The Perils of Joy: Contesting Mulid Festivals in Contemporary Egypt

7. Legitimizing Celebration

152 7 Legitimizing Celebration Agreat many people love mulids, or at least some parts of them, and argue for their point of view. The opposition to mulids and their exoticization as popular heritage are contested, most important, by a Sufi discourse in defense of mulids. This discourse is articulated by people who participate in mulids and defend their own festive practice, people who have an affinity to Sufi spirituality even if they may not frequent mulids, members and leaders of Sufi groups, and members of the religious establishment who are sympathetic to Sufism and the veneration of Muslim saints. But the Sufi discourse to defend mulids often looks rather different than the actual festive practice. Although ambiguity and openness are key to the atmosphere of a mulid, the arguments people make to legitimize their festive practice are frequently characterized by a sense of seriousness and discipline that is difficult to match with the actual festive practice. This is not always so, however, and so a discourse of purposeful seriousness exists alongside the affirmation of ambivalence and openness. The tone of the defense of mulids, I argue in this chapter, is strongly related to the kind of intended audience it addresses, and the more people try to argue for the mulids’ inclusion in the modernist and reformist public, the more this relationship affects not only their arguments, but also the way they celebrate mulids. The debate on mulids is by no means between “popular” Sufis and “orthodox” scholars. As far as mulids are concerned, there is in fact no such thing as a unified orthodoxy. Although some scholars and imams take a position close to that of the Salafi doctrine, some remain close to Sufism, and many others cannot be clearly associated with either current. Al-Azhar, the Ministry of Religious Endowments, and the Fatwa Office Legitimizing Celebration  153 of the Ministry of Justice keep a remarkably low profile on controversial issues such as the mulid “because it is a subject of disagreement,” as a lecturer at the Azhar, himself of Sufi orientation, pointed out to me.1 It should be no surprise, then, that most attempts to justify mulids from a religious point of view present themselves as the correct Islamic point of view. This presentation goes perfectly in line with the religious views of the vast majority of people with Sufi leanings, who generally see themselves not as supporters of popular religion, but as the moderate mainstream of Islam. In a nutshell, the scholarly discourse in justification of mulids claims that mulids are not a bid‘a because they are not the kind of innovation intended in the hadith against innovations, that venerating friends of God is not polytheism because it is not worship, and that one must distinguish between the festival’s religious core and its social context. This line of argumentation aims at showing that Salafi critics of Sufism and mulids have misunderstood key religious concepts that, when correctly understood , turn out to allow and even sanction the celebration of mulids. Thus, although mulids were not celebrated in the age of the Prophet, they are not a forbidden bid‘a, first, because they are not opposed to the spirit of Islam and, second, because they are a custom, not a form of worship: We have a hadith in the Sunna of the Prophet, blessings be upon him, who said: “Who establishes a good custom in Islam, upon him is its reward and the reward of those who follow it after him, without anything being reduced from their reward. And who establishes a bad custom, upon him is its burden.”2 . . . And there is the hadith that says that “every novelty is an innovation, and every innovation is an error, and every error leads to hell,” but the Prophet nevertheless also said: “Who establishes a good custom, upon him is its reward,” so the meaning of the hadith is that there will be novelties like the computer and Internet and television and radio: these are of course all contemporary inventions . . . that can be either profitable or destructive for society. . . . What is intended by [the term] novelties3 in the hadith are novelties in the Islamic law, which are known to damage religion. For example, we cannot change a legal rule. But what is subject to change, by the way of analogy or reasoning, is custom.4 154  The Perils of Joy Defining mulids as a custom inverts...