Observations on Islam
Herded by yellow-jacketed police, the procession, some 3,000-strong, surges through Walthamstow. It is the Sunday before Milad-un-Nabi, the anniversary of the Prophet's birth, and many mosques have banded together for London's largest Muslim event.
Under long green banners displaying Arabic and Urdu, rows of men in tall lambskin sweep up from the Jamia Mosque in Lea Bridge Road, interspersed with Routemasters full of elderly imams. Children run alongside, and shopkeepers rush out to offer soft drinks, sweetmeats and milk pudding.
Linked to others in Bradford, Oldham and Birmingham, the march is a means for Muslims to demonstrate love of the Prophet, but it is also a political gesture. It is the first Milad-un-Nabi since the Danish cartoon controversy, and the procession has been organised by the Muslim Action Committee, set up in February to campaign for "global civility" and to call for tighter controls on the European press.
In the front row of marchers is Imam Ghulam Rabbani, of the Lea Bridge Road mosque, who has won widespread loyalty among British Muslims since arriving from Denmark six years ago.
Even within the Muslim community, though, the occasion is the subject of debate, and British mosques and message boards host arguments about it that go to the heart of one of the deepest divides in global Islam. When a young girl calling herself Sunni Sister signs in to an MPAC (Muslim Public Affairs Committee) talk board to ask whether it is wrong to celebrate the Milad, she is bombarded with densely argued posts laced with allusion and Koranic quotation. The arguments can be traced back to radical Saudi-based Wahhabi scholarship, which holds that it is idolatrous to identify or commemorate real episodes from the life of Muhammad.
Fuelled, traditionalists fear, by petrodollars and imported Saudi imams, Wahhabism is a marginal but growing voice in British Islam. By the end of the thread, Sunni Sister has been convinced that the Milad is bida'a, or innovation, and therefore reprehensible. "Thank u," she types. "Now I understand why Milad is wrong."
Though Muhammad fasted every Monday to commemorate his own birth, the annual celebration was not introduced until 1207AD, by Muzaffar ad-Din ibn Zain al-Din, ruler of Irbil in Iraq. It spread from there to Egypt and Mecca, and is celebrated today in Muslim communities from Lahore to Sarajevo, but is suppressed in modern, Wahhabi Saudi Arabia.
Traditionalists in Britain play down the controversy. "It is nothing," insists Ismaeel-Haneef Hijazi, representative of the MAC. "There is a small but vocal minority who think it is wrong to commemorate the Prophet's birthday, but they are insignificant."
The Walthamstow march blended the traditions of an 800-year-old festival with a response to the latest problems faced by Muslims in the UK. But if the internal debates of British Islam are anything to go by, the Prophet's birthday could become a turbulent affair.
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