Celebrating Muhammad’s Birthday in the Middle East: Supporting or Complicating Muslim Identity Projects?

Abstract

Five hundred years after the Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632 A.D., the Shiite Fatimid dynasty that ruled Egypt introduced a new festival commemorating and celebrating the birth of Muhammad. This festival, known in Arabic as the mawlid al-nabi, birth of the Prophet, or mawlid for short, soon spread around the region and through the expanding Muslim world. Yet, from the beginning, the mawlid met with criticism: Was it a ‘Muslim’ festival or a ‘Shiite’ festival? Did its observance lead Muslims astray by suggesting that someone other than God should be venerated and, hence, making them guilty of shirk, or polytheism? Since the rise of Wahhabism in the late 1700s and the rise of conservative forms of Salafism in the late 1800s, the Muslim world, and particularly the Middle East, has witnessed an increasingly sharp division between those states that sanction the observance of the mawlid and those that do not. This chapter surveys the states of the contemporary Middle East, noting whether a state forbids, permits or requires (by making a state holiday) mawlid observance. It then maps these findings against the sectarian composition of each state’s population and the outlook of its government, assessing the role that these festivals, or their absence, play in fostering national, regional and/or sectarian identities. It closes by suggesting the broader implications of the celebration of Muhammad’s birthday for national identities and regional politics around the region.