Of the scores of authored mawlid texts and informally compiled mawlid manuscripts in existence, the vast majority begin with an account of the Light of Muhammad. This fact may seem paradoxical, given that the Prophet’s pre-existence would seem to diminish the significance of his physical birth in the sixth-century CE – the event commemorated by the mawlid celebration. However, the overwhelming consensus of the mawlid tradition is to treat the Prophet’s birth, not as the beginning of the existence of a historical individual, but as an episode in an ongoing cosmic drama that began with the inception of creation. The Prophet’s physical birth is not the beginning of his existence, but the point at which his manifold blessings become manifest on earth and available to humanity.
The pre-existence of the Light of Muhammad is described or alluded to in many ways in mawlid texts, but their accounts are most often based on one or the other of two broadly disseminated narratives associated with the figures of two of the Prophet’s Companions, Ka‘b al-Ahbar and Jabir ibn ‘Abd Allah al-Ansari. Neither of these narratives has received credence from hadith scholars, and neither of them is plausibly associated with the historically opaque Companion to whom it is described. Nevertheless, for the sake of convenience we will identify the two narratives by the names under which they have now circulated for hundreds of years.
The narrative begins with God declaring to the angels that He intends to create “a being whom I will honor and exalt over all other beings, whom I will make the master of the first and the last and the intercessor of the Day of Resurrection – I mean the Day of Judgment; if it were not for him, the Gardens would not have been adorned and the Fires would not have been kindled.”51 Unlike in the Qur’an (2:30), where God proclaims His intention to create Adam and is questioned by the angels, here precedence is accorded to the Prophet Muhammad. The angels having (in contrast with the scenario presented in the Qur’an) docilely proclaimed their obedience to God’s will.
Islam on Education, Knowledge and Enlightenment
