, the night journey, his campaigns, and closing in intercession.

Its liturgical use is enormous. It is chanted at mawlid gatherings, at weddings and funerals, in Sufi assemblies from Morocco to Indonesia, in madrasas as a memorisation text, and it is worn as an amulet. Individual verses are used as prayers. It has been translated into Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Malay, Swahili, Punjabi, Hausa and many other languages, and commented on in Arabic hundreds of times.

Very few poems in any language have that reach.

Its ubiquity makes it a flashpoint, and the objection is theological and specific rather than general.

Salafi and Wahhabi criticism focuses on particular verses, above all those addressing the Prophet directly with requests, and those attributing to him a role in the created order. The line most often cited as objectionable says that of the poet's generosity is this world and its rival the hereafter, and of his knowledge is the knowledge of the tablet and the pen. Critics read this as attributing to a human being what belongs to God alone, which falls under shirk, association, the one thing Islamic theology treats as unforgivable.

Defenders argue that the language is the conventional hyperbole of Arabic panegyric, that the poet elsewhere states plainly that the Prophet's excellence has a limit and that he is a human being, and that the verses in question are intercessory rather than worshipful. Classical commentators, including entirely orthodox ones, addressed the issue and defended the poem, and it has been endorsed by scholars of every Sunni school.

The dispute is therefore internal to Sunni Islam and old, and it intensified with the rise of Salafi movements in the modern period. In some countries the poem is a routine part of public religious life; in others its public recitation is discouraged or forbidden.

An account that presents it as uncontroversially beloved misses half the picture, and one that presents it as heterodox misses the other half. It is beloved and it is contested, by different Muslims, on stated grounds.