Disfrutar
in the Alhambra

 Dª Paola Luque Vargas
Islamic tradition has various feast days to commemorate very special events such as the one we will be talking about, mawlid al-Nab?.
This subject was deliberately selected for the December talk because the mawlid will be celebrated soon in what is also the run-up to the Christian festival of Christmas. In a curious phenomenon that repeats itself every 33 years as a result of the difference between the lunar and solar years of the Islamic and Gregorian calendars respectively, the Prophet’s birth will be celebrated twice in 2015, at the beginning of the year on 3^rd January and on the date of most interest to us now, 24^th December.
In the particular case of al-Andalus, we know that the Muslims used to celebrate other Islamic feast days such as Eid al-Fitr, the festival in which Muslims break their fast at the end of the month of Ramadan, and the Night of Destiny or Layla al-qadr, on which the first verses of the Quran were revealed to the Prophet; etc. The Muslims of al-Andalus also assimilated feast days typical of the Christian tradition such as the day of St John and Christmas Day, something which was hardly surprising given the fact that Muslims and Christians lived side by side and that both John the Baptist and Jesus are also venerated in Islam. However the fact that the Muslims shared certain practices with their Christian neighbours began to worry the Faq?h, who, fearing that their flock would abandon their faith, introduced the mawlid, a typically Islamic feast day, which quickly took on in al-Andalus.
This brief talk seeks to explain the importance of the mawlid in various different aspects of the history of al-Andalus, especially in its literature, in the celebrations organized to mark the event and in the political sphere, focusing especially on the protocol followed in the Court, an example of which was the famous celebration of the mawlid in the Alhambra in 1362 during the Sultanate of Mu¬ammad V, mentioned by Ibn al-Jatib in his NufaÅat al-Yirab.
This talk will be transmitted live on 27^th December on the Periscope application for smartphones and tablets
Sunday 20th and 27th December, Room IV, 12.00h