September, the month of the Prophet

On September 4, Muslims entered the month of Rabi’al-Awwal, which has a special flavor in Islam: it is the birthday of Muhammad, born on the 12th day of the month, in the year known as the Elephant (570 AD) (1). Rabi’al-awwal is thus nicknamed ” month of lights and beauty “, an allusion to the spiritual secrets surrounding the prophetic figure.

Muslims around the world thus commemorate, for thirty days, the Mawlid Al-Nabi (birthday of the Prophet), a sort of great memorial: it is an opportunity to remember him, to meditate on his qualities and to sing his merits. Because, if since the Middle Ages the image of the Prophet has often been negative in the West, he is on the contrary a figure of light and clemency for Muslims who see in his birth a favor done to humanity, by virtue of the verse: “We have not sent you except as a mercy to the worlds.” (Quran: 21, 107).

Mawlid is a time of remembrance, joy and gratitude

Mawlid is therefore a time of remembrance, joy and gratitude. Medieval accounts of the first Mawlids in Arabia evoke the visit to the Prophet’s birthplace: symbolically, people followed in his footsteps and got closer to him by returning to his oldest traces. Today, family homes (like mosques) are decorated, perfumed with incense, lit with candles; meals are prepared during which gifts are offered and songs or stories of Mohammed’s life are listened to. In mosques, daily sessions offer the reading of his biography, his words (hadith), but also songs and poems, often old, praising his merits, he of whom the Koran says: “You are indeed endowed with a sublime nature.” (Quran: 68, 4).

These popular and learned practices are driven by two major spiritual themes. First, that of the ideal towards which each believer tends: love of the Prophet, which involves imitating his actions and, for the most pious, his spiritual states.

The second theme explains the above: the intimate reality of the Prophet is Light (a “Resplendent Torch”Quran: 33, 46), pre-existing all creation, of which a hadith tells us that it passed from “kidneys to kidneys” among the prophets (a sign of their essential unity), to finally incarnate in Mohammed. The illumination of homes and mosques in this month is a subtle reminder of this “Muhammadian Light”of which Creation is a refraction, and which is celebrated in so many mystical texts: “You are Sun, you are full Moon; you are Light on another Light.”

Celebrations discredited in Saudi Arabia

In the 20th century the Mawlid was criticized, particularly in Saudi Arabia, in the name of a “return to the purity of Islam” : Wahhabism sees it as a blameworthy religious innovation and an exaggeration in the love granted to the Prophet. But these criticisms could not counterbalance the great scholarly tradition which, for centuries, never ceased to encourage the faithful to these commemorations, nor extinguish the immense fervor (mystical, scholarly and popular), nourished by so many Koranic, prophetic and poetic references:

“All the creatures created after him,
Are dewdrops from the ocean of graces,
His light is the goal of every creature,
Origin of being and also of non-being.” (2)

To go further: Claude Addas, The Muhammadan House. Insights into Devotion to the Prophet in Muslim MysticismGallimard, 2015.