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The Mulid of al-Sayyid al-Badawi of Tanta - Egypt's Legendary Sufi Festival (Hardcover)
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The Mulid of al-Sayyid al-Badawi of Tanta - Egypt's Legendary Sufi Festival (Hardcover)
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Every year, in the heart of the Nile Delta, a festival takes place
that was for centuries the biggest in the Muslim world: the mulid
of al-Sayyid Ahmad al-Badawi of Tanta. Since the thirteenth century
millions of believers from neighboring regions and countries have
flooded into Tanta, Egypt's fourth-largest city, to pay devotional
homage to al-Badawi, a much-loved saint who cures the impotent and
renders barren women fertile. This book tells for the first time
the history of a mulid that for long overshadowed even the
pilgrimage to Mecca. Organized by Sufi brotherhoods, it had, by the
nineteenth century, grown to become the scene of a boisterous and
rowdy festival that excited the curiosity of European travelers.
Their accounts of the indecorous dancing and sacred prostitution
that enlivened the mulid of al-Sayyid al-Badawi fed straight into
Orientalist visions of a sensual and atavistic East. Islamic
modernists as well as Western observers were quick to criticize the
cult of al-Badawi, reducing it to a muddle of superstitions and
even a resurgence of anti-Islamic pagan practices. For many
pilgrims, however, al-Badawi came to embody the Egyptian saint par
excellence, the true link to the Prophet, his hagiographies and
mulid standing for the genuine expression of a shared popular
culture. Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen shows that the mulid does not in
fact stand in opposition to religious orthodoxy, but rather acts as
a mirror to Egyptian Islam, uniting ordinary believers, peasants,
ulama, and heads of Sufi brotherhoods in a shared spiritual fervor.
The Mulid of al-Sayyid al-Badawi of Tanta leads us on a discovery
of this remarkably colorful and festive manifestation of Islam.
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