Somalis hold processions for Prophet Muhammad’s birthday despite militant threats

Somalia Brings the Prophet’s Birthday Back Into the Sun

Streets of Mogadishu turn green and white

Before dawn on Thursday, Mogadishu’s sea breeze carried a different kind of chorus. It rose from mosques and courtyards, from balconies draped with fabric the color of limes and spring leaves. By midmorning, the capital’s streets swelled with thousands of worshippers—many young and dressed in white—waving bright green flags and singing devotional poetry in the rolling cadence of Somali Arabic. Loudspeakers crackled with Quranic recitation. Drums fell into rhythm. The city’s usual improvisation of traffic slowed as crowds moved like a tide through roundabouts and side streets.

Somalia marked the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday—Mawlid—with a government-declared public holiday, reviving an old tradition of public festivity that extremists once tried to erase. The Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, citing piety and religious observance, ordered a nationwide day off for both public and private workers. In a capital stitched together by risk and resilience, the choice felt both cultural and political: a statement that public life belongs again to the public.

Security forces watched from the edges—rifles slung, eyes scanning the open space of celebration—unable, or perhaps unwilling, to interrupt the joyful pitch. Young people livestreamed the processions to relatives in Minneapolis, London, Toronto—diaspora touchpoints that so often make the city’s pulse audible far from the Indian Ocean coast. “To those who oppose this celebration, I say, ‘fear God,’” said Sheikh Abati Abba Nur, a Sufi scholar, squeezing his prayer beads between thumb and forefinger. “This is the month in which our prophet was born, and celebrating it does not contradict Islamic teachings.”

A festival once silenced

Mawlid is part of Somalia’s inheritance, carried for generations by Sufi orders like the Qadiriyya. It is the old night of qasidah, of praise poetry rising from courtyards where men and women kept time by clapping, of children memorizing the Barzanji and trading dates at the end. The public face of that tradition was pushed into the shadows during the ascent of al-Shabab, the al-Qaida-linked militant group that banned Mawlid as religious “innovation.” Those were the years when much of the city’s devotional life scattered indoors—or fell silent altogether—under threat of punishment.

Militants were driven out of Mogadishu in 2011, but insecurity never disappeared, and the retaking of public space has been halting and hard-won. Each year since, the celebrations have stretched another block or two. Each year, the police cordon moves outward just a bit. Thursday’s holiday felt like the clearest official nod yet that the city’s religious calendar is no longer dictated by fear.

Debate within the faith

Not everyone welcomed the decree. “Muhammad’s birthday was not celebrated in the prophet’s lifetime,” said Sheikh Abdurahman Diriye, a Wahhabi scholar, echoing the conservative argument that honoring the prophet should avoid forms not explicitly practiced by him. This disagreement—whether the Mawlid is veneration or innovation—is not new, and in Somalia it is not purely academic. Sufi communities suffered under militant rule precisely because their rituals and poetry invite a more mystical reading of Islamic devotion.

Yet, for many ordinary Somalis, the day is more intimate than doctrinal. “People are beginning to recognize the importance of this day as they shed ignorance,” said Fadumo Abdulkadir, standing with her daughters near a mosque gate festooned with green ribbon. She described the Mawlid she remembers from her childhood: the smell of cardamom tea, the sound of elders’ voices braiding scripture into song. “We lost so much during the war. This brings back who we are.”

The politics of a holiday

Public holidays are rarely just days off. In fragile states, they are markers of identity and legitimacy. Somalia’s foreign-backed government, locked in a long fight against al-Shabab and struggling to convince citizens it can provide both security and services, also governs the symbolic realm: which commemorations get the green light, which processions receive police support, which rituals are given a national embrace. Declaring Mawlid a holiday aligns the state with a long local tradition and the communities that carry it, even as it risks criticism from literalist clerics suspicious of devotional exuberance.

That tension stretches well beyond Somalia’s borders. Across the Muslim world, the Mawlid’s public status varies by place and politics. In Egypt and Morocco, sweets and parades mark the day. In parts of West Africa, especially Senegal and Mauritania, Sufi brotherhoods anchor civic life and the Mawlid is a major event. In Saudi Arabia, by contrast, the conservative doctrine known as Wahhabism—and its influence—informs the absence of public celebration. Somalia, navigating its own religious landscape, joins the long list of countries where tradition and modernity spar gently—and sometimes fiercely—over public expressions of faith.

A regional and global mirror

For observers of the Horn of Africa, Thursday’s scenes in Mogadishu offer a broader read on the region’s trajectory. Across the Sahel and East Africa, Sufi communities and reformist movements negotiate the same space, each claiming fidelity to scripture and to heritage. Governments, wary of militancy yet keen to showcase pluralism, often find themselves referees of ritual. And for youth, particularly those with a foot in the diaspora, identity is lived in two time zones at once—where a Mawlid chant goes viral on a cousin’s phone in Edmonton, carrying a city’s soundscape into winter light.

These are not idle aesthetics. Public rituals redraw the boundaries of fear. They tell shopkeepers it is safe to keep the lights on a little later. They assure families that their children can sing in the open air. They test whether the march of daily life—one holiday, one wedding, one market day at a time—can outpace the threats that seek to interrupt it.

What endures

As the sun slipped and the calls to prayer braided across the capital, Mogadishu’s celebrants lingered. The green flags folded, the phones went back into pockets, and the chants subsided into the hum of the city’s evening. Security forces relaxed but did not melt away; Somalia still faces sporadic attacks from al-Shabab, and no one forgets that. Yet the memory of this day—of voices raised without apology—hangs in the air like incense.

In the end, Mawlid in Somalia is less about uniformity than about belonging. Can a society bruised by decades of war and extremism make room for public joy? Can traditions threatened by violent dogma recover their confidence in the sunlight? Thursday’s answer looked, and sounded, like a yes.

That yes doesn’t settle theological debates, nor does it erase the security challenges that shadow daily life. But it does something else: it knits communities to their past and creates a shared present in which children, watching their parents sing, may come to understand that faith can be solemn and festive at once. For a country rebuilding itself one ritual and one road at a time, that is no small victory.

By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.