The Birth Of The Prophet Muhammad(saws):Devotional Piety in Sunni Islam by Marion Holmes Katz

The Birth Of The Prophet Muhammad(saws): Devotional Piety In Sunni Islam (culture And Civilization In The Middle East) by Marion Holmes Katz,Ph.D. 1997, University of Chicago,Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies
Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies,50 Washington Square South,New York, NY 10012
In the medieval period, the birth of the Prophet Muhammad (the mawlid) was celebrated in popular narratives and ceremonies that expressed the religious agendas and aspirations of ordinary Muslims, including women.
This book examines the Mawlid from its origins to the present day and provides a new insight into how an aspect of everyday Islamic piety has been transformed by modernity. The book gives a window into the religious lives of medieval Muslim women, rather than focusing on the limitations that were placed on them and shows how medieval popular Islam was coherent and meaningful, not just a set of deviations from scholarly norms.
Concise in both historical and textual analysis, this book is an important contribution to our understanding of contemporary Muslim devotional practices and will be of great interest to postgraduate students and researchers of Islam, religious studies and medieval studies.

Editorial Reviews
Muslim World Book Review:
Wadham College, Oxford, Ahmed Weir
The Birth of The Prophet Muhammad: Devotional Piety in Sunni Islam. By Marion Holmes Katz. ISBN: 9780415771276.
In this work on devotional Sunni piety, Marion Jolmes Katz immerses herself, as a participant and observer, into the world of the mawlid, displaying an empathetic understanding of how the mawlid can touch the believers heart. It is a work of historical theology tracing the mawlid from its birth at some point in the eleventh century to its dead-hearted critics of the twentieth century.] [ Within her chapters on the historical development of the mawlid, Katz devotes considerable energy to the discussion of qiyam, or standing. In this she uncovers some gems. She traces the first recorded instance of standing to the Egyptian scholar Taj al-Din al-Subki. This happened in the Umayyad Mosque, Damascus in the fourteenth century during a public recitation of Al-Sarsaris ode, Writing in gold is but little for the praise of Mustafa.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments

Introduction

The emergence of mawlid narratives

An archaeology of mawlid narratives 6

Formal mawlid texts 50

Conclusion 61

Gifts and reciprocity in the celebration of the mawlid 63

Mawlid banquets 67

Pious utterances and the generation of merit 75

The exchange of merit and the economy of salvation 87

Conclusion 96

Emotion, law, and the celebration of the mawlid

Joy 104

Love 117

The salvific value of personal relationships 125

Standing as an expression of emotion 128

Conclusion 139

Time and merit in the celebration of the mawlid

The night of the mawlid and laylat al-qadr 146

Special times and their uses 147

Homogeneous and non-homogeneous time 153

Conclusion 164

Mawlids under attack

Wahhabi opposition 170

Modernist critiques 174

New rationales for the celebration of the mawlid 182

The marginalization of the mawlid in the late-twentiethcentury 184

The eclipse of the devotionalist model 188

Conclusion 206

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