Mawlid
birthday of Muhammad
Mawlid (Arabic: مولد) is an annual festival commemorating the birthday of the Islamic prophet Muhammad on the date of 12 Rabi I, the third month of the Islamic calendar.
The Muslim general Gökböri, a deputy of Saladin (r. 1174–1193), is believed to have been the first to publicly celebrate Mawlid, which he did in an impressive ceremony at the Prophet's Mosque in Medina. The Ottomans under Sultan Murad III (r. 1574–1595) declared it an official holiday.
Celebrants hold mahfils on Mawlid in which religious poetry is recited in praise of Muhammad accompanied by a feast. Other customs affiliated with Mawlid are supererogatory fasting, prayer and dhikr.
Mawlid observance is a recognized national holiday in most Muslim-majority countries of the world. It is generally approved by the Hanafi, Maliki and Shafi'i schools of Sunni Islam, as well as by Shia Muslims. However, Salafism and Wahhabism regard celebration of the Mawlid a reprehensible bid'a (innovation) and prohibit its observance. Deobandi jurists take an intermediate position, viewing the matter as an issue of Ikhtilaf (scholarly disagreement).
Etymology
The term Mawlid is derived from the Arabic root word walad, meaning "to give birth" or "descendant".
The public source identifies “Mawlid” as birthday of Muhammad. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Mawlid, birthday and Muhammad.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q193027. The Library of Congress control number is sh85082344. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1174, 1193, 1574 and 1595.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mawlid” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.