Mawlid
Marion Katz
Related Terms:
- Ashura (commemoration ceremonies on the 10th of Muharram)
- Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca)
- Hilye (verbal icon of the Prophet Muhammad)
- Mahmal (ceremonial palanquin during hajj procession)
Related Khamseen Video:
Sumru Belger Krody, “Prayer Carpets,” Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, published 11 May 2021.
Marika Sardar, “The Gwalior Qur’an,” Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, published 28 August 2020.
References:
Brown, James. “ʿAzafid Ceuta, Mawlid al-Nabī and the Development of Marīnid Strategies of Legitimation,” in The Articulation of Power in Medieval Iberia and the Maghrib, ed. Amira Bennison, 127–152. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 
Hermansen, Marcia. “Milad/Mawlid: Celebrating the Prophet’s Birthday,” in The Practice of Islam in America: An Introduction, ed. Edward Curtis IV, 123–138. New York: New York University Press, 2017.
Kaptein, N. J. G. Muhammad’s Birthday Festival: Early History in the Central Muslim Lands and Development in the Muslim West until the 10th/16th Century. Leiden and New York: E.J. Brill, 1993.
Katz, Marion. The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad: Devotional Piety in Sunni Islam. London and New York: Routledge, 2007.
Tareen, SherAli. Defending Muhammad in Modernity, Chapter 8. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020.
Citation:
Marion Katz, “Mawlid,” Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, published 30 January 2024.
Marion Katz is a Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. Her research focuses on pre-modern Islamic law, gender, and ritual between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, especially the conceptual structures of legal works and how Islamic legal thought relates to other normative discourses that were authoritative for premodern Muslims. Her books includes Body of Text: The Emergence of the Sunni Law of Ritual Purity (2002), The Birth of The Prophet Muhammad: Devotional Piety in Sunni Islam (2007), Women in the Mosque: A History of Legal Thought and Social Practice (2014), and Wives and Work: Islamic Law and Ethics Before Modernity (2022).