Tarikh Islam

Celebrating the Birth of Prophet Mohammad and Ahl al-Bayt has gone through various historical changes, five of its stages are mentioned in this article. This ceremony was officially and publicly established in the fourth century during the Fatimid era of Egypt with the aim of honoring the position of the Holy Prophet. It was immediately followed by the Muslims of other Islamic territories, such as Levant, Hijaz, Greater Khorasan and North Africa; and all the Islamic territories celebrated the Prophet’s birthday by the seventh and eighth centuries. At the meantime, the introduction of deviant tendencies and thoughts like Sufism in this ceremony, deviated it from its main path and created some moral and jurisprudential deviations in this ceremony. Religious scholars demarcated this ceremony and its deviations to confront the heresies; yet by the emergence of the Wahhabi sect, the scholars’ rectifying approach turned into its denial by the Wahhabis. The outcome of studying these historical changes is the necessity of separation between the content problems of this kind of ceremonies and holding these ceremonies in the first place