Mawlid is the observance of the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, kept by many Muslims on the twelfth of Rabi al-Awwal (many Shia keep the seventeenth). Unlike the two canonical Eids, it is not part of the earliest Islamic calendar; it arose several centuries after the Prophet's lifetime. Court celebrations are recorded under the Fatimids in Egypt, and the first great public Mawlid festival is generally attributed to the ruler Muzaffar al-Din Gokburi at Erbil (in modern Iraq) in the early thirteenth century, an occasion described by contemporaries as lavish, with feasting, sermons and poetry. From there the observance spread widely, carried in part by the growth of Sufism, and it is now a public holiday in much of the Muslim world.
This history is the root of a live disagreement. Because the Prophet and the first generations did not keep his birthday, some scholars, and above all the modern Salafi and Wahhabi movements, regard the Mawlid as an unwarranted bid'a, an innovation in religion, and decline to mark it; the criticism is associated with the medieval jurist Ibn Taymiyya and his heirs. Its defenders, the majority tradition, hold that honouring the Prophet in this way is a praiseworthy expression of love and does not add to the obligations of the faith.