Mulids of Cairo: Sufi Guilds, Popular Celebrations and the ''Roller-Coaster Landscape" of the Resignified City

In Cairo as the month of Rabi al-Thani begins, each person knows that the mulid or festival of Hussein is imminent. This mulid commemorates the birthday of Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. Fixed on the Islamic lunar calendar, the date of the celebration moves forward approximately ten days each year within the global solar calendar. Organized around the Cairo mosque that is dedicated to the man who is considered a saint by Sufis, this festive celebration brings together residents and pilgrims from the entire country, animating the whole quarter that bears Hussein's name according to rituals of the mulid, recodifying and rhythmically reordering the space. In the context of increasingly heavy-handed attempts by Cairo city police and the national government to close down public space to hugely popular Sufi festivals as a way to repress any large-scale public gathering (particularly after large public protests in Cairo after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq), this chapter sets out to map out the special meanings, practices, and pleasures of the Cairo mulid. Although not expressly political, the mulid does continue to articulate alternative collective urban identities and solidarities, and to overpower conceptual, geographic, and religious attempts to contain it. This chapter offers a reading of ways in which public space in Cairo is created, or at least expressively resignified, during the special circumstances created by these festivals or mulids. These events constitute particular, circumscribed, holy space-time occurrences because they are at once popular festivals and devout pilgrimages