Milad (birthday) of the Prophet (pbuh)
Question:
Is this permissible in Islam to celebrate Milad of Hazrat Muhammad صلی الله عليه وسلم to promote good in society? Many peoples say this is an innovation and every innovation leads to fire. Please give reference which supports the answer either from Qura'n or Hadith.
Answer:
Anything that adds to the corpus of religion with no authority from God and His prophet (pbuh) will be in the category of Innovation (Bid’ah).
The problem with innovations is that they often gradually change the values of the religion and bias the focus of the followers of the religion to concepts that do not have any basis in religion. This is the essence of the hadith that you mentioned, where it says that every innovation is misguidance and every misguidance is in fire. This means every misguidance resulted by an innovative act in religion leads to hell fire.
Now we know for sure that the prophet (pbuh) himself never encouraged celebrating his birth day. We also know that none of the companions or their followers did so. In fact when we read the sira (way of life) of the prophet (pbuh) we find that he never allowed people to treat him in a way that he, rather than God, would become the centre of attention.
On the other hand, I do not see any problems with talking about the prophet (pbuh) and arranging gatherings in which people are educated about the life of the prophet (pbuh). I definitely do not see a problem to hold these gatherings on the birthday of the prophet (pbuh). However what I described will not be a celebration or a religious festival. This will only be an educational, preaching event, where, for the occasion of birthday of the prophet (pbuh) topics and discussions related to his personality are discussed and preached.
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February 2014
Is this permissible in Islam to celebrate Milad of Hazrat Muhammad صلی الله عليه وسلم to promote good in society? Many peoples say this is an innovation and every innovation leads to fire. Please give reference which supports the answer either from Qura'n or Hadith.
Answer:
Anything that adds to the corpus of religion with no authority from God and His prophet (pbuh) will be in the category of Innovation (Bid’ah).
The problem with innovations is that they often gradually change the values of the religion and bias the focus of the followers of the religion to concepts that do not have any basis in religion. This is the essence of the hadith that you mentioned, where it says that every innovation is misguidance and every misguidance is in fire. This means every misguidance resulted by an innovative act in religion leads to hell fire.
Now we know for sure that the prophet (pbuh) himself never encouraged celebrating his birth day. We also know that none of the companions or their followers did so. In fact when we read the sira (way of life) of the prophet (pbuh) we find that he never allowed people to treat him in a way that he, rather than God, would become the centre of attention.
On the other hand, I do not see any problems with talking about the prophet (pbuh) and arranging gatherings in which people are educated about the life of the prophet (pbuh). I definitely do not see a problem to hold these gatherings on the birthday of the prophet (pbuh). However what I described will not be a celebration or a religious festival. This will only be an educational, preaching event, where, for the occasion of birthday of the prophet (pbuh) topics and discussions related to his personality are discussed and preached.
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February 2014
