It has long been recognized that much of the richness of Muslim women's ritual lives has been found outside of both the mosque and the “five pillars of Islam,” in a wide set of devotional practices that have met with varying degrees of affirmation and censure from male religious scholars.Footnote ¹ This recognition has given rise to a valuable literature on such practices as shrine visitation,Footnote ² spirit-possession rituals,Footnote ³ and Twelver Shiʿi women's domestic ceremonies.Footnote ⁴ The prevalence of such noncanonical rituals in Muslim women's lives, although waning in many parts of the contemporary world, raises questions about the relationship between women's religious practices and the constitution of Islamic orthodoxies. Have women, often given lesser access to mosque-based and canonical rituals, historically resorted to autonomous and rewarding religious practices that are, nevertheless, fated to be marginalized in the male-dominated construction of Islamic normativity—a normativity that women may ultimately internalize and master only at great cost to their religious lives?Footnote ⁵

The pursuit of divergent religious practices by the urban masses, rural dwellers, the religiously uneducated (even if rich or powerful), and women represents both an integral part of Islamic practice throughout history and a central concern of many Islamic scholars of all periods. Despite a growing recognition of the importance of such “popular” practices, however, there has been great difficulty in disentangling the factors of social status, wealth, literacy, urban versus rural dwelling, and gender to create a coherent and useful category of “popular Islam.”Footnote ⁶ Particularly in the case of women (although also with respect to other—intersecting—groups such as the unlearned and the poor), it is important to critique the concept of “popular Islam” while retaining awareness that different groups had differential access to the means of authenticating and valorizing their religious practices, both in their own eyes and in those of others. Rather than simply lacking authentication, however, such practices were likely valorized through different strategies. It is also important to note that the deployment of a category akin to “popular Islam” (i.e., an Islam of “the common people,” which is also frequently associated with women's activities) is a feature of our historical sources for the Islamic past as well as of many contemporary debates about current practices.Footnote ⁷

This study examines women's celebrations of the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad (the mawlid) in Sanaa, Yemen, at the turn of the 21st century as an example of the ways in which a given ritual can be construed, by various parties, both as “folk religion” and as correct or “orthodox” Islam. In comparison to zār spirit-possession rituals, which have been much more extensively studied, the mawlid has a much closer and more ambiguous relationship with scholarly orthodoxy; it is thus a good test case for examining how the same practice can be framed as “popular” or “orthodox” Islam and for discovering what may be at stake when this is done in a particular context.Footnote ⁸

The celebration of the Prophet's birthday first arose among Sunni Muslims in the 12th century. That the mawlid celebration was universally recognized as a new religious practice left it open to accusations of bidʿa (religious innovation, i.e., ritual practice ungrounded in the sunna of the Prophet), although many prominent scholars embraced it. The mawlid celebration manifested itself in part as a carnivalistic festival held on the anniversary of the Prophet's birth and usually involving feasting and Sufi recitals. Less spectacularly but perhaps more pervasively, it took the form of a modest domestic celebration during which family, friends, and neighbors heard a recitation of the story of the Prophet's birth (soon a widespread genre of devotional writing), invoked blessings upon the Prophet, and sometimes partook in a festive meal. Such observances could honor a variety of life-cycle events and auspicious occasions, not necessarily in the season of the Prophet's birth.

Women seem to have numbered among the early enthusiasts of the domestic mawlid ritual. Women's mawlid gatherings are discussed (and condemned) in two of the earliest anti-mawlid polemics, dating from the 14th century.Footnote ⁹ By the 15th century, women's mawlids seem to have become common among various social strata, at least in Syria, and were performed at the celebration of weddings and in fulfillment of vows.Footnote ¹⁰ It would be tempting to conclude that women's cultivation of the mawlid celebration represents a classic example of the double bind that women have often confronted in their ritual participation. The mawlid celebration sidestepped issues of ritual purity and mosque access, provided a religiously meaningful framework for women's sociability, and could be incorporated into the life-cycle occasions (such as marriage, childbirth, and death) that punctuated women's lives. The performance of mawlids could be harnessed to the personal and familial concerns (marriage, fertility, and the health of family members) that were often most vital to women. Nevertheless, the mawlid's tenuous religious legitimacy might simultaneously devalue and marginalize the religious efforts of the women who cultivated it.

Such an interpretation is justified for women's mawlid celebrations in certain specific times and places, particularly in the modern period. The ascendancy of Salafi trends in international Islam in the 20th century raised more rigorous claims for adherence to the sunna and elimination of bidaʿ and involved a broad attack on traditional custom and “superstition.” In the late 20th century, a vigorous Saudi-led campaign against mawlids intensified opposition to their performance in many parts of the Islamic world. Recent amplification of the views of premodern opponents to the mawlid celebration should not, however, obscure the extent to which the Muslim scholarly establishment cultivated mawlid piety in the centuries of its flourishing—or the extent to which mawlid celebrations continue to be orthodox in local Islamic societies. Many of the luminaries of the premodern scholarly elite elaborated theoretical justifications for the celebration of the mawlid or produced devotional texts to be used in the context of the celebration.Footnote ¹¹

Talal Asad has famously proposed that in analyzing Islamic belief and practice, “one should begin, as Muslims do, from the concept of a discursive tradition that includes and relates itself to the founding texts of the Qurʾan and the hadith.”Footnote ¹² Because Muslims constitute their practices as Islamic by invoking concepts of a “correct model”—that is, of orthodoxy—contesting the legitimacy and significance of practices is an inherent aspect of the tradition rather than a sign of the tradition in crisis.Footnote ¹³ A concept of orthodoxy—of “apt performance”—is in play whenever Islamic practices are inculcated and reproduced, “whether by an ʿalim, a khaṭīb, a Sufi shaykh, or an untutored parent.”Footnote ¹⁴ He uses this recognition to break down the dichotomy between “elite” and “folk” Islam.

These insights can usefully be applied to the mawlid, although defining the tradition in terms of Qurʾan and hadith is unduly restrictive. Muslims have historically advanced competing visions of the “correct model” not only on the basis of direct invocation of the texts of Qurʾan and hadith but also with reference to other sources of authenticating precedent, including the teachings of the legal schools (madhāhib), the claimed consensus (ijmāʿ) of legal scholars, the authority of religious visions and dreams, and other received ideas about correct Islam. Although all these sources of authority are assumed ultimately to be compatible with (and rooted in) the Qurʾan and hadith, such mediating structures may be much more relevant to the forms of authentication routinely adduced by Muslims over the centuries than the primary texts themselves. The legitimacy of celebrating the Prophet's birthday was justified by elite scholars (as well as, so far as we can determine, by ordinary believers) as much in terms of a widely accepted underlying model of loyalty and love for the Prophet Muhammad as in terms of specific revealed texts.

Although the practice of standing (qiyām) in honor of the Prophet's birth during the recital of his life story during the mawlid ceremony has often been decried as bidʿa, for instance, historically it was just as often treated as a badge of orthodoxy. Ibrahim ibn Muhammad al-Halabi (d. 1549) wrote a treatise condemning the qiyām, which he regarded as bidʿa, but he did so in response to critics who had condemned his own failure to rise on the grounds that it was a religious obligation.Footnote ¹⁵ Responding to the rising threat of the Wahhabis in the Hijaz, Shafiʿi scholar Muhammad al-Hijrasi claimed in 1886 that failure to perform the qiyām was tantamount to disbelief.Footnote ¹⁶ The point here is not to establish the orthodoxy of the mawlid celebration (or qiyām) in any objective sense or even to affirm its acceptance by the numerical majority or the ascendant party of religious scholars in any given time or place. Rather, it is important to acknowledge that claims of orthodoxy were the common coin of all sides to the dispute and to refocus attention on the ways in which such claims were wielded.

In contemporary Sanaa, the mawlid celebration is often identified (both by local Yemenis and by foreign observers) with “popular Islam” and with women's religious practice. Arriving in Yemen in the fall of 2000, I hoped to locate and attend some women's celebrations of the mawlid. As I questioned new Yemeni acquaintances in Sanaa about the ceremony, two themes quickly emerged: the mawlid was a manifestation of “folk” (shaʿbī) Islam, and it was a dying practice. The two themes converged in the repeated remark that the mawlid was a practice of “old women,” an observation that implicitly combined the themes of socioreligious marginality and of looming obsolescence. Neither assumption proved to be unqualifiedly true, although the frequency and social distribution of women's mawlids in Sanaa may well have declined as compared with earlier times. Through the network of professional female chanters (nashshādāt/munshidāt), it was not difficult to locate a wealth of mawlid ceremonies held by and for women of all ages and social strata (as well as by men, although men's mawlids were less accessible to me).

The idea that the mawlid reflects the Islam of old women appeared to express both deprecation (implying that the mawlid ceremony failed to meet an increasingly widespread standard of Islamic legitimacy) and nostalgia (incorporating the mawlid into a valued sense of the Yemeni past). In an article published in June 2000 in the Yemeni paper al-Thawra, the scholar Arwa ʿAbduhʿ Uthman produced an elegiac evocation of the Yemeni mawlids of her childhood under the rubric shaʿbiyyat (folklore). She notes that mawlid celebrations have declined in all regions of Yemen except the Tihama and Hadramawt; in the rest of the country, they have become “social occasions” (munāsabāt ijtimāʿiyya) rather than religious ceremonies. She proposes that mawlids and other disappearing religious observances be saved from oblivion on a national level by coordination among nongovernmental organizations to preserve the “religious and cultural heritage” of each region of the country.Footnote ¹⁷

Following Asad, this study argues that the Sanʿani women who perform mawlid ceremonies manifest concepts of orthodoxy by adhering to clear models of “correct practice” and (in some cases) by amending or replacing those elements that they consider ill founded or deviant. Rather than discard the category of “folk” or “popular” Islam, however, it explores the ways in which the construction of such a category has been invoked—to very different ends—by actors within the Yemeni Islamic tradition. Although it is not possible to identify the mawlid celebration with a particular gender, social stratum, or degree of education, the effort to define the mawlid celebration as “popular Islam” (i.e., the Islam of the uneducated, of the lower classes, or of women) is not completely new or only externally imposed. Rather, it reflects one of the “reasons and arguments. . .intrinsic to traditional practice” emphasized by Asad.Footnote ¹⁸ It can be used to delegitimize the practice or (as in Arwa ʿ Uthman's article) to legitimize it in terms of a newly valorized traditional heritage. Simultaneously, orthodoxy in Asad's sense is manifested in the practices and views of Yemeni women who perform mawlid ceremonies, which are shaped with conscious reference to a “correct model” rooted in the Islamic discursive tradition.

THE YEMENI MAWLID TRADITION

The composition of devotional texts commemorating the Prophet's birthday appears to have spread among Shafiʿi scholars of southern Yemen in the 15th century. The first identifiable Yemeni mawlid author seems to be Abu Bakr ibn ʿAli al-Zunquli, a Shafiʿi from Taʿizz who settled in Aden and died in 1462–63.Footnote ¹⁹ Somewhat later, a number of mawlid works were produced by Yemenis who were in personal contact with one of the most active proponents of the mawlid, Muhammad al-Sakhawi (d. 1497), an Egyptian who spent extended periods residing and teaching in the Hijaz and encountered many Yemeni pilgrims.Footnote ²⁰ A highly influential mawlid text, still in broad circulation today, was produced by the prominent Zabidi hadith scholar and historian ʿAbd al-Rahman ibn ʿAli ibn al-Daybaʿ (d. 1537), who studied with al-Sakhawi in Mecca.Footnote ²¹ Whether or not these individuals' mawlid compositions were specifically inspired by al-Sakhawi, this pattern suggests that mawlid composition was disseminated in Yemen in scholarly circles similar to (and in contact with) those that spread mawlids in Syria and Egypt. The mawlid celebration was also cultivated by the political elite: in his historical work on the city of Zabid, Ibn al-Daybaʿ records the official celebration of the Prophet's mawlid in the year 1485, under the auspices of the Tahirid ruler al-Malik al-Mansur.Footnote ²²

Several centuries later, a rare insight into the social setting of the mawlid celebration and into the construction of scholarly discourse about it is provided by an unusually long and detailed fatwa by the Sanʿani scholar Muhammad ibn ʿAli al-Shawkani (d. 1834). Although Zaydi by heritage and formal allegiance, al-Shawkani was an unusually bold and brilliant proponent of the traditionist trend, which sought to ground Islamic thought and praxis directly in the textual sources of the Qurʾan and hadith. In his pursuit of hadith, al-Shawkani drew close to the position of Sunni scholars, and like other Salafi scholars he keenly pursued the eradication of bidaʿ, “innovations”—that is to say, religious practices having no basis in the Prophet's sunna.Footnote ²³

Al-Shawkani's anonymous questioner presents an inquiry several pages in length, providing a circumstantial description of the mawlid ceremony. The question is a rhetorically skillful statement of juristic opinion, polemicizing against the mawlid as an innovation. The questioner manages to incorporate into his opening sentences no fewer than six derivatives of the root ḥ-d-th (“to be new”) and two usages of the word bidʿa. (Although the celebration of mawlids may indeed have spread more slowly to the Zaydi heartland than to the Shafiʿi areas of southern Yemen, it should be remembered that “innovation” is a normative concept designating deviation from the Prophet's sunna and not from established social practice; it may or may not have been genuinely novel in Sanaa.)

The questioner begins by describing the practice at issue. He states that the celebration of the mawlid has been introduced by “the foolish and the common people” (al-sufahāʾ wa-l-sūqa), including the associates of one specific nashshād. The celebration attracts a diverse crowd; young and old, men and women—all participate in the gathering. Voices are lifted in invocation and melody; women's voices join in the chorus. At the beginning of the ceremony, the participants come out of the house with lighted candles and perform a zifāf (a term widely used for wedding processions); onlookers converge from every side. The procession returns to the house where the gathering is taking place, and participants stand as if in expectation of the arrival of the Prophet Muhammad, singing, “Welcome, O light of my eyes!” (marḥabā ya nūr ʿaynī). The atmosphere is one of serenity and reverence. The ordinary people, the inquirer notes with disgust, are really on the lookout to catch a glimpse of the Prophet.Footnote ²⁴

Within the highly self-conscious rhetoric of the question, the social and professional status of participants in the mawlid is pervasively emphasized. The social milieu of the celebration is identified three times as that of commoners (sūqa); although this term actually refers to subjects rather than to market folk (properly sūqiyyūn),Footnote ²⁵ the questioner seems to conflate the two either as a linguistic solecism or as a conscious play on words.Footnote ²⁶ He also identifies the hosts of two mawlids as belonging to specific markets. In his response, al-Shawkani similarly identifies a mawlid reciter as having been a man of the market (sūqī).Footnote ²⁷ In both the question and answer, a value judgment (“common,” “plebeian,” “vulgar”) seems to be conflated with a substantive socioeconomic identity (associated with the market). In describing the mawlid participants, the questioner uses several other characterizations that combine moral and religious censure with implications of low social or educational status: “the foolish” (al-sufahāʾ), “the common people” (al-ʿawāmm), “the simple” (al-aghmār), “the rabble” (al-awghād), and “the riffraff” (al-raʿāʿ).Footnote ²⁸ In addition, he mentions the participation of women twice.Footnote ²⁹ (As Brinkley Messick has observed, “the association of knowledge and Islam. . .contributed to defining the secondary status of all women,” who as a category have been characterized in Yemen as juhhāl, “ignorant.”Footnote ³⁰)

In his response, al-Shawkani uses a narrower and more consistent terminology. He refers four different times to the “common people” (al-ʿāmma), a category he contrasts with the “notables” (aʿyān, occurring four times).Footnote ³¹

The terminology used by al-Shawkani and his anonymous questioner suggests that they both sought to establish a connection between the celebration of the mawlid and a specific, if broad, social milieu (the commercial classes, the populace, or more generally the unlearned). In some sense, each of them is constructing a concept analogous to that of “popular Islam,” that is, a set of practices distinctively associated with those outside the learned cadre of the ʿulamaʾ. For both writers, this linkage contributes to undermining the legitimacy of the practice. To a certain extent, of course, al-Shawkani and his questioner are probably communicating factual data; there is no reason to doubt that market folk, women, or nonscholars enthusiastically celebrated the Prophet's birthday. Nevertheless, the two men simultaneously reveal that these correlations among socioeconomic milieu, learned stature, and participation in the mawlid are more an ideal construct than a simple matter of fact. The questioner laments the attendance of notables (aʿyān) of the political and religious establishments at a mawlid Footnote ³² while al-Shawkani notes the participation of “those who are famed for knowledge, nobility, and leadership,” “some of the elite who have achieved distinction in seeking knowledge,” and the “notables.”Footnote ³³

Al-Shawkani and his questioner deplore the fact that social, political, and scholarly elites participate in the celebration of the mawlid, and clever rhetorical framing allows them to suggest that this is an anomaly. Nevertheless, their own testimony refutes the idea that mawlid celebrations were distinctively the practice of the vulgar or the unlearned. Al-Shawkani and his questioner are thus not merely observing de facto correlations between social rank and religious participation, but they are also actively constructing an identification of the mawlid and “popular Islam” that serves to marginalize it. In part, their enterprise is conditioned by their Yemeni cultural milieu. Yemeni society was distinctively stratified, and al-Shawkani himself is known for his insistence on a vital linkage between social status and learned accomplishment. Al-Shawkani insists that sayyids (descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, the highest social stratum in Yemen) should not enter the markets because their dignity and even their legal probity (ʿadāla) might thereby be impaired.Footnote ³⁴ Conversely, he argues that members of lowly occupational groups have ignoble moral qualities that render them inherently unfit for entry into the scholarly class.Footnote ³⁵ Al-Shawkani classifies the urban populace as an intermediate category between the Islamically educated elite and the ignorant rural people who live in a state of de facto paganism (jāhiliyya).Footnote ³⁶

Thus, the idea that the mawlid is a manifestation of popular religiosity forms part of the rhetoric of orthodoxy wielded by al-Shawkani and his questioner. Although we lack direct testimony from the opposing party, an incident recounted in al-Shawkani's fatwa suggests that mawlid participants wielded a model of orthodoxy as well. As the whole company stands in welcome of the Prophet, a man becomes tired and sits down, whereupon one of the distinguished guests admonishes him angrily, crying, “Stand; it isn't a game!”Footnote ³⁷

CONTEMPORARY WOMEN CHANTERS OF THE MAWLID

In Sanaa, a women's mawlid is usually held in the large sitting room of a family home.Footnote ³⁸ Women sit in an open square, on cushions bordering the room. The chanter sits at the head, provided with an incense burner and at least one container of rosewater. The chanter (who may have an assistant who “answers” her chant by performing alternate phrases of the text) recites selections from the Qurʾan, most prominently featuring Chapter 36 (Yasin), and then recites the story of the Prophet's birth. The women listen (and sometimes chat among themselves). The performance is periodically punctuated by invocations of blessings upon the Prophet (performed enthusiastically by the whole group) and by selections of devotional poetry presented in a melodic style. The intensity of the ceremony peaks as the narrative reaches the point of the Prophet's birth, when the entire company rises to its feet and sings a song welcoming the Prophet amidst clouds of incense. One or more women circulate around the room, sprinkling everyone with rosewater.

According to informants, Sanʿani women's mawlids are performed primarily to observe life-cycle events, including marriage, childbirth, and death; to celebrate auspicious events such as returning from the hajj or occupying a new home; or to fulfill a vow (nadhr). Despite the range of life events that might offer occasions for mawlid ceremonies, I rarely encountered women's ceremonies held for any purpose but to celebrate a recent birth. Thus, in today's Sanaa, women's mawlids are de facto overwhelmingly associated with childbirth.

As a women's life-cycle celebration, the mawlid forms part of a larger complex that involves other life events and other elements of the chanter's repertoire. Professional chanters also perform zaffas, ceremonial processions during which the chanter leads the guests in laudatory songs in honor of a bride or a new mother. In the case of women's zaffas, the short procession occurs within the house and proceeds, often up the steep steps of the Sanʿani tower house, to the sitting room, where the woman reclines in state. The spatial movement reflects the woman's change in status (although the ascent may largely be a function of local architecture). Most mawlids performed at life-cycle celebrations involve zaffas, although many zaffas are performed without mawlids.

Zaffas and mawlids are linked not only by the associated occasions on which they are performed, but also by a shared repertoire of central chants. Insofar as my informants were able to clarify the question, it seemed that the zaffa chants were borrowed from the mawlid rather than vice versa. Most significantly, the culminating chants in both cases are versions of the same songs: “Marḥaba ya Nur ʿAyni” (Welcome, O Light of My Eyes, the song mentioned by both Shawkani and his anonymous questionerFootnote ³⁹) and “Talaʿ al-Badr ʿalayna” (The Full Moon Has Arisen Upon Us). Both of the latter songs are performed on the occasion of the qiyām, the most reverent and participatory point in the mawlid ceremony, when the whole group stands in honor of the Prophet's birth. “Talaʿ al-Badr ʿalayna” is, according some sources from the classical textual tradition, the song with which the women of Medina greeted the Prophet on the occasion of his hijra.Footnote ⁴⁰ It has an obvious relevance to the context of the qiyām, which is widely understood as the moment of the Prophet's literal (i.e., spiritual) or figurative arrival at the mawlid ceremony. It is interesting that in the classical legal tradition it also represents a locus classicus for the legitimacy of song (and drumming) in conjunction with joyous occasions, such as the wedding zaffa (singing otherwise being religiously suspect).Footnote ⁴¹ The use of these verses in the context of the qiyām thus represents an implicit argument for the normative legitimacy of the qiyām (always the element of the mawlid most vulnerable to charges of bidʿa). Sometimes this argument is made explicit: “Iman,” a chanter of Hadrami origin who lives and performs in Sanaa, invoked the example of the women of Medina to assure me of the religious permissibility of the qiyām.Footnote ⁴²

The mawlid text most widely performed by Sanʿani women is an anonymous work entitled Sharaf al-Anam, which is commercially available in the form of an inexpensive pamphlet. The work's currency is not limited to Yemen, but its popularity in Yemen is deeply rooted.Footnote ⁴³ A report transmitted from Ibn al-Daybaʿ suggests that the work enjoyed wide circulation in his time and that its authorship had already been forgotten.Footnote ⁴⁴

Sharaf al-Anam recounts the story of the Prophet Muhammad's creation as a primordial light that is placed within the loins of Adam and passed to his descendants. The light of Muhammad beams from the brow of the Prophet's father, ʿAbd Allah, and is transferred to his wife Amina upon the conception of the Prophet. In each month of her pregnancy, a past prophet appears to hail the birth of the new messenger. When Amina goes into labor, alone in her house, she is aided by women of the sacred past: Asiya, the wife of Pharaoh (a heroic believer in the Qurʾanic account; see 66:11), and Maryam, the mother of Jesus, accompanied by radiant houris. After the birth of the Prophet, the narrative continues with the story of his wet nurse, Halima, a tribal woman seeking a nursling in Mecca in a year of drought and famine. Her donkey is emaciated, and her own infant wails with hunger. When she nurses the infant Prophet, her breasts overflow, her mount revives, and her livestock yield copious milk. As long as the holy child dwells with them, her family is blessed with fertility and plenty.Footnote ⁴⁵

Sharaf al-Anam, like other classic texts of the mawlid genre, displays a very distinctive approach to the life story of the Prophet Muhammad. It is a version in which lactation thematically eclipses revelation; the events of Muhammad's adult career as the Messenger of God are outside of its focus of attention. Much of it is recounted in the voices of Amina and Halima, both of whom enjoy a relationship of nurture with the infant Prophet even though neither is known by the classical scholarly tradition to have been Muslim in the historical sense (Amina died during Muhammad's childhood, and it was debated whether Halima lived to convert). Such narratives reflect a distinctive attitude in which loving devotion to the person of the Prophet (rather than obedience to the law he transmits) functions as the main form of access to his salvific power, and growth, fertility, and nurture are the central manifestations of the sacred.

It is tempting and (at least provisionally) plausible to interpret these emphases in terms of a distinctive “women's Islam,” an approach that has been explored in more than one anthropological study of the mawlid. Analyzing mevlud performances among the women of the market town of Egirdir, Turkey, Nancy and Richard Tapper emphasize the celebration's focus on “exalting childbirth” and the “ideal of motherhood.”Footnote ⁴⁶ As has been exhaustively discussed by Nadia Abu-Zahra, the Tappers' analysis is both factually and interpretively flawedFootnote ⁴⁷; nevertheless, they point to significant gendered themes in the mawlid. In a somewhat similar vein, Julie Marcus argues that women's mawlids in Izmir are “distinctively. . .female” because they are egalitarian, open, and inclusive. Furthermore, the thematic and visual imagery of whiteness and fluidity represents, for Marcus, “life-flow concepts” that contrast starkly with the (male) purity strictures of the mosque, in which boundary transgressions are defined as polluting. Thus, in the symbolism of the mawlid, birth is associated with whiteness and purity rather than with pollution and ritual proscription.Footnote ⁴⁸

That the overwhelming majority of Sanʿani women's mawlids are held in celebration of childbirth creates a strong connection between the content of the ceremony and the occasion of its celebration. Although I suggested this parallel to mawlid attendees several times, they briskly dismissed the idea that mawlids were in any sense a reflection of women's Islam or a celebration of motherhood. It is true that the devotional themes associated with the Prophet's birth have historically had a wide appeal to men as well as women. Although it is tempting to hypothesize that the wide dissemination of such narratives may be grounded partially in their congeniality to women's concerns, such texts have often been produced and disseminated by identifiable men.

Nevertheless, there are grounds for belief that certain aspects of mawlid piety do respond to the values or perceptions of women. The zaffa that precedes a mawlid celebrating a birth involves a lengthy laudatory song in celebration of the nōfas (new mother), a word clearly deriving from the period of ritual impurity (nifās) following childbirth. Among other things, the song proudly enumerates the various luxuries and services to which the new mother is entitled. Having earlier studied Islamic legal discourses on ritual purity, I found this a striking appropriation of a term more commonly associated with ritual proscription. This example might be taken as support for Marcus's contention that the association of childbirth with (arguable) symbols of purity represents a female counterdiscourse to the (implicitly male) normative discourse of ritual purity. The exaltation of the nōfas contrasts with the comments of one male chanter, whose revised and modernized mawlid passed over the Prophet Muhammad's physical birth to emphasize his prophetic mission. He deprecated the content of the traditional mawlid, noting that labor and childbirth are not proper subjects of religious contemplation. The content of Sharaf al-Anam and other mawlid texts in circulation among Yemeni women, which mention all manner of bodily functions (from the cessation of Amina's menstruation to the pangs of her labor and the copious flowing of Halima's breasts), suggests a contrasting religious sensibility in which images of bodily fertility and abundance indicate the profusion of divine blessing (baraka) emanating from the person of the Prophet.

However, I found no evidence that mawlid practice reflected female alienation or dissent from normative concepts of ṭahāra (ritual purity). It is true that mawlids circumvent the purity restrictions applying to most normative religious activities; a menstruating woman cannot perform salat, but she may attend a mawlid. However, in the exceptional case when the issue of purity explicitly arose, participant women dealt with it in terms of normative Islam. I witnessed one spirited exchange between a mawlid chanter, who declined to recite from the Qurʾan in the context of the mawlid while she was menstruating, and an attendee who insisted that such abstention was unnecessary. The chanter resolved the matter (at least to her own satisfaction) by citing a hadith of the Prophet prohibiting recitation during menstruation. Rather than any dichotomy between a purported male predilection for boundaries and control and a female affinity for openness and “life flow,” mawlid practice reflects one of a repertory of models of pious action that have coexisted for centuries, among men as well as women.Footnote ⁴⁹

The religious status and authority of mawlid ceremonies is also related to the role of the women who perform them. Most women's mawlids are led by a professional chanter (munshida or nashshāda). Although their status may be waning under the influence of newer religious trends and the availability of other educational and professional opportunities for women, chanters still receive a degree of respect. They are identified by the title sayyidatunā (literally, “our lady”); in the homes where they perform mawlids, zaffas, and mourning sessions they are received with some deference. In the past, the role seems to have involved more distinctive and dignified professional dress. These days, self-presentation and demeanor vary widely. Whereas some chanters understand and present themselves as modestly authoritative religious functionaries, others play the role of religiously and socially respectable entertainers. Although chanters of the former group intersperse their performances with didactic comments and religious exhortations, those of the latter group place greater emphasis on vocal beauty and supplement their performances with witty repartee. This variation reflects the multiple motives that may lead a woman to become a chanter, which include vocal talent, religious commitment, and economic need. Although each individual woman generally combines all of these elements to some degree, different components predominate.

In some cases, for a woman with unusual vocal talents, religious chanting is a reputable alternative to a career as a singer. As one chanter explained, no young woman who came from a good family (bayt nās) or had a respectable social origin (aṣl) would become a singer. Rather, singing (ghināʾ) is associated with the low stratum of Yemeni society traditionally identified with butchers and barbers. For some women, chanting recommends itself largely as a means of livelihood in a situation in which few other career options are available to women. Chanting requires limited education and training, and the necessary instruction is available to many girls through the network of older women. A middle-aged woman recounted to me that, encouraged by friends who admired her voice in neighborhood religious gatherings (majālis), she began to chant professionally after her husband had been disabled by illness. A more prominent young chanter was sent for training after the death of her father and resumed it after the failure of an early marriage. Her ability to support herself and her family relieves her of any pressure to remarry. In another case, contributing to the family income through chanting seemed to be a deliberate strategy to avoid remarriage.Footnote ⁵⁰

Learning and performing mawlids involves a combination of oral and literary transmission. Some chanters perform from printed pamphlets; the texts of the most popular mawlids are widely and cheaply available. Chanters with more formal training in mawlid performance typically have their own handwritten booklets. Despite a generally low level of formal education, all of the women chanters I met had at least elementary literacy. (I met only one young chanter who was a university student; she conceded that people found the combination incongruous.) Chanters generally do not compose their material, which is largely identical to the contents of the printed booklets (or, in the case of more recent “reformed” mawlids, with texts from classical historical sources). However, they do exercise the power of selection and abbreviation, and the resulting performances are by no means identical. By selecting and shaping the material they perform, mawlid chanters function as “culture brokers” between the elite male scholars who usually author the texts and the women who consume them.Footnote ⁵¹

Although all of the chanters I interviewed or whose performances I attended pursued a “correct model” of the mawlid ceremony, the components of this model vary significantly. Following are sketches of the understandings and ideals of three munshidāt who exemplify the most widespread trends in Sanʿani mawlid chanting.

THE TRADITIONAL CHANTER

“Habiba” (pseudonym) is an older chanter with adult children. She learned to chant, she said, from “old women”; she has trained her two daughters as well as the wives of her two sons. Habiba and her daughter enthusiastically agreed when I ventured that the main point of the mawlid might be “expressing love for the Prophet.” When I asked if the Prophet was present at the qiyām, Habiba said, “Yes! When you are very involved in the mawlid you feel as if he is right there, and your skin prickles” (taqshaʿrirru). I asked where the Prophet was and whether he was aware of people greeting him in the mawlid. They confidently affirmed that he was aware (although they were not specific about his location). Several people present then added that the angels report to the Prophet that “So and so, the son of so and so, is greeting you,” and that the greetings are always multiplied by ten (ten for one, a thousand for a hundred, etc.). Habiba and her daughter especially stressed the importance of love for the Prophet, expressed in events like the mawlid, to ensure his intercession on Judgment Day. When a sinning Muslim's acts are weighed in the balance and his sins outweigh his good deeds, the angels will take him to Hell. The Prophet, however, will command that the prayers the Muslim has invoked upon him be added to the balance of good deeds. Then the good will outweigh the bad.

Habiba and her daughter stressed the cosmic status of the Prophet above all. They described how on Judgment Day sinners will approach each prophet in turn in hopes of intercession. Each of them, however, will be occupied with a sin of his own: Adam ate from the forbidden tree, Abraham lied, and so forth. Only Muhammad will be without sin and capable of intercession.

SAMIRA

“Samira” is a divorcée in her late twenties; she has several children and lives with her widowed mother and her adult siblings. Her younger sister accompanies her in performing mawlids and zaffas. She is a young woman of sparkling intelligence and sharp wit, and her personality as well as her vocal talent have attracted a wide clientele. She has a fairly basic and perfunctory interpretation of the importance of the mawlid; it is traditional, and it wards off the evil eye (ḥasad, or envy) on occasions of good fortune. For instance, she explained the shadhāb—a distinctive kind of greenery that adorns the area where a new mother reclines—in terms of a new mother's vulnerability to ḥasad in the period of nifās, the forty days of impurity after childbirth. When I asked why shadhāb offered such protection, she and her sister were initially nonplussed; finally, she said that it was a plant that sprouted from the ground where Abraham had been thrown into the furnace and the fire had grown cold for him (see Qurʾan 21:69).

Asked about the objective of performing the mawlid, Samira remarked that “it is an old Yemeni custom” (huwa min ʿādāt wa-taqālīd al-Yaman zamān). According to Samira, the mawlid used to be a matter of religious conviction (ʿaqīda); these days, however, it is merely a social custom (ʿāda ijtimāʿiyya). People are obliged to have a mawlid if there is a birth in the family; otherwise, people will say that they cannot afford it. Symptomatic of this shift, she said, is the decline in devotional vows (nudhūr); making vows is something that people used to do back when they really believed in mawlids. Samira also emphasized the religious value of invoking blessings upon the Prophet; she cited a hadith stating that a gathering in which blessings are invoked on the Prophet will be surrounded by angels and mentioned in heaven. During mawlid ceremonies, she often exhorts women (particularly those who are diverting themselves with gossip) by citing the Prophet's statement that “the stingy one (al-bakhīl) is he who hears me mentioned and does not invoke blessings upon me.”

With respect to the content of the mawlid, Samira is more interested in the demands of her audience (who prefer a familiar mawlid) than in any particular religious agenda in her selection of texts. However, the content of her mawlid has evolved with the changing religious sensibility of her times. Her elderly mother once told me a story about the creation of the primordial Pen and Tablet; the Pen was commanded by God to write the name of Muhammad, for whose sake everything, including the Pen and Tablet, had been created. Samira yelled from the inner courtyard, “That's a fable [khurāfa]! I don't present it in the mawlid because it's a fable!” Her mother nevertheless insisted, “Fable or not, it's nice!” The passage in question proved to be a familiar text from the medieval mawlid tradition; its disappearance from Samira's performance reflected the changing religious understandings of the women in her social environment.

Samira has a keen and self-conscious appreciation of Yemeni culture that is perhaps unusual for someone of her modest educational level and limited exposure to non-Yemenis. She regards her own activities as aspects of a national heritage (turāth) that is worthy of appreciation and preservation. One example of her distinctive attitude was reflected in her own form of sijāf, the special decorations surrounding the place of honor where a new mother reclines in state. When Samira's sister-in-law gave birth, Samira's sijāf included not only the customary religious items (including copies of the Qurʾan encased in brocade bags and wooden prayer beads), but also samples of Yemeni basketry and traditional woodwork as well as her brother's Kalashnikov rifle. In her hands the sijāf had become a self-conscious expression of Yemeni heritage and identity. She similarly regards the mawlid as a manifestation of Yemeni culture; she is very aware of the Association of [male] Chanters (Jamʿiyyat al-Munshidin) and has toyed with the idea of founding a similar association for female chanters. When asked about the objectives of such an organization, she said that it would be to preserve (tathbīt) authentic Sanʿani chant. Fashions change so fast, she said, that she is chanting different things than she did five years ago.

KARIMA

“Karima,” a young and childless divorcée, comes from a well-to-do family with a history of chanting. She began chanting with her ex-husband's sisters in order to help with the household finances. She was not particularly interested in the content or historical accuracy of the mawlid texts she performed; she simply wished to earn money to help her then husband.

By the time I met her, in 2000, Karima had a personal interest in the Prophet Muhammad's biography (al-sīra). Although she has only an elementary school education, her family background offers her access to historical sources and hadith compilations. She now performs her own revised version of the mawlid text. Her attitude toward the mawlid narrative is historicist and reflects more recent ideas of science and rationality. She is generally skeptical about many of the more vivid miracles cherished in the devotional tradition. For instance, it claims that Halima's camel greeted the infant Muhammad (“But it didn't!”) and that the Black Stone came out to salute him (“But it didn't!”). How could these things be true, she asked, when one can't rationally accept them?

Karima's personal devotion to the Prophet is strong and intimate. While we were reviewing the words of a song about the Prophet's death, she was moved almost to tears. She says that when she thinks about the Prophet, speaks to him intimately (nājāʾ), and expresses her love (taghazzala), she sometimes weeps: “It's as if there were no one but me and the Prophet.” Karima's version of the mawlid distinctively ends with a song about the Prophet's death, an original touch that adds religious depth and emotional poignancy to the performance.

Karima is very aware of opposition to the mawlid. She said that there are women who go to mawlid sessions to denounce the practice and preach to the women about “true” Islam. (This is not a phenomenon that I personally observed, and it probably loomed larger as an ideological challenge than as a practical problem at mawlid ceremonies.) She said that they are able to browbeat the mawlid chanters because most of the latter have very little formal education. As for herself, she said that despite her own lack of extensive religious instruction she is well enough informed to defend herself.

She told of one such woman she allowed to speak at one of her mawlid sessions out of respect for her advanced age. Naturally, the woman said that the mawlid was a bidʿa (Karima retorted that of course it is a bidʿa, but it is a good bidʿa. She gave a list of things, from pens to cars, that are beneficial innovations). Karima said that she did not respond until the woman began to attack the recitation of the Qurʾan that accompanies the mawlid. The woman denounced the practice of reciting the fātiḥa for the soul (ilā rūḥ) of the deceased and of the Prophet Muhammad, the other prophets, Fatima, and the imams, and denied that such recitations could “reach” the deceased. Karima's response was to cite the sunna of the Prophet (who reportedly requested prayers for his own father). Finally, Karima cursed the elderly woman's deceased father. When she reacted with fury, Karima retorted, “Oh, so you think my curses can reach your dead father, but the fātiḥa can't?!” It was not a surprise that Karima says that she has a reputation among the women who intrude to preach against the mawlid.

As a chanter, Karima is committed to disseminating what she considers a more enlightened and correct form of religious knowledge and practice to her audience. Not only does she use a revised form of the mawlid text based on authoritative early sources, but she is also eager to engage participants who are intrigued by the unfamiliar aspects of her performance. At one mawlid I attended, she explained to a guest how she had revised the mawlid to eliminate fictitious exaggerations and things that had never happened. (The guest immediately chimed in, “Yes! They even say that the Prophet split the moon in two!”—an idea that she clearly found completely implausible, although it is widely accepted by classical Islamic scholars.)

These three chanters' understanding of the function and significance of the mawlid ceremony clearly reflects normative ideas about the “correct model” of pious action, although the precise nature of this model varies. Although Habiba expressed no awareness or concern regarding current disputes about the legitimacy of the mawlid ceremony, her remarks (and those of her friends) reflect a model of pious action that is deeply rooted in the classical textual tradition, one in which the generation of merit through pious utterances is more important than the communication of factual information about the Prophet's life.Footnote ⁵² She cites hadith to emphasize the importance of the prayers upon the Prophet that represent the primary religious participation of mawlid attendees, and the texts she cites are similar to those adduced by premodern scholarly supporters of the mawlid. For instance, the report that an angel relays the prayers to the Prophet and that they are returned tenfold is cited by al-Sakhawi.Footnote ⁵³ Al-Sakhawi also knows more than one report affirming that on Judgment Day, if a believer's sins outweigh his good deeds, Muhammad will tip the scales by casting his prayers upon the Prophet onto the positive side of the balance.Footnote ⁵⁴ The chanters' use of Qurʾanic recitation (in this case, implicitly) also reflects a widespread model, one deeply rooted in the scholarly tradition and that attaches special religious merit to the recitation of specific passages. Almost without exception, the Qurʾanic passages chanted at the beginning of a mawlid (which are not included in the printed-booklet text) are ones to which special merits or virtues are attributed in hadith texts circulated by premodern scholars.

The emphasis on pious recitation is not, however, the only “correct model” promoted by the chanters. For Karima, attention has shifted from a performative to an informative understanding of the function and significance of the mawlid; her primary concern is to educate her listeners about the Prophet and stimulate reflection about his life and moral example. This new emphasis reflects a tradition of modernist mawlid composition going back to the early 20th century.Footnote ⁵⁵ Samira's understanding of the mawlid as a component of a newly valorized Yemeni heritage represents a third “correct model,” one that emphasizes cultural preservation and authenticity as criteria of the good mawlid performance. (Nevertheless, as we have seen, she embraces changes in the text of the mawlid that reflect newer understandings of religious orthodoxy and textual accuracy.)

In terms of the content of their performances, these women are grounded in a rigorous fidelity to premodern texts that they treat as authoritative. Even when the material was learned in apprenticeship with older chanters, it corresponds closely to the established textual models; there is no extemporaneous storytelling, and the texts draw on a stable repertoire of narrative and devotional selections, with only minor variations in wording.

It is interesting that the only mawlid text I encountered that seemed to draw on a living tradition of storytelling was one in circulation among male chanters.Footnote ⁵⁶ The freedom of the narrative is particularly striking in the long passage recounting the experiences of the Prophet's wet nurse, Halima. In one dramatic exchange, Amina demands that Halima nurse the infant Prophet in her presence. Halima is thrown into confusion, for her breasts have been dry for three years; she has been feeding her own children camel and sheep milk. However, when she puts the child to her breast, it flows with milk. Although this narrative conforms to the overall outline familiar from sources stretching back to Ibn Ishaq (d. 767), it reflects a freedom of narration that yields details and dialogue not found in premodern texts. A male chanter explained in response to an inquiry about the origins of this rendition that it was well known among “the chanters of Sanaa”; unlike the female chanters I interviewed, he regarded established practice within the profession as sufficient grounds for the story's acceptance. It is perhaps ironic that the greater “normativity” of the women's mawlid narratives (i.e., their firm adherence to premodern textual models) may be rooted in a lesser confidence in their own professional authority.