Abstract
The celebration the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, mawlid al-nabi, on the 12th (or 17th in the Shiite tradition) of the Islamic month of Rabi’al-awwal is a widespread, albeit understudied, Muslim religious festival. Classic outlines by Muslim religious scholars present the celebration as an occasion of showing gratitude to God for sending his ‘beloved’ messenger and of praising ‘the best of creation’. It forms part of an ‘economy of salvation’ (Katz 2007, 87) and divine rewards (thawab) for ritual participation can be expected, rewards that can outweigh sins on the day of reckoning. However, the legitimacy of mawlid is heavily contested. Muslim critics deem it to be an illegitimate innovation that should be eradicated. The following is an explorations into what happens when both celebration and discourse go online.
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Notes
- 1.
In the following I will use the term ‘mawlid’ exclusively for the annual celebration of the Prophet’s birthday. For other uses of the term, see Fuchs and Knappert 2011.
- 2.
Scholarly works on mawlid have included works on the origin of the celebration (e.g. Kaptein 1993), the history of mawlid texts (e.g. Katz 2007, 6–62), contemporary Muslim legal debate on mawlid (e.g. Schussman 1998) and ethnographical accounts (e.g. Tapper and Tapper 1987) Marion Holmes Katz’ book The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad (2007) is so far the most detailed and most comprehensive account of the historical development of mawlid texts, of the religious ideology underlying the celebration, and of contemporary debates.
- 3.
Mawlid is a common rendering in Arabic, and the term used in the Encyclopaedia of Islam (Fuchs and Knappert 2011). There are however several alternative terms. Apart from milad, these are for example mulud, mevlid, maulidi and meeladu. For a fairly comprehensive lists of terms and their connection to different geographical regions, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mawlid
- 4.
I would here like to express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewer who provided me with the link to this free, and useful software. For information and download, see http://lexiurl.wlv.ac.uk/index.html
- 5.
For the global ‘digital divide’ in access to the Internet with particular focus on Muslims, see Bunt 2009, 55–64.
- 6.
The term is a self-designation, and refers to the championing of the Islam of the ‘pious forefathers’, al-salaf al-salih.
- 7.
For the community guidelines, see www.youtube.com/static?template=community_guidelines&hl=en&gl=US
- 8.
It should be noted that it is not ideal for this. It is often difficult to follow a discussion that takes place in the comments section. Comments, especially those made more than a year ago, are not ordered chronologically. Threaded responses are limited to one level.
- 9.
- 10.
Elaboration of this distinction has involved, for example, adding the dimension of relationship to off-line traditions and practices, reserving ‘on-line religion’ for web practices that refer mainly to activities taking place on-line, and ‘religion on-line’ for those that refer to off-line religious traditions (see Young 2004, 93).
- 11.
The final report of the project is available on-line (http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ss/research/FITNA/pdfs/FINAL_REPORT_Fitna.pdf).
- 12.
In January 2011 I attempted to get access to the uploading feature of IslamicTube in order to upload a mawlid quote, and observe whether it would be removed from the site. Unfortunately, I never received the promised activation mail for my account, neither did I receive any response to my queries sent to the administrators.
- 13.
Sufism is often defined as ‘Islamic mysticism’. Here, however, I refer to a form of ‘popular Islam’ focussing on the loyalty to the leader of a religious order, tariqa, (a shaykh or pir), on performance of the collective worship of ‘remembrance’, dhikr, on miracles and on the channelling of divine blessings (baraka).
- 14.
Browsing the web for mawlid content suggests that this organisation and its leader have chosen to make mawlid an important part of their propagation machinery.
- 15.
Figures of both location of uploader and location featuring in the clip probably mirror a bias in the choice of search terms and the use of the Latin alphabet. The term ‘milad’ is particularly common in a South Asian context, and a majority of Muslims in the UK are of South Asian decent.
- 16.
At this time, I choose not to speculate on this difference between the two samples concerning gender.
- 17.
Conway and McInerney reach similar results regarding regional geographical distribution in their sample of comments to jihadi videos. They also found a mean age of 27.9 (compared to the median in my sample of 28) (Conway and McInerney 2008, 112–113). Unfortunately, they did not collect data on stated gender of the commentators.
- 18.
In Internet slang, a ‘troll’ is a person who posts comments with the intention to provoke emotional reactions.
- 19.
In the following, I will quote comments in an exact manner, as I deem this important in displaying their character of ‘written speech’.
- 20.
See e.g. Young 2004 for a similar use of Austin’s notion in relation to religious participation on-line.
- 21.
See Helland 2005 for a methodological elaboration on the problem of determining what constitute religious actions on-line.
- 22.
A word frequency search showed that the words bid‘a (in different spellings), ‘innovation’ and ‘innovate’ taken together appear 436 times in the comments. This can be compared to the words ‘islam’ and ‘islamic’ (415) and mawlid with different spellings (435).
- 23.
In Globalized Islam Olivier Roy terms the opposition between Sufism and Salafism an Islamological ‘cliché’ that obscures the similarities between trends in contemporary Islam (Roy 2004, 229). However, in the comments here under analysis, this opposition is emically highly relevant.
- 24.
Weisburd postulates such a role for the jihadi videos he analyses (Weisburd 2009, 1070).
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Svensson, J. (2013). ITZ BIDAH BRO!!!!! GT ME?? – YouTube Mawlid and Voices of Praise and Blame. In: Hoffmann, T., Larsson, G. (eds) Muslims and the New Information and Communication Technologies. Muslims in Global Societies Series, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7247-2_6
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