Mandi Safar

In the traditional Islamic calendar the month of Safar comes to an end in exactly these days and we just passed the last wednesday of that month (at least according to most calculations).

There are – in what is usually called “Folk Islam” – a large array of yearly observances and cyclical traditions that were respected for centuries and were important signposts of social culture but which rapidly are wiped out from the face of this world in exactly these decades.

The last wednesday of Safar is one of those yearly observances. In the Persianized Muslim world it was once known as Aakhri Charshamba, in Javanese it is known as Rebo Wekasan.
In Malay it was referd to as “Mandi Safar”, due to rituals that I will briefly describe some lines down from here.

To the growing Salafi/Wahhabi trend in Islam observances and traditions like these are manifestations of cultural and religious decay, they oppose a conception of Islam as merely a political ideology and are consequently deemed a harmful innovation departing from an imagined “true Islam”.
To the so called Progressive Muslims and related modernistic movements the mentioned traditions are largely mere cultural superstitions, obsolete in a modern world and not relevant to a rationalized and secularized discourse on spirituality.
And even many traditional and traditionalist Muslims have a problem with many traditional yearly observances in Folk Islam.
Due to their own struggle with Salafism and Modernism they neatly started to categorize Islamic traditions into those that can be defended according to parameters of the classical literary traditions of Islam and those that have to be stigmatized and left without defense since their support is mainly part of an oral tradition of the opressed classes.

In oral lore, however, the last wednesday of Safar is connected to traditions concerning the imagined last days of the Prophet Muhammad. It was in the month of Safar that, according to some reports, he was suffering from his last disease which in the end led to him passing away from this world.
However, on the last wednesday of this month he was reported to have felt better for at least one day. For the first time since he fell ill, it is said, Prophet Muhammad got up from his bed, performed a ritual bath and displayed a happy and cheerful attitude, despite the fact that he already assumed death was coming for him and despite the fact that his community awaited future with depressed and fearful thoughts.

Due to this tradition, Folk Islam celebrated the last wednesday of Safar with ritual purifications(mandi = to bath, in Malay) and with cheerful and joyful activities like picnics at the riverside.
Not all of these activities were what one would call “spiritual” or “religious”. The mundane and the ethereal were deeply connected on those occasions.
But all of these activities were meant to reflect on the passing of time, on making new beginnings and purifying yourself and they were meant to stress that even in depressing and fearful times there is hope and reason to rejoice.
These activities put the celebrants in the position of an imagined Muhammad who never lost his trust in the unchanging Allah, despite all the insecurities of everchanging earthly life.

We can indeed cast doubts on the historical factuality surrounding the stories about the last days of noble Prophet Muhammad.

And many of the Southasian and Southeastasian traditions surrounding the joyful activities on that Last Wednesday surely do not derive from the earliest days of Islam and come from other cultural sources.
Some Malay traditions in particular most probably have their roots in an ancient cultural exchange that once took place between (Hindu) Tamil South India and a (once Indianized) Malay Peninsula; something that was used as an argument by a current Malaysian Majlis Fatwa to ban the tradition as “unislamic”.

However, historical factuality is not what I am concerned about when mourning the disappearance of folkislamic customs from this world.

I see the stigmatization and destruction of traditions like the Last Wednesday as manifestations of a fundamental and (in my eyes) very sad shift in the history of Islam.
This shift first of all came to be due to a process of defining Islam as a uniformous static and stagnant fixed (cultural-religious) “identity” which did not yet exist in the so called classical times and then, under political domination of exploiting powers, privileging the culture, traditions and interpretations of affluent Muslim social elites in close contact with colonial institutions over the culture, desires and perspectives of the “common people”.

Traditions like Aakhri Charshamba or Mandi Safar were able to survive centuries of changing Muslim rulers, just ones as much as tyrannical ones, of different sectarian affiliations, hoards of Muslim warriors roaming the land, hoards of Muslim preachers doing the same.
They were an integral part of folk spirituality for a very long period of Muslim history and as such they were an important part of an internal “Islamization” (or at least spiritualization) of rural everyday life and they had an important function in reminding the people of ethical, social and spiritual standards.
Nothing could seriously harm them, despite the fact that from very early days on have indeed been some people in Islam criticizing these traditions, describing them as harmful innovations, as departures from a imagined orthodoxy and orthopraxy etc..

For centuries nothing could take away the central social function and cultural importance from traditions like these.
But a shift that turned Islam into an “identity” in the modern sense of the word and that hen largely derived the boundaries of that identity from elitist discourses alone was able to take away all legitimacy from the perspectives of Folk Islam within a few decades.

Despite that irreversible shift I myself do still uphold that even when coming from a strictly quranic perspective we are still able to give legitimacy to the traditions of Folk Islam.
A legitimacy grounded in a basic right to selfexpression and cultural variety that the Quran definitely emphasizes.

Stigmatizing Folk Islam, in my eyes, is not a natural outcome of our search for “the Truth”, be it Islamic or otherwise.
It is not a natural outcome of a wish to establish better spiritual standards in the lives of human beings.
It is, however, a voluntary and deliberate choice for a culture/class based Chauvinism and a step towards a methodology of pure destruction and I deem both to be in itself antithetical to any possible conception of better spiritual standards and a search for “the Truth”.

These traditions may not be based on a historical factuality and they may indeed to a certain extent be obsolete in a modern world with a different relationship to the cycle of the year.
But they are grounded in a human desire to find spiritual beauty and meaning in our daily and yearly activities and to find symbols to connect the immanence of our existence to its transcendence.

To respect and support this desire means to flourish and to prosper, in my humble opinion.

We know pretty much for sure that a respect and support for exactly this desire was an important basis for the historical Islamic da’wah and the rapid spread of ethical and spiritual ideals of Islam in places like Southasia and Southeastasia.

Both legends and reliable historical accounts concerning the wellknown Muslim missionaries of South- and Southeastasia abound of reports on how these people adapted and assimilated local cultural forms, the desires of several social milieus and classes, preislamic spiritual practices and art to the ethical and spiritual ideals of Islam and only by doing so could they present Islam as a universal teaching that could have meaning to people from all backgrounds.
If there hadn´t been traditions like Mandi Safar at some point in history Malays probably wouldn´t be Muslims today.

That in itself characterizes stigmatizing and banning traditions like these in modern Muslim communities as a highly ironic, even comic, process.
Even more so, it exposes the modern “Fatwa business” as a pretty funny form of selfsabotage.
Todays Islam totally sabotages its own appeal by constantly being concerned about drawing borders and separating lines, instead of welcoming several colours and shades of creation with open arms just as earlier Muslims were able to do, just as the Quran would inspire us to do.