So what does a mulid look like then? To an outsider, the initial appearance is utterly chaotic…a mixture of Sufi pilgrims, roaming youths, families, amusements, trade, ecstatic piety, and solemn commemoration, all framed by colorful lights and very loud music…evoked by the exclamation “Mulid!”.
-The Perils of Joy: Contesting Mulid Festivals in Contemporary Egypt, Samuli Schielke
The crowd was brilliant, spotted with primary colors. The air rippled with tambourines, while here and there in the lags of silence that fell over the shouts and chanting there came the sudden jabbering of the long drums…horses moaned…a cart filled with the prostitutes of the Arab town in colored robes went by with shrill screams…and the singing of painted men to the gnash of cymbals and scribbling of mandolines: the whole as gorgeous as a tropical animal. “Nessim,” she [Justine] said foolishly. “On one sole condition- that we sleep together absolutely tonight.”
-Balthazar, Lawrence Durrell
Durrell had to consult his personally inscribed copy of McPherson’s Moulids of Egypt in order to get his description right. Schielke the anthropologist only had to throw himself into the festivity head first. He found that the parade of prostitutes at the Tanta moulid had been suppressed in the early 20th Century and that public circumcision booths were outlawed. But not so fast on the policing of morality…he also found that the spiritual retreat ritual of Khalwa, in which unmarried male and female Sufis pair off for intimate encounters, was still going strong on the moulid’s concluding Laila Kabīra, Big Night. Just ask Justine.