The Birth of The Prophet Muhammad: Devotional Piety in Sunni Islam (Culture and Civilization in the Middle East)

287 Pages·2007·1.792 MB·English

by  Marion Holmes Katz

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The Birth of the Prophet Mu ammad
In the medieval period, the birth of the Prophet Muhammad (the mawlid) was
celebrated in popular narratives and ceremonies that expressed the religious
agendas and aspirations of ordinary Muslims, including women. Mawlid
celebrations expressed the hope for salvation through the relationship of love
and mutuality with the Prophet, rather than exclusively through obedience to
Islamic Law.
The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad: Devotional piety in Sunni Islam
examines the mawlid from its origins to the present day and provides a new
insight into how an aspect of everyday Islamic piety has been transformed by
modernity. The book demonstrates that medieval popular Islam was coherent and
meaningful, not just a set of deviations from scholarly norms. It gives a window
into the religious lives of medieval Muslim women, rather than focusing on the
limitations that were placed on them. Elite scholars attempted to co-opt and
discipline these forms of piety, but were not able to control or suppress them, and
popular narratives about the Prophet’s birth remained a powerful counter-canon
for centuries. In the twentieth century, social and economic change transformed
the ways in which Muslims imagined the Prophet Muhammad, and the
celebration of his birthday was marginalized by political forces.
Combining textual and historical analysis, this book is an important
contribution to our understanding of contemporary Muslim devotional practices
and will be of great interest to graduate students and researchers of Islam,
religious studies, and medieval studies.
Marion Holmes Katz is Associate Professor at the Department of Middle
Eastern Studies, New York University, USA. Her research interests are Islamic
law, ritual, and gender.
Culture and Civilization in the Middle East
Series Editor:
Ian R. Netton
University of Leeds
This series studies the Middle East through the twin foci of its diverse cultures
and civilisations. Comprising original monographs as well as scholarly surveys,
it covers topics in the fields of Middle Eastern literature, archaeology, law,
history, philosophy, science, folklore, art, architecture and language. While there
is a plurality of views, the series presents serious scholarship in a lucid and
stimulating fashion.
1. Arabic Literature – An Overview 7. Arab Representations of the
Pierre Cachia Occident
East-West Encounters in Arabic
2. Modern Arab Historiography Fiction
Historical Discourse and the Rasheed El-Enany
Nation-State
Youssef Choueiri 8. God and Humans in Islamic
Thought
Abd al-Jabbar, Ibn Sinaand
3. The Philosophical Poetics of
al-Ghazali
Alfarabi,Avicenna and Averroes
Maha Elkaisy-Friemuth
The Aristotelian Reception
Salim Kemal
9. Original Islam
Malik and the Madhhab of
4. The Epistemology of Ibn
Madina
Khaldun
Yasin Dutton
Zaid Ahmad
10. Al-Ghazaliand the Qur’an
5. The Hanbali School of Law and One Book, Many Meanings
Ibn Taymiyyah Martin Whittingham
Conflict or Concilation
Abdul Hakim I Al-Matroudi 11. The Birth of the Prophet
Muhammad
6. Arabic Rhetoric Devotional piety in
A Pragmatic Analysis Sunni Islam
Hussein Abdul-Raof Marion Holmes Katz
The Birth of the
h
Prophet Mu ammad
Devotional piety in Sunni Islam
Marion Holmes Katz
First published 2007
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007.
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© 2007 Marion Holmes Katz
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN 0-203-96214-1Mastere-bookISBN
ISBN10: 0–415–77127–7 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0–203–96214–1 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–77127–6 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–203–96214–5 (ebk)
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 The emergence of mawlidnarratives 6
An archaeology of mawlidnarratives 6
Formal mawlidtexts 50
Conclusion 61
2 Gifts and reciprocity in the celebration
of the mawlid 63
Mawlidbanquets 67
Pious utterances and the generation of merit 75
The exchange of merit and the economy of salvation 87
Conclusion 96
3 Emotion,law,and the celebration of the mawlid 104
Joy 104
Love 117
The salvific value of personal relationships 125
Standing as an expression of emotion 128
Conclusion 139
4 Time and merit in the celebration of the mawlid 143
The night of the mawlidandlaylat al-qadr 146
Special times and their uses 147
Homogeneous and non-homogeneous time 153
Conclusion 164
vi Contents
5 Mawlids under attack 169
Wahhabiopposition 170
Modernist critiques 174
New rationales for the celebration of the mawlid 182
The marginalization of the mawlidin the
late-twentieth century 184
The eclipse of the devotionalist model 188
Conclusion 206
Conclusion 208
Appendix 216
Notes 220
Bibliography 258
Index 271
Acknowledgments
The first stage of research on this project was made possible by a fellowship from
the Association for Religion and Intellectual Life, which provided room, board,
and library access in New York City in the summer of 1998. The generous
comments and encouragement of the ARIL staff and the other participants helped
me to incubate the project and encouraged me to pursue it. A fellowship from the
American Institute for Yemeni Studies allowed me to spend five months researching
mawlids in Sanaa in 2000–1. The AIYS staff and the other residents in the hostel
(particularly Chris Edens and Maurice Pomerantz) helped me with the connec-
tions and expertise to make research in an unfamiliar country possible. I thank the
staffs of the Maktaba al-Gharbiya and Maktabat al-Awqaf, Sanaa, and the Ahqaf
Library, Tarim, for access to the manuscript collections there. Mr Ja‘far
Muhammad al-Saqqaf of Tarim allowed me access to his invaluable personal
library, and his graciousness and erudition were of enormous help. I am also
grateful to the Jam‘iyat al-Munshidin for their extensive and patient contributions
to my project. The professional help and personal kindness of a number of women
chanters made my stay in Sanaa a happy one; my work with them will be reflected
in a future publication. In Damascus, I received kind and spontaneous help from
the staff of the Abu Nur madrasa and the women to whom they introduced me.
For access to manuscript and published sources, I am also grateful to the patient
and professional staffs of Dar al-Kutub, Cairo; the Asad Library, Damascus; the
Topkapı and Süleymaniye libraries, Istanbul; the Rare Books collection at
Princeton University; and the Library of Congress, Washington.
I received both moral support and intellectual input for this book from my
colleagues at both Mount Holyoke College, where I began my research, and
NewYork University, where I completed it. In particular, I thank Bernard Haykel
for encouraging me to travel to Yemen and Everett Rowson for helping me with
his notes, comments, and general erudition. My parents, Stanley and Adria Katz,
have contributed in countless ways throughout the project. I owe this book, like
all of my accomplishments, to them.
In the course of this project, I have received help both from people who wish
to see mawlidcelebrations vanish from Muslim practice and from those who find
them deeply meaningful. I have listened to impromptu lectures about the evils of
religious innovation, and met women (in a mosque in Damascus) who kissed my
viii Acknowledgments
cheeks to partake of the baraka of my project. The generosity and tolerance of
both groups has touched and humbled me. I am profoundly grateful to the people
who have shared with me not only their knowledge, but also their religious lives
and aspirations. Mawlidopponents and devotees alike may find material that both
delights and offends them in this work. I hope it will prove interesting and
informative to some with a personal stake in the religious debates it traces, as well
as to those whose interest is purely intellectual. Devotees of the Prophet will note
that in my translations of Arabic works, I have omitted the blessings and greetings
upon the Prophet that have been invoked by authors or added by copyists after
mention of his name. Although I found such interjections awkward to include in
English translation, I hope that they will be supplied in practice by readers who
feel so moved. Regardless of the specific stances of the many authors whose work
I have studied and the people whose religious lives I have been privileged to
glimpse, being exposed to the genuine (if protean) love that the Prophet
Muhammad inspires has not been the least of the blessings of this project.
Finally, I thank Bradley Marshall McCormick, whom I met and married over
the course of this project. His love and encouragement have supported me in my
work, and it is to him that I dedicate this book.