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| Daily News Egypt |
The
mulid (celebration of a saint's birthday) of Sayyid Zaynab, the Prophet's granddaughter and one of he patron saints of Cairo, was this week, and
Daily News Egypt has a photo gallery. Sayyida Zaynab's is probably the largest nd most colorful of the Cairo
mulids, centered around the neighborhood around the mosque where she is buried. (She is also buried in a town south of Damascus, but she is a saint and the Prophet's granddaughter, and miracles happen.)
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| Daily News Egypt |
One of the legacies of the Fatimid era in Egypt is the fact that several of Cairo's patron saints are actually ‘Alids, including Imam Hussein, Sayyida Zaynab and Sayyida Nafisa, though Egypt's few Shi‘ites are usually not allowed to conduct separate ceremonies, and the people celebrating th
e mulid are Sunni. (Another Cairo saint with a big
mulid, Imam al-Shafi‘i, was a Sunni, but a legal scholar who didn't much approve of venerating saints. Now he is one.)
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| Daily News Egypt |
Islamists frown on
mulids as saint-worship, and
during the swine flu hysteria of 2009 there was an attempt to ban public celebrations of mulids, but they remain a popular event, part festival, part carnival, part religious devotion; the Sufi orders come out in force, but so do hucksters, vendors, fortune-tellers and what-not.
Go take a look at the photo essay if you can't get to any
mulids in person.
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