Genres of the Self

When I posit that Mappila devotional genres such as the mawlud and the mala are generative—not merely expressive/symbolic—of ethical selfhood among Mappilas who inhabit the devotional performative world of these genres, I enfold, as well as uphold, a set of assumptions about literary genre, performance/embodiment and self-fashioning, not least of ethical consequence. These throw into question the dominant interpretive grid of what I have termed “literarisation” above which has so far informed Mappila literary studies (and of which I provide an example below). I view text or genre as practice rather than as idea and consequently I seek to understand text/genre taking on board its formative relation to context.Footnote ⁴ This notion helps me to conceptualise text or genre not as merely expressive of a pre-existing surround or locus, but as equally constitutive of contexts and cultural formations.

The terms “self-fashioning” and “ethical formation” that stand out in my analysis are evidently inspired by the highly influential work of Michel Foucault on power/knowledge, subjectivity and technologies of the self, and ethics. After Foucault, we no longer apprehend power as a merely repressive and restrictive external force but as an enabling, internal relationship—that is, power as potentiality, the capacity to enact something in relation to other persons, things, institutions, and so on.Footnote ⁵ As Colin Gordon rightly notes, crucial to Foucault's analytics of power are his two ideas of the “productivity of power” and the “constitution of subjectivity through power relations” where power relations involve not just repression and limitation but also “the intention to teach, to mold conduct, to instill forms of self-awareness and identities”.Footnote ⁶

In his investigation into subject formation—the way a human being “turns him- or herself into a subject”Footnote ⁷ —Foucault draws our attention to what he calls “technologies of the self”:

In other words, these technologies are the intellectual and practical procedures, instruments and tools suggested or prescribed to human beings in order for them to mould and govern their ways of being human. As Paul Rabinow and Nikolas RoseFootnote ⁹ have pointed out, in Foucault's scheme of things “ethics” is understood in terms of the techniques, practices and procedures through which a subject works upon herself, thereby transforming herself into the willing subjects of a certain moral discourse. In fashioning her own self, the subject of Foucault's analysis is acting within a field of constraints, however—that is, he is not talking about a free, autonomous subject who crafts her/- self independently (of other persons, things, institutions, and so on). Instead, the subject for Foucault is constituted within the bounds of what he describes as “modes of subjectivation”—the ways in which the “individual establishes his relationship to the rule and recognises himself as obligated to put it into practice.”Footnote ¹⁰ In this view, human beings are enjoined or summoned to recognise their moral obligations through a system of order such as divine law or rational rule. Note that Foucault's idea of modes of subjectivation characteristic of ethical formation points up the relations of domination and structures of authority through which a subject transforms herself in order to realise a teleological model within a particular life world.Footnote ¹¹ As there are different modes of subjectivation, of establishing one's relations to oneself through obedience to a moral code, Foucault's analysis of ethical formation urges that we examine the specific morphology—the contours and character— of ethical practices in order to understand the kind of ethical subject fashioned through such practices. These practices are best understood as techniques or arts of existence that include embodied acts and ways of one's daily conduct in life. Significantly, the idea of techniques of the self emphasises the ethical work these techniques perform in creating subjectivity rather than the signification they carry for their practitioners.

Foucault's conception of ethical formation in turn takes its inspiration from a larger, much older tradition of ethics that we call Aristotelian. For Aristotle, moral virtues are acquired through habituation—“as a result of habit”.Footnote ¹² This involves a coordination of outward behaviours, including bodily acts, and inward dispositions through the repeated performance of acts that contain those specific virtues. Key to the conceptual architecture of Aristotelian moral thinking that has influenced both Christian and Islamic tradition is the notion of habitus—a concept first introduced into the social sciences by Marcel MaussFootnote ¹³ and popularised by Pierre Bourdieu.Footnote ¹⁴ Habitus is about ethical formation made possible by a certain pedagogical process through which a moral disposition is acquired. This process entails the acquisition of a virtue by a person through consistent physical exertion, assiduous practice, and discipline such that this virtue becomes permanently enmeshed and sedimented in the person's character. Drawing on Mauss's formulation of habitus in his essay “Body Techniques”, cultural anthropologist Talal Asad employs habitus to refer to the “predisposition of the body”, to its “traditional sensibilities”—to “that aspect of a tradition in which specific virtues are defined and an attempt is made to cultivate and enact them.”Footnote ¹⁵ One can see an echo of this principle in the fourteenth century Muslim thinker Ibn Khaldun's (d. 1406) notion of “malaka”. As Ibn Khaldun puts it, “A (malaka) is a firmly rooted quality acquired by doing a certain action and repeating it time after time, until the form of (that action) is firmly fixed. A (malaka) corresponds to the original (action after which it was formed).”Footnote ¹⁶ The notion of habitus, therefore, brings to relief the constitutive role of conscious, repeated performance of actions—virtuous or otherwise—in forging and augmenting subjectivities.Footnote ¹⁷

There is, of course, a fascinating body of contemporary scholarship that explores aspects of ethical self-formation enabled through embodied and ensouled practices, (where the material body forms the site of human action and experience, and the living human body becomes an integrated whole having “developable means” for accomplishing a range of human goalsFootnote ¹⁸ ), along lines of inquiry inspired and opened up by Aristotelian moral thought. Of this, I wish to single out the work of two socio-cultural anthropologists Saba MahmoodFootnote ¹⁹ and Charles HirschkindFootnote ²⁰ who have deepened and enriched our understanding of the constitutive relationship between bodily acts and ethical self-improvement central to contemporary forms of Muslim religiosity. In her ethnography of the elaborate program of self-cultivation practiced by the women's mosque movement in Egypt, Mahmood focuses on the bodily, technical capacities demanded by self-formation and on the particular conception of the body, personhood, and politics these capacities presuppose, engender, and construct. Likewise, Charles Hirschkind analyses at ethnographic length the practice of ethical cassette sermon listening among men associated with the Islamic Revival in contemporary Egypt as part of a practical tradition for the formation of a pious sensorium—a sensorium that has developed the somatic and affective potentialities that enable virtuous dispositions.

Both these ethnographies explore at length practices such as ritual prayer, veiling, and cassette sermon audition directed at the cultivation of Islamic conduct in which painful emotions—for instance, virtuous fear (taqwa)—are integral to the practice of ethical formation. Notably, as their ethnographic vignettes underscore, these emotions are regarded not as mere stimuli for action but formative of action itself. These emotions are also understood to be an indispensable means for the cultivation of virtues and pious dispositions required to become a devout Muslim. Moreover, in this economy of ethical-formation, ritual performance serves both as a means and as an end, and exteriority is considered to be as a means to interiority, in stark contrast to the modern, secular notion of the separation between public exteriority and private interiority.Footnote ²¹

I find the conceptual insights that Mahmood and Hirschkind provide into the constitutive relationship between (ritual) performance and self-cultivation particularly handy for examining the texture of ethical self-fashioning engendered by the performative dimensions of the literary culture of Mappila Muslims of Kerala—that is, for exploring the ways in which recitation of devotional performance genres such as the mawlud and the mala by Mappilas, as I argue in this essay, not only reflects but also forges the kinds of pious dispositions and virtuous affects required of the performers to become good Muslims. While I exploit their analytics to the full, my work also departs from theirs in certain respects which I want to briefly mention here. First, whereas both Mahmood and Hirschkind focus on the practices of cultivating Islamic conduct in which painful emotions such as fear and remorse are regarded as central to the practice of moral discrimination, it is love, joy, and reverence for the extolled such as the Prophet Muhammad and Sufi figures—pleasant emotions if you will—that are integral to the practice of ethical formation enabled by Mappila devotional narratives with which I am concerned in this essay. Note that my point is not that the endurance of pain is inconsequential in a programme of self-cultivation for Mappila Muslims. Instead, I simply want to say that it is explicitly the virtue of love and similar emotions that one feels and experiences for the objects of veneration in devotional narratives that are both expressed and enacted in pious recitative practices. What I take from Mahmood and Hirschkind is the insight permeating their work which, when translated into the context of my problematic, means that the practice of reciting devotional narratives by Mappilas does not issue from an always already love that exists in the reciters for the venerated figures of these narratives but it is also through such practice that virtuous love and similar emotions are created and bodied forth, as I shall explain shortly. Second, while both Mahmood and Hirschkind have analyzed aspects of the programme of ethical self-fashioning associated with the Islamic Revival which is largely dismissive of Sufi devotional practices such as the mawlud, in probing the morphology of Mappila self-fashioning in this essay I focus my attention on what I call the transformative practices made possible by overtly Sufi-inspired devotional narratives that live a controversial existence within the Islamic tradition.Footnote ²² Finally, (and this applies to Hirschkind), while acknowledging the development and formation of the virtues facilitated by sermon audition, Hirschkind, however, wants to theorise this practice at the level of the somatic more than the programmatic—that is, as he puts it, the practice of sermon audition enables “less honed dispositions. . .than the somatic and affective potentialities” that sustain such dispositions.Footnote ²³ In contrast, insomuch as I deal with the practice of reciting devotional narratives among Muslims of Malabar, I am mainly concerned with a disciplinary programme geared to the task of developing and forming virtues, as is the case with Quranic recitation, for example—although the mawlud and mala performance can also be, and indeed is, an avenue for the practice of ethical listening that is best explored in terms of its somatics rather than its programmatics, as Hirschkind has rightly argued. Even as my concerns in this essay diverge from those of Mahmood's and Hirschkind's at the level of thematics, the analytic labour of my study largely owes it to their illuminating work on questions of embodiment/ensoulment and ethical formation.

In what follows I analyze, through brief ethnographic portrayal, the ritual performance of devotional narratives by contemporary Mappila Muslims of Malabar and how this performance tradition maps onto a programme of self-cultivation that is central to the performers’ conception of being a pious Muslim. In so doing, I want to highlight the constitutive role of Mappila literary culture—devotional literary genres in particular—in the formation of an ethical selfhood among Mappilas. I also want to urge that the devotional performance narratives such as the ones I am presently concerned with should be apprehended and appreciated not through the lens of an abstract “literarisation” which reduces these narratives to mere cultural artifacts having no bearing upon one's daily conduct in life—a lens that also relegates these narratives to a putative realm of private, individual consumption. Instead—and here I stress—they should be explored with adequate attention to their social production and performative dimensions which enable a particular life world where the literary is reducible neither to the performative nor to the aesthetic. That is to say, a proper understanding of devotional performance genres of Mappila literary culture also requires a profound sensitivity on our part to the ethical work they perform on Mappila selves, to the accomplishment of which the poetics of these narratives is no less crucial.Footnote ²⁴

My specific argument is that Mappila devotional performance genres like the mawlud and the mala are best understood as transformative practices in which the reciter-performer not only enacts a special relationship with the object of veneration in these genres—the Prophet, Sufis, etc.—but also develops and cultivates pious dispositions such as the virtuous love and reverence for the extolled. While the mawlud is usually recited collectively rather than individually on various occasions like the celebration of the Prophet's birthday, of death anniversaries of Sufi figures, housewarming, wake, etc., the mala is more often than not sung individually seeking fulfilment of certain needs or desires such as protection against maladies, or for its general meritorious value. However, to flesh out my argument in this essay, I focus my attention on the performative aspects of the mawlud rather than the mala, although my analysis will be equally consequential for an understanding of the latter as well. My preference for the former over the latter is twofold. First, practically, I cannot deal with the performative dimensions of both these genres in ethnographic detail within the spatial confines of this essay. Second, I find the mawlud, contra the mala, the most “untouchable” of topics in Mappila literary/cultural studies and therefore the most deserving of critical attention.Footnote ²⁵

The Ethnographic Entanglement

My ethnographic observations on which I pivot my analysis of the constitutive relationship between devotional narratives and ethical formation come out of a number of recitations of the mawlud that I have attended and participated in over a period of five years in various parts of Malappuram district in south Malabar.Footnote ²⁶ This apart, at a more personal level, I have found myself part of this tradition of Islamic devotionalism from a very early age. In fact, I grew up in a family and community of Mappilas in South Malabar whose daily life was punctuated by recitations of devotional narratives such as the mawlud and the mala. I have grown up hearing my own father, a wage earner, singing the mala and reciting the mawlud and other devotional poems at the fall of night almost every day without fail—a tradition he keeps up to this day. I have also heard my mother, who is mostly consigned to household tasks, singing devotional songs in Arabic and Arabi Malayalam. Most often, they both would sing from the prayer manual called sabeena (see below), and on occasions they would simply chant from memory. And the same story can be told of many Mappila households not only in my hometown but also elsewhere. The result is inevitable: nested within the interstices of my ethnographic descriptions are traces of my long personal entanglement and enmeshment in Mappila devotional life that has been formative of my own relation with myself—my ethical selfhood if you will. The lines separating participant-observer from informant collapse as I enter into the spirit of the mawluds I have professionally observed as an ethnographer and come to speak the same language as my informants. Therefore, if my own voice, as distinct from my scholarly voice, is also audible in the din of my ethnographic minutia, that is because I have no ethnographic “other” to confront in the first place—in studying and writing about Mappilas and their devotional performance narratives, I have also studied and written about myself as a Mappila. I know this situation has its own cost but I do not think that intellectual labour should necessarily be quarantined from life, that if one practices what one studies, then one cannot study it “critically”.

Also, the devotional practices such as recitation of the mawlud and the mala are still so common a scene in Mappila religious lifescape that many Mappilas who participate in such practices do not even consider them a subject worthy of enquiry. Indeed, this take-it-for-granted attitude on the part of Mappilas towards ritual performances that animate their daily life was made clear to me in many standard comments I received from several of my informants when I told them that my research concerned the mawlud and the mala. Some would greet me with a shrug of shoulders, giving the impression that there was nothing one could actually research about so familiar, “invisible” and quotidian a practice. Others would pity me for “wasting” a hard-won research opportunity on such an “uninteresting”, “old-fashioned” topic. However, my own conviction is that it is important to make strange this familiarity, to render visible this invisibility, if we are to cast light on the rich morphology of the devotional practices internal to the architecture of ethical self-fashioning in contemporary Keralite Islam. This essay is an attempt, in a preliminary way, at this kind of defamiliarisation and making visible of some of the familiar yet invisible aspects of Mappila literary culture.

Against “Literarisation”

Be that as it may, what piqued my interest the most and then pitchforked me into this study was the sheer absence of any substantive discussion on the devotional, performative aspects of Mappila literary culture in mainstream scholarship on Mappila literature, despite the centrality of the performance genres to the fashioning of devotional piety among Mappilas. I found that most, if not all, scholars of Mappila literature betray profound discomfort with the performative dimensions of Mappila literary culture. A main reason for this discomfort, as I discovered, owes to a particular religiously-inspired antagonism toward Sufi-based devotional practices that shapes the attitude of Mappila scholars who have studied Mappila literary culture so far. That is, the mawlud and the mala as both devotional genres and practices live a controversial existence in Keralite Islam and their religious legitimacy is both defended and contested within the Islamic tradition.Footnote ²⁷

But most studies of Mappila literary culture have been carried out by writers who represent the “opposing” side of this internal debate within the tradition, however. I am thinking here of the influential work of C. N. Ahmad Moulavi and K. K. Muhammad Abdul Kareem entitled Mahathaya Mappila Sahitya Parambaryam (The Great Mappila Literary Tradition) published by the authors themselves in 1978. I have no intention to discredit as unimportant a work such as this which has left an indelible mark on the emerging field of Mappila literary studies. In fact, Moulavi and Kareem painstakingly undertook a study of Mappila literary culture at a time when this topic was greatly under researched. Their work still remains a reference point in contemporary scholarship on Mappila literature. However, the merits of Moulavi and Kareem's work should not obscure for us from view the analytical traps within it: both Moulavi and Kareem are highly insensitive to the performative aspects of Mappila devotional genres such as the mawlud and the mala. While there is a total silence in their work on the thick texture of the mawlud performance, their treatment of the mala is marred by an urge—propelled by their “reformist” zeal—to reject the genre and its recitative use as a deviant practice with little or no place in what they consider to be “normative” Islam.Footnote ²⁸

The dismissive attitude of Moulavi and Kareem toward devotional narratives underwrites their entire discussion of the subject in the book. For example, while acknowledging the artistic merit of Muhyiddin Mala (1607), the earliest extant example of the Arabi Malayalam mala genre, Moulavi and Kareem smuggle in their ideological dis-ease with devotional piety characteristic of the text: “But, the Quran will never allow one to accept the ideas that this short poem contains.”Footnote ²⁹ I should clarify that my worry here is not the religious legitimacy of these contentious genres as such—to prove or disprove whether they are “correct” Islamic practices. I am rather worried about the violence in the form of an epistemic foreclosure that such a religiously motivated attitude visits upon any attempt to understand and engage Mappila literary culture of which devotional practices are a constitutive part. In other words, I am concerned with and about the tendency among scholars like Moulavi and Kareem to preempt any adequate engagement with Mappila literary culture by reading theological legitimacy and authenticity into the devotional performance genres of this culture such as the mawlud and the mala. This tendency is even more disquieting in that it has come to serve as the normative way to do Mappila literature to date—a tendency that sits comfortably with the approach of “literarisation” to Mappila devotional genres by which these genres are reduced to mere cultural objects through an exclusive focus on their formal, stylistic and aesthetic features at the expense of the performative world these genres not only inhabit but also enable.Footnote ³⁰

“Peace Be unto You, O Prophet”: The Mappila Mawlud and Cultivation of Virtuous Love

The Arabic word “mawlid,” which popularly refers to the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad (mawlid al-nabi), is used to designate both the observance and celebration of his birthday (also known as milad), and the literary genre appropriate for recitation on such occasion.Footnote ³¹ However, Mappilas more commonly use the term “mawlud” which in local parlance appears to be a slight corruption of mawlid, the classical Arabic word for the observance of the Prophet's birthday, rather than refers to the related Arabic noun of the same construction (i. e. mawlud) which means “new-born child”—hence my use of mawlud rather than mawlid throughout this essay to emphasise the former's popular use in Malabar, though people who are conversant with Arabic may find it easy to dub this usage a misnomer.Footnote ³² Also, by extension, other revered Islamic personalities such as the martyrs of the Battle of Badr and Sufi figures all have mawluds written in their honour, although my focus in this essay will be on mawluds of the Prophet.

A typical mawlud gathering in Malabar is a group of men (and women)Footnote ³³ who are seated on the floor of a house/mosque, for example, in a circular or semicircular fashion where incense burns throughout, and sometimes perfume changes hands from one corner of the room to the other.Footnote ³⁴ Usually, the mawlud is led by a team of musliyars (religious teachers, usually employed at local madrasas/mosques) in front of whom is placed some adorned pillow or decorative cloth to hold the prayer manual from which to recite a particular mawlud text.

A mawlud text begins with a certain prose narrative (better known by the Arabic word hadith, which technically refers to the tradition of the Prophet) followed by a corresponding poem (often called bayt, which means “verse” in Arabic)—the mawlud is in Arabic through and through. The number of prose narratives interspersed with poems differs from mawlud to mawlud and it is not uncommon to make an improvised mawlud—so to speak—by choosing parts of different mawluds in the prayer manual. Mawlud recitation is antiphonal from start to finish. While the prose narratives in ornate, classical Arabic often describing vignettes concerning the birth and life of the Prophet are more often than not read out only by one of the musliyars present or by others in the audience who are confident of their ability to read the Arabic texts aloud. This reading activity is frequently punctuated by the rest of the group invoking necessary and desirable utterances or expressions as demanded by the text that is read out—these include invoking blessings on the Prophets, companions of the Prophet, and other revered Muslim figures who are mentioned throughout the text. Salat, invoking blessings and greetings on the Prophet (swallallahu ‘alaihi wasallam), is the most remarkable of the invocations that overwhelm a mawlud performance.

Once a prose narrative comes to a close, as indicated by the reader's modulation of voice while giving out the last word, the entire group fervently chants salat three times, thereby paving the way for the corresponding poem to be sung with much more fervour. Each poem that follows a prose narrative has a familiar refrain, usually called jawab (literally “answer”) to it that all the attendees know by heart. The jawab is repeated after each line of the poem. While the attendees also follow the whole poem that is being sung under the musliyars’ supervision—of course, most of the attendees have committed to memory parts, and some even the whole, of mawlud poems through regular attendance at performances—it is through the jawab that the full participation of attendees is not only secured but also sustained effectively. Note that although Mappilas have basic familiarity with Arabic as the language is so crucial to them liturgically, their literacy in Arabic is largely about recognising the grapho-phonic correspondences, and so being capable of producing the right sounds, when reading the Quran, for example. Therefore, the mawlud text, completely in Arabic, does not make any semantic demands upon them. Though some of the attendees I talked to had some sense of what the familiar jawabs meant, the understanding of mawlud texts at the level of semantics for most of average attendees stops at a general feeling that they are extolling the virtues of the Prophet, that they are venerating the Prophet through the narratives being read out and the songs sung—although they have no clue of details in any concrete sense. More importantly however, there are numerous words, phrases, proper nouns permeating a mawlud text which induce immediate recognition from the attendees—names and attributes of the Prophet Muhammad, for instance—which in turn evokes appropriate response in the form of invocations and bodies forth attitudes and emotions appropriate for the passages/verses recited such as joy, reverence for the Prophet, longing for his resting place, etc. Thus, the reception of mawluds by ordinary Mappilas does not reside as much in silent, privatised consumption of texts as in the kinesthetic responses that these texts engender such as appropriate invocations, body movements and gestures.Footnote ³⁵

The alternate reading and singing of mawlud narratives in prose and verse reaches its apogee when the qiyam (standing) is staged. The mawlud recitation typically ends with a final round of supplication led by the musliyar or imam (the leader of ritual prayers at the mosque) present—the formal prayer in Arabic at the end of each mawlud is always preferred, though it is not uncommon for the musliyar/imam to add to the formulaic prayer supplicatory utterances both in Arabic and Malayalam in order to appeal stronger to the attendees, depending on the context of the mawlud recitation.

Qiyam (or nikkal/nilkkal in Mappila parlance) refers to the practice of standing in honour of the Prophet towards the end of the mawlud recitation when the Ashraqa Bayt or what Mappilas simply calls Ashraqa (a mawlud ode called after its opening hemistich “Ashraqa al-badru ‘alayna,” which means “The full moon has descended on us!”) is sung out. The Ashraqa song that immediately follows the prose narrative which colourfully depicts the much sought after birth of the Prophet figures in the mawlud of obscure authorship known as Sharraf al-Anam (“Honour of humankind”—drawn from its opening passage of rhymed prose that begins with “Praise be to Allah who honoured humankind with the bearer of the highest station”) which enjoys broad circulation among Mappilas. The standard refrain or jawab to this “standing” ode is a set of profuse invocations on the Prophet, namely,

The bodily act of standing when the mawlud is approaching its crescendo brings to light the ritual enactment of emotions—love and gratitude for the Prophet, for instance—that is integral to the mawlud recitation as a technique of ethical formation for Mappilas. Talking to me about the qiyam over a dinner at the end of a mawlud we attended in a mutual friend's house, Akbar, a Mappila dentist in his thirties practising at Kondotty in Malappuram, noted that the act of standing in honour of the Prophet during the mawlud was “effective”—and this is his word as he frequently slipped many English words into our conversation in Malayalam—in that it actually gets us immersed (layippikkunnu) in the mawlud and produces (undakkunnu) in us the love of the Prophet that is required of all Muslims. I shall return to this point made by Akbar below.

The most popular of the mawlud texts among Mappilas, however, is the Manqus Mawlud, which Mappilas have traditionally attributed to a renowned Mappila ‘alim (religious scholar) of Yemeni Arab descent, Shaikh Zainuddin b. Ali al-Makhdum al-Malabari (d.1521), also called “the senior Makhdum”. It was he who had presided over the heyday of the Shaikh Makhdum institution at Ponnani (a coastal town in Malappuram). As the tradition goes, Shaikh Zainuddin composed this mawlud when approached by people from Ponnani and its neighbourhoods who were fearful of deadly disease breaking out in their midst.Footnote ³⁶ Accordingly, this work has been credited in Keralite Sunni Islam with curative, talismanic, and spiritual powers.Footnote ³⁷ As the title of the mawlud suggests (which literally means The Abridged),Footnote ³⁸ in his work Shaikh Zainuddin has offered a cross-section of popular mawlid narratives in the Arab-Islamic tradition. Manqus comprises of five odes tastefully interspersed with prose narratives—all of them never failing to recreate, with all pomp and show, the wonders, inter alia, preceding, accompanying and following the much sought-after birth of the Prophet Muhammad. A typical mawlud recitation among Mappilas, however, involves selections from both Manqus and Sharrf al-Anam—the latter is especially, though by no means exclusively, brought in in order to make use of its popular Ashraqa Bayt that literally has the attendees rise to their feet to perform the qiyam.Footnote ³⁹ It should be noted that despite being part of the mawlud Sharraf al-Anam, the Ashraqa Bayt often figures as a single work in the Mappila prayer book for ready use.

Both Manqus and Sharraf al-Anam, like other mawluds and devotional songs, circulate in prayer manuals/pamphlets which are synecdochically called mawlud kitab (book of mawlud) or edu (literally “leaf” or “page” of a book)—more interestingly, these prayer manuals are also known as sabeenas/safeenas, a word which I learnt from my mother at a very early age and then kept hearing often as I grew up in a village in South Malabar.Footnote ⁴⁰ The word “sabeena” is a corruption of the Persian “shabeena” which means “nocturnal.”Footnote ⁴¹ Since Mappilas used to (and continue to) recite mawluds, malas, and other devotional songs, and a variety of litanies from the prayer book daily at night, most especially between maghrib (sunset prayer) and ‘isha’(night prayer), the prayer book was also called sabeena/safeena metonymically, meaning “that which is recited at night”.

In actual practice, the use of mawlud narratives in Malabar, as elsewhere in Muslim societies, extends well beyond the occasion of the Prophet's birthday, only an annual event, to the daily grind of life for devout Muslims. The mawlud performs a tremendous array of literary, thaumaturgical, liturgical, and religious functions for the Sunni Mappilas. They range from personal acts of piety and devotion to the Prophet, to its widespread public recitation, especially, in many areas other than the Prophet's birthday: at wakes, housewarmings, marriages, in fulfilment of vows, before the start of a new undertaking, and so forth. While it is also recited by Mappila Muslims individually for its meritorious and numinous value, in fulfilment of desires, etc. the mawlud is more commonly held collectively at households, mosques, and public venues. Indeed, most of the mawluds I attended during my fieldwork in parts of Malappuram district in South Malabar were held in connection with housewarmings, wakes, and death anniversaries of family members, although the mawluds which were performed in fulfilment of vows and simply to gain barkat (blessing) and earn merit were not uncommon.Footnote ⁴²

The Islamic month of Rabi‘ul Awwal which witnessed the Prophet's birth, is the month of the mawlud par excellence in Malabar—in this month, especially throughout its first twelve days, the twelfth day being the birthday of the Prophet, recitations and chants of mawlud narratives literally submerge the devotional soundscape of Mappila villages and towns. Though household events are not rare during this month, the mosque becomes the privileged site for the mawlud throughout the first two weeks of the month. The recitations are usually held in the evening between the sunset and night prayers (maghrib and ‘isha’) or immediately after the night prayer (‘isha’). This mosque-centered mawlud festivity culminates in a well-attended, recital of the mawlud on the early morning of the twelfth day of Rabi‘ul Awwal to coincide with the time of the Prophet's birth which, according to the tradition in circulation among my informants, took place in the early hours nearing the break of dawn on a Monday—the hour that is just before the time of the obligatory dawn prayer (subhi). After a mawlud at the mosque, blessed sweets or pudding known as chirni—a corruption of the Persian word “shirini” literally “sweets”— is served. Usually sponsored by residents of a mahallu, (literally, “place,” but in Mappila usage refers to a demarcated area of Muslim population of varying size under the jurisdiction of a local congregational mosque known as juma‘ masjid/jama‘at palli with a qadi—Islamic scholar who advises Muslims on Islamic personal law— at its helm), chirni can be anything from snacks, bakery, dates to a meal. But the typical, much sought after, chirni for the mosque mawlud among the Mappilas I worked with is what they call kava/kulavi, which is traditional South Indian pudding or payasam that mainly includes cracked wheat, coconut and jaggery. Mappila families in a mahallu vie with each other to sponsor kava to be served at mosque mawluds. Since most mosques usually hold mawluds only for the first twelve days of Rabi‘ul Awwal, only a few families get the chance to sponsor kava. In fact, as many of my informants have told me, they all contact people on the mosque board enquiring if they can offer kava to a mosque mawlud in Rabi‘ul Awwal only to be told that all the spots are “booked.”

Key to devotional piety tied up with the mawlud is the concept of baraka–or barkat in Mappila Malayalam. An “auspicious power” that affects all that is associated with sacred Islamic persons such as the Prophet Muhammad and Sufis, and holy things such as a copy of the Quran or a prayer book, the concept of baraka is highly “amorphous” as it is communicated by “association”, rather than elicited by “exchange” as is the case with the notion of thawab (merit or reward).Footnote ⁴³ That is, unlike merit or thawab that accrues from pious actions one performs, baraka does not depend on the performance of actions as such since one can benefit from the baraka generated by others (for example, holy men). In actual practice, however, both thawab and baraka are mutually entangled, although they are by no means reducible to each other. This is best illuminated by the two phrases often used by the mawlud attendees I have interviewed. When asked why they are participating in mawluds, they would reply with little variation: “kooli kittanum” (to earn thawab) and barkatinum (to gain barkat). Here, the attendee does benefit not only from the merit resulting from his pious acts of recitation of and participation in the mawlud but also from the baraka associated with the figure of the Prophet, the spatial and temporal specificities of the mawlud, and so on. Barkat permeates everything that is connected with the mawlud—space, time, text, food, etc. The mawlud majlis (venue), mawlud text, sabeena, and chirni all are understood to be embodiments and conduits of barkat. Consequently, the mawlud is not just about the recitation of the devotional text—since barkat is an all-pervasive force, chirni, a seemingly mundane thing, also assumes a central place in the overall performative complex of the mawlud. An important consequence of barkat for ethical cultivation as it is envisaged in the Mappila imaginary is that the auspicious power of the mawlud transforms one's daily conduct of life by cultivating in the practitioner the virtuous love for the Prophet which in turn helps her/him acquire adab, the proper Islamic conduct, and finally get closer to God—the ultimate end of ethical formation as the Mappilas see it. As Pokkar, a businessman based in Malappuram town, pointed out, “Thanks to the barkat of the revered (mahanmar), we become conscious of our evil ways and try to live our lives in fear of God, in worship of Him (padachone pedichu, onu ‘ibadatheduthu)”. Note that barkat here is tied to bodily acts such as reciting the mawlud, visiting mosques, Sufi shrines, and even eating chirni that accompany a devotional practice such as the mawlud. Mawlud generates barkat that has implications for the life of the attendees beyond the immediate spatial and temporal coordinates of the mawlud: it also influences how the attendees conduct their affairs on a day-to-day basis so that they remain aware of their ultimate obligation to live in accord with the will of God—that is, as a true Muslim or, in Pokkar's words above, “in fear of God”.

Part of the mawlud festivity during Rabi‘ul Awwal also includes the mawlud procession taken out on the streets of villages and towns during which mawlud songs and other praise poems to the Prophet pour out of loudspeakers, and, more usually now, to the accompaniment of a traditional Mappila art form called daffmuttu.Footnote ⁴⁴ The procession usually winds through the alleys, streets and thoroughfares of each mahallu. Yet another component of the mawlud festivity is a public mawlud meet or gathering, often called nabidina sammelanam, at each local mosque (or madrasa, traditional Islamic institution, attached to it) where young madrasa students give short Islamic sermons celebrating the life of the Prophet, among others, and sing a variety of praise songs in both Malayalam and Arabic—although sometimes poetry and oratory in other Indian languages such as Urdu are also featured in order to add colour and flavour to the occasion. This public event is greatly appreciated because in addition to its general meritorious aspects characteristic of the mawlud, it also serves as a platform where the youth of Mappila community cut their oratorical and artistic teeth in a strictly religious setting and environment. It also helps the community to re/orient and channel to Islamic ends the creative and artistic potentialities of its young generation who daily spend most of their time in secular liberal spaces such as public schools and universities which, as the Mappilas I worked with noted, render the task of becoming a pious Muslim extremely difficult. Kuttyamu, a trader by profession and a key organizer of Islamic activities at Kizhisseri, a town north of Malappuram district, with whom I have attended several mawluds not only in Rabi‘ul Awwal but in other months as well, commented to me about public mawlud meetings thus: “We live in such an age where it is very hard to live a “proper” (sharikkum) Muslim life so it is important to hold events of this sort (mawlud) so that we and, especially, our children can try to keep to the demands of what it means to be a Muslim”. Note that in the religious imaginary of Mappilas like Kuttyamu mawlud's theological/juridical authenticity is not the moot point—he instead sees the mawlud festivity and a variety of practices that go into it as constitutive of becoming a good Muslim. Key to this imaginary are the virtues of love, joy and reverence for the Prophet which are understood to be nothing more than an article of faith that serves both as a means and an end.

Commensality, the activity of eating together, and distribution of food are another feature of the mawlud festivity among Mappilas. Serving food is a defining component of the Mappila mawlud—whether held in households or mosques. On the birthday of the Prophet, or on a day immediately after it, each Mappila mahallu celebrating the mawlud organises annadanam (distribution of food) on a grand scale. This “blessed” food, again, is believed to be a carrier of barkat and, regardless of their social status, Mappilas—young and old, men and women alike—throng the mosque or madrasa premises to collect food and take it home. In households, a mawlud usually begins with refreshments and snacks, and a sumptuous feast awaits the end of the recitation. Even the poor Mappilas do not do things by halves when it comes to serving food at the mawlud in their homes—in some of the mawluds I attended which were held in the homes of Mappilas who were all low-income wage earners, the menu was no less inviting and abundant than that I found in the mawlud feasts thrown by affluent Mappila families. While extravagance, and ostentatious display of wealth and status in one's daily conduct of life are often decried by many of these Mappilas, feasting at the mawlud as best as one could is considered a virtuous act that accrues divine rewards. Saidali Baqavi, who serves as an imam and qadi at the Kizhisseri mahallu where Kuttyamu whom I mention above lives, reiterated to the residents of his mahallu the rationale behind mawlud feasting and the whole idea of the mawlud celebrations during one of his weekly lessons I attended which was also open to women. Not surprisingly, his Malayalam prose was lavishly interspersed with Arabic words and expressions. I quote him:

I have allowed Baqavi to speak at some length for himself and the Mappilas whom he serves so that we can learn from Mappilas themselves about the heart of the programme of self-cultivation made possible by the mawlud in all its constitutive facets—from the recitation of the mawlud text to the serving of food at the end. Baqavi calls attention to the key emotions appropriate to the devotional practice of the mawlud: love and reverence for the Prophet and joy at his much sought after birth. Indeed, mawlud texts are not lacking in references to these emotions underlying the celebration of the mawlud. For example, in Manqus there are references to the mawlid being celebrated in expression of joy at the Prophet's birth (farahan bi mawlidi rasulillahi). The evocation and expression of appropriate emotions that Baqavi places at the centre of the Mappila mawlud resonate with the practice of the mawlid celebration in the larger Islamic world. In this tradition, sentiments such as joy and love are treated as concrete matters to be regulated under the Islamic law (shari‘a) which in turn are subject to divine reward and punishment. Accordingly, evoking and manifesting joy and delight at the birth of the Prophet is considered by the mawlud practitioners to be a religious act which is no less obligatory. Similarly, love of the Prophet is also deemed to be an obligation on the part of Muslims and there are authoritative hadiths to this effect, including the one alluded to in the excerpt from Baqavi's lesson—i.e., a true believer ought to love the Prophet more dearly than “his parents, his children, and the whole humankind” (min validihi va valadihi va al-nasi ajma‘in).Footnote ⁴⁵ Moreover, there is an impressive body of Islamic literature that thematises the emotions such as joy and love that are appropriate to the mawlid celebration, and as this is available elsewhere, I do not wish to rehearse it here.Footnote ⁴⁶ What is remarkable, however, is that since the necessary emotions such as joy, love, reverence, and gratitude are impalpable in and of themselves, they must find expression in outward activities. To rejoice, to love, to revere, and to be grateful—they are all not mere subjective feelings but performative acts as well. Therefore, these emotions manifest themselves in a variety of external acts such as recitation, singing, standing, taking out processions, decorating, feasting, etc. It is to these performative conventions whereby joy and delight, love and reverence for the Prophet are acted out in publicly recognised forms that Baqavi draws our attention to when he talks about feeding people, reciting the mawlud, organising the mawlud celebrations, and so on. Since most Mappilas do not understand Arabic, the role of imams/qadis, like Baqavi, in inculcating among Mappilas the devotional model underpinning the mawlud is paramount. Each mahallu organises a host of Islamic lessons, usually known to Mappilas as “mata padhana/Quran classukal” (“religious/Quran classes”), on a regular basis that are aimed at educating ordinary Mappilas about a wide range of topics, including the mawlud and saint veneration. The lesson delivered by Baqavi from which I have just quoted is a case in point.

Two points are analytically consequential in the passage extracted from Baqavi's lesson that help us appreciate the ethical work that the mawlud enacts in crafting the Mappila self. First, the understanding of the mawlud in Baqavi's framework views the mawlud not as merely expressive, but also constitutive, of the virtues of the love and reverence for the Prophet—and similar appropriate dispositions such joy and gratitude— which, on this understanding, are thought to be an article of faith incumbent upon all Muslims. That is to say, mawlud attendees do not enter into the mawlud with an always already set of emotions and dispositions appropriate to the performance of the mawlud such as the love and reverence for the Prophet. Instead, it is also through the mawlud and related practices such as invocation of salat that they develop such virtuous emotions and affects. Second, on this understanding, the mawlud is construed as both a means and an end and there is no necessary separation between the two.Footnote ⁴⁷ It is an end because the virtue of love for the Prophet underpinning the celebration of the mawlud is considered by Mappilas like Baqavi to be an obligation on the part of the believers—something that is necessary to accomplish their faith (iman). The mawlud and the virtuous love one cultivates through it are also a means in that they also inform the way one conducts oneself daily in life, thereby they help one realise the larger goal of being a pious Muslim who is closer to God—of being a muttaqwi (roughly “God-fearing”). Notably, in this framing, the performance of the mawlud by bodying forth appropriate emotions and gestures is a necessary, and not a contingent, act in the acquisition of both the virtuous love for the Prophet and piety in general.Footnote ⁴⁸