The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad: Devotional Piety in Sunni Islam.

• Author: Wheeler, Brannon
• Position: Book review

The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad: Devotional Piety in Sunni Islam. By MARION HOLMES KATZ. Culture and Civilization in the Middle East, vol. I I. New York: ROUTLEDGE, 2007. Pp. viii + 275. $150 (cloth), $39.95 (paper).

Carefully written and meticulously documented, this book supplies an insightful analysis of the ritual celebration of the Prophet Muhammad's birthday from the medieval period to modern times. More than supplying a welcome history of the origins and development of the mawlid ritual in its Middle East and North African contexts, Marion Katz provides an analysis of the historical contexts and individual personalities responsible for shaping the mawlid and integrating it into diverse political and social structures. Katz's conclusion that "the origins of the mawlid can be traced, not to the single innovative act of some identifiable authority, but to the slow coalescence of a constellation of devotional narratives and practices that eventually converged to form a single, highly flexible, and attractive form of ritual action" (p. 208) makes the painstaking and innovative work of her study appear almost expected, commonsensical, and, above all, historically defensible.

Katz divides her study into discrete chapters that treat not so much the chronological history of the mawlid but different pervasive and persistent aspects of it that developed in different contexts in response to various specific communal forces. In particular, Katz shows how women and other popular, sometimes subversive groups were able to gain a more public form of expression through both the narratives and the practice of the mawlid. This includes Katz's convincing explanation--if in need of a longer treatment at some later point--for the marginalization of the mawlid in modern times.

Following a general introduction that attempts to pinpoint the accepted origins for the celebration, Katz gives a long overview of textual evidence for the mawlid, using an approach she calls "an archaeology of mawlid narratives." Chapters two to four examine different structural and performative aspects of the mawlid in a variety of different historical contexts. Katz looks at the role of emotion (joy and love) and presents a kind of phenomenology of time as it relates to the accrual of personal merit in the practice of the mawlid. Katz also draws out the legal aspects of the mawlid well, and laces throughout a broader discussion of how the practice of mawlid relates to individual...