The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad Devotional Piety in Sunni Islam by Marion Holmes Katz (London and New York: Routledge, 2007. 275 pages)

Abstract

Despite the central importance of festival and devotional piety to premodern
Muslims, book-length studies in this field have been relatively rare.
Katz’s work, The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad, represents a tour-deforce
of critical scholarship that advances the field significantly both through
its engagement with textual sources from the formative period to the present
and through its judicious use of theoretical tools to analyze this material. As
its title suggests, the work strives to explore how Muslims have alternatively
promoted and contested the commemoration of the Prophet’s birth at
different points in history, with a particular emphasis on how the devotionalist
approach, which was prominent in the pre-modern era, fell out of favor
among Middle Eastern Sunnis in the late twentieth century. Aimed primarily
at specialists in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, especially scholars
of history, law, and religion, this work is recommended to anyone interested
in the history of Muslim ritual, the history of devotion to the Prophet, and
the interplay between normative and non-normative forms ofMuslim belief
and practice ...