mawlid-Texts from the 13th to the 18th Century: Prophetic Piety as Ritual Performance?

• Applicant: Dr. Ines Weinrich
• Subject Area: Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies
• Term: from 2017 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 389265477

Prosimetric narratives centring on the birth of the prophet Muhammad (mawlid) emerge from the late 12th century onwards. In the following centuries, almost all renowned scholars write mawlid-texts. Hitherto research has only studied some of the older texts with regard to content motifs and narrative strands. The proposed project will analyse mawlid-texts not only with regard to content but as literary texts and will for the first time include the poetry which accounts a large part of many texts. It thoroughly examines seven selected texts whose wide circulation and usage is well documented. It focuses on the question of how content and form provide insight into the respective functions of the texts. Special interest will be paid to the identification of rhetoric devices which point to an artistic vocal rendition of these texts.The project captures mawlid-texts in three dimensions whose eminence may alter from text to text: as a literary genre, as a means of religious education, and as a script of ritual performance. It shall analyse mawlid as a prosimetric literary genre at the interstices of oral and written tradition, exploring questions of genre and authorship, analysing the rhetorical devices, and placing it within the literary production and its emerging new aesthetics in general and within the praise poetry for the prophet in particular. It shall analyse mawlid as a means of religious education, identifying thematic features and the respective images of the prophet. Finally, the analysis of mawlid as a script of ritual performance will focus on the performative elements that are inscribed into the text and enable the participation of the audience, like prayers, corresponding bodily movements, or poetic structures. The evaluation of text-immanent characteristics will be supplemented by the combination of several source types: Arabic historiography, Arabic and European travelogues, and Islamic juridical literature on ritual practice and recitation techniques. This will be complemented by observations and audio material of contemporary performance practices of praise poems for the prophet, mawlid, and prayers stemming from a fieldwork of the applicant in Syria and Lebanon 2008-2013.mawlid-texts interact with other literary texts and the emerging new aesthetics in the Mamluk period on the one hand and with new emerging practices of piety on the other hand. The project thus seeks to be a contribution to historical religious practice and to the literary history of the 13th to 18th century. However, the study will not be on historical practice and its texts alone. Rather, it deals with religious practice still valid for lived Islam today. This practice, however, finds itself currently on the defensive, facing the pressure of self-titled spokespersons of a so-called correct Islam.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants