The Prophet’s birthday I never really learned how to observe or ‘celebrate’

As a working print journalist in Dhaka, I am unusually conscious of Eid-e-Miladunnabi. 

Bangladeshi newspapers cease publication on only 11 to 13 days in a typical year. These are complete shutdowns, without even the special arrangements that allow an edition to appear in print during some holidays. Eid-e-Miladunnabi is one of those precious dates. 

Beyond the holiday roster, however, the occasion long remained obscure to me.

I grew up in a typical conservative Muslim household in a Muslim-majority country. Ramadan and the two Eids ordered the religious year. Shab-e-Barat once had a vivid place in our home. During the 1990s and early 2000s, Amma prepared halwa, sometimes in several varieties, and the night carried the pleasant sense that ordinary domestic life had been temporarily suspended.

Later, the cooking stopped. Amma had come to believe, partly through the increasingly accessible sermons of Islamic preachers on Youtube, that Shab-e-Barat was bid‘ah: a religious invention unsupported by the earliest practice of Islam.

I understood what had disappeared because I remembered it. Eid-e-Miladunnabi was different. I had never really known what its celebration entailed. There was no childhood ritual to recover, no family gathering, no household celebration and not even an improved lunch of polao and korma. The day existed in the calendar but barely inside our home.

That gap between public recognition and private experience reflects a larger fact about the festival. Eid-e-Miladunnabi, usually called Mawlid al-Nabi in Arabic, does not possess one universally accepted form. It commemorates the birth of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), conventionally placed by most Sunni Muslims on the 12th of Rabi al-Awwal. 

Many Shiite Muslims observe it on the 17th. The precise date of his birth is historically uncertain; the 12th is also traditionally associated with his death. Even its status as a festival remains disputed.

The Quran does not prescribe a birthday observance, and neither the Prophet nor his companions celebrated one. The earliest organized commemorations appeared centuries after his death. Historians generally locate their institutional origins in Fatimid Egypt during the 11th or early 12th century. The Fatimid court marked several sacred birthdays, including those of the Prophet and members of his family. 

These occasions were largely ceremonies of the ruling establishment, involving sermons, food, sweets, and charitable distribution. The Ottomans made it an official imperial observance in the late 16th century. The festival was therefore a medieval institution that accumulated legitimacy through repetition.

That history explains the theological argument that continues today. Many Sunni scholars, particularly within Sufi-oriented traditions, accepted the Mawlid as a commendable innovation, provided it involved Quranic recitation, accounts of the Prophet’s life and feeding people. 

The influential Egyptian scholar Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti described such a gathering as a “good innovation,” valuable because it expressed gratitude and affection for the Prophet.

Opponents apply a stricter test. If the Prophet, his companions, and the earliest Muslims did not observe his birthday, they argue, later Muslims cannot introduce it as an act of worship. Salafi and Ahl-e-Hadith scholars generally reject the festival on this basis. Some Deobandi scholars also oppose its ceremonial forms, particularly processions and claims that the Prophet is spiritually present at gatherings. 

The disagreement is not about whether Muhammad should be loved, but about whether love may be given a ritual form he did not prescribe. The result is an unusual religious occasion…a national holiday across much of the Muslim world that some devout Muslims decline to recognize at all.

In Saudi Arabia, where the religious establishment has historically been shaped by Wahhabi-Salafi thought, Mawlid is not an official festival. Public birthday ceremonies have traditionally been discouraged as innovations. Qatar has followed a broadly similar course. Yet elsewhere in the Arab world, the date is deeply embedded in public culture. 

Egyptians buy halawat al-moulid—sweets, sesame confections, and sugar figurines—while mosques and Sufi orders arrange recitations and gatherings. In Morocco, the occasion combines mosque observance with family meals and ceremonies linked to the monarchy. 

Across parts of Yemen, Jordan, Palestine, and North Africa, communities recite devotional poetry, recount the Prophet’s biography, distribute food, and hold processions.

Türkiye observes Mevlid Kandili more quietly, with illuminated mosques, prayers, sermons, and recitations of Süleyman Çelebi’s 15th-century poem Vesiletü’n-Necat, popularly known simply as the Mevlid. Iran places the Sunni and Shiite dates within Islamic Unity Week, giving a disputed chronology an official ecumenical purpose.

When Mawlid reached South Asia, it entered a religious culture already shaped by Persian courts, Sufi shrines, vernacular poetry, and local forms of public devotion. There it became Eid-e-Miladunnabi, Nabi Dibas, or simply Milad. Processions known as Jashn-e-Julus, green flags, illuminated streets, naat recitations, sermons, communal meals, and charity became common, especially among Barelvi and Sufi-oriented Muslims. 

In Pakistan and parts of India, trucks, mosques, and neighborhoods are covered in green lights. Groups sing praises of the Prophet, and food is distributed as langar. Deobandi and Ahl-e-Hadith communities may avoid these celebrations even while holding conferences on the Prophet’s life.

In Bengal, observance acquired a role beyond theology. A recent article in The Daily Star newspaper shows how, during the early 20th century, Milad programs gave Muslim pupils in colonial schools a cultural occasion comparable to the festivals organized by Hindu students. 

Schools held essay contests and lectures in Bengali and English about the Prophet’s life. Kazi Nazrul Islam and other Muslim writers produced poems and prose for the occasion. Milad became a vehicle for literary activity, middle-class identity, community organization, and eventually political mobilization.

This history complicates the easy claim that South Asian Muslims merely diluted Islam with local customs. Cultural blending certainly shaped the festival, as it shaped Muslim clothing, food, music, and language. But the Mawlid itself did not originate in Bengal or India. It arrived with centuries of Arab, Persian, Ottoman, and Sufi precedent, and then assumed local forms. South Asia made it louder, greener, more processional, and more closely tied to communal identity.

The same global circulation that once spread Mawlid now helps weaken it in some households. Youtube, and Facebook have carried Saudi and Salafi arguments into Bengali homes, challenging practices transmitted by local clerics and families. I have seen this transformation with Shab-e-Barat…a celebration that once smelled of Amma’s halwa was gradually recategorized as an invention. Eid-e-Miladunnabi entered our awareness at the other end of that change…already contested, already stripped of any domestic ritual.

That is why I know the holiday chiefly through the silence of a newspaper office. Elsewhere, it means sugared sweets in Cairo, devotional verse in Istanbul, royal ceremony in Morocco, green processions in Karachi, school essays in colonial Bengal, or deliberate nonobservance in Riyadh. In my own life, it has meant no feast and no ceremony, only a day when the presses stop. 

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Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa