Sultry, moonless nights see the start of the mulid—the lights are vibrant and the shisha sweet, crowds swaying in trance-like prayer to tambourines and Islamic declarations of god is great, god is truth. Buildings are washed of color, draped over with carnival tapestries and graffiti. Women brush out braids and men swaddle grams of hash in newspaper triangles, knot string with their teeth; the marriage of tradition and religion sees a rebirth in one town square. The mulid has begun. Mulids are Egyptian saints-day festivals, characterized by a plural and dynamic character which makes defining them difficult. It has “never been possible to tell what a mulid is really about or how it is going to develop,” but despite the ambiguity surrounding the mulid, it has remained in public consciousness over the years. Emerging alongside Islamic mysticism (Sufism) and the Muslim cult of saints, the mulid was believed to originate in the late Middle Ages. It embraced the extraordinary, and combined elements of religious pilgrimage, community carnivals, and public fairs. Ethnologist Samuli Schielke holds that a mulid is a “festival characterized by a profound ambivalence of experience;” it is a…
