‘I Love Muhammad’ And The Politics Of Religious Exhibitionism – OpEd

A seemingly simple slogan — “I Love Muhammad” — has ignited a wave of public mobilization, protests, and police action across multiple states of India. What began as a banner displayed during a Eid-Milad-un-Nabi procession in Rawatpur, Kanpur, quickly escalated into a nationwide controversy, resulting in over 1,300 Muslims being accused and dozens arrested, according to the Association for Protection of Civil Rights. The police response to the banner has emphasized that it is a “new tradition”. The dispute in Kanpur arose over the placement of a new tent and banner, perceived by Hindutva groups as an unwelcome innovation in the traditional Milad route.

While state repression needs to be condemned, one also needs to understand the “I Love Muhammad” campaign, and its associated processions, as a drive toward public exhibitionism within contemporary Muslim devotional practice. Why is it that the love for the Prophet needs to be inscribed in the form of a banner? Why must devotion take the shape of sound, movement, and spectacle in the streets rather than quietly expressed in private or domestic spaces? The question thus relates to the exhibitionistic nature of the love that is being expressed. 

The History of Milad in Hyderabad

The history of Milad processions in Hyderabad shows us how religious exhibitionism arises. Asghar Ali Engineer interprets the emergence of the Milad procession in Hyderabad as a crucial turning point in the transformation of religious practice into an instrument of political and economic power. The procession was first introduced in 1978, when the Majlis-e-Ittihadul Muslimeen sought to assert its influence in the old city. On the surface, the Milad procession appeared to be a religious celebration of the Prophet’s birth, yet Engineer stresses that its deeper function lay in marking territory and projecting communal strength. The bulk of support for the Majlis, and therefore for the Milad procession, came not from the original Hyderabadi Muslims but from poorer Muslim migrants from Maharashtra and Karnataka. These new settlers, resettled often on sarf-e-khas lands of the Nizam (like Bhavani Nagar), felt vulnerable and in need of protection. Their precarious economic position and weak social roots in the city made them receptive to the Majlis’ communal posturing, which offered a sense of collective security and belonging. The Milad procession gave them a visible way to assert presence in the contested urban space of Hyderabad. This was a visible break from the earlier pluralistic culture of “mushairas, biryani, Dasehra and Moharram” celebrations.

By bringing large numbers of Muslims into the streets, the Majlis demonstrated its ability to control public space, consolidate its migrant support base, and bargain with ruling parties such as the Congress and later Telugu Desam. In Engineer’s words, religious processions like these “provide symbolic strength in numbers, which translates into bargaining power” with state elites. The Milad procession quickly became embedded in a cycle of competitive communalism. Hindu organizations responded by centralizing the Ganesh festival in 1979, transforming it from a dispersed set of local rituals into a highly visible public procession. The result was a pattern of rival mobilizations in which both communities sought to outdo one another in terms of numbers, noise, and territorial coverage. Engineer emphasizes that these spectacles were not simply devotional but strategic. They served as visible markers of community dominance in contested neighborhoods, laying the groundwork for clashes. As one local observer noted, “the Ganesh procession was in retaliation to the Milad procession,” and from 1980 onwards Hyderabad witnessed regular communal riots during such events.

Engineer’s critical insight lies in linking these processions to the economic and property struggles of the old city. Between 1956 and 1984, Hyderabad saw “distress sale of properties worth Rs 50 crore,” much of it directly tied to communal riots and the atmosphere of fear they created. Violence repeatedly forced families, often poorer Hindus or insecure Muslims, to sell property at throwaway rates. These transactions enriched land mafias, petty politicians, and Majlis-linked networks. The Milad procession thus cannot be seen in isolation as a religious act; it functioned as a spark that justified recurring communal clashes, which in turn facilitated the transfer of land and property into the hands of those who benefitted from disorder.

Engineer notes how riots in 1990 began “with a fight between two gangs of land-grabbers. One group happened to be Hindu while the other, Muslim. The incident took place in Hafiznagar area of the new city. It is alleged that the Muslim group had the backing of the Majlis and the Congress.” What began as a clash over property quickly escalated into a communal riot: retaliatory killings, stabbings, and bombings spread across the city, leaving scores dead. Once Sardar, a notorious Muslim land-grabber with Majlis ties, was killed, the cycle intensified, and communal identities overtook the original economic dispute. Engineer points out that in this way, “naked economic and political interests” found cover in the idiom of religion.

The choice of targets during the riots further reveals the property logic underlying communal mobilization. The Majlis goondas attacked poor Hindu construction workers, seasonal migrants, and Dalit communities such as the Yadavas and Pardis. These groups were among the most vulnerable residents of the old city, occupying marginal housing and working in insecure sectors like construction. Driving them out through violence not only reduced Hindu presence in contested areas but also opened up land for acquisition. Engineer shows that communal violence therefore functioned as a mechanism of dispossession, where the destruction of lives and livelihoods directly fed into the accumulation of land and power by elites aligned with the Majlis.

For Engineer, the Milad procession represents the symbolic entry point of this entire cycle. By converting religious devotion into a staged assertion of communal identity, the Majlis created the conditions for rivalry, riots, and dispossession. Once institutionalized, the procession offered both a platform for political bargaining with ruling elites and a cover for the enrichment of land mafias and criminal networks. The story of Hyderabad’s Milad thus demonstrates how public religiosity, far from being a matter of pure faith, became a vehicle through which economic interests were advanced and political control over the old city was secured.

Marginalizing Women

The Milad celebrations also represent a major shift in terms of gender. Z. Fareen Parvez’s ethnographic account of Milad-un-Nabi in Hyderabad – undertaken from February to March 2010 – offers a window into how the celebration has shifted from women-centered domestic practice to a masculinized spectacle of public power. In her conversations with women from a low-income neighborhood, Parvez records a clear sense of disorientation. As one woman named Nahid explained, “It used to just be in the house. We would make kheer puris and visit our families.” Milad celebrations once revolved around food, kinship, and women’s ritual agency in the domestic sphere. These gatherings allowed women, who were excluded from mosques, to carry religious meaning into everyday life. By contrast, the newly politicized Milad processions unfold in the streets, dominated by men, flags, and loud displays of collective identity. As Parvez observes, “As Milad-un-Nabi now obviously enters the terrain of politics and into public space and activities dominated by men, the role of women perhaps loses its value.”

The patriarchal restructuring is not only symbolic but also practical. The women Parvez studied, many of whom were semi-literate and part of a women’s Islamic study circle, resumed their normal lessons on the Prophet’s birthday, refusing to adopt the new public ritual. Their exclusion from the processions sharpened their critique of the noisy, masculine displays of piety. Farhat, one of the teachers, described how a neighborhood procession resulted in “noise complaints,” police violence, and eventually the closure of shops. What to the Majlis and other organizers appeared as a show of Muslim solidarity was, in women’s eyes, an occasion of chaos, confrontation, and state repression. Their skepticism signals how patriarchal strategies of communal assertion do not unify the community but fracture it along gendered lines of participation and exclusion.

Parvez’s ethnography thus uncovers how the “public” Milad transforms devotional practice into a communal spectacle where men’s bodies in the street become the bearers of Muslim identity. Women, relegated to private study circles, lose their earlier role in maintaining the festival’s meaning. In this sense, the new communal strategy constructs a patriarchal body politic, where masculinity, visibility, and territorial occupation define collective power, while women’s domestic religiosity is devalued or rendered obsolete. What appears as communal strength on the streets of Hyderabad simultaneously embodies an erasure of women’s agency in the very tradition being celebrated.

Sonic Assertion

My own experience of the 2024 Milad processions in Hyderabad’s Old City reveals the new patriarchal cultures that have developed in Indian Muslims’ celebration of the Prophet. The song “Mere Nabi Lajawaab Hain” offers an important glimpse into how popular religious culture can remake the image of the Prophet into something that departs from his own insistence on being a messenger of God. The Prophet repeatedly emphasized his humanity, stressing that his role was to convey the divine message rather than to be treated as divine himself. Yet the lyrics repeatedly elevate him into a position that borders on god-like reverence. For instance, lines such as “Nabiyon mein gulaab hain, rashk-e-mahtaab hain, Rab ka intikhaab hain” place him at the apex of creation, as a cosmic choice of God, surpassing all other prophets in beauty and glory. 

The song’s refrain, “Mere Nabi lajawab hain” (my Prophet is incomparable), enacts this exceptionalization through its sheer repetition. The Prophet is framed as beyond analogy, beyond likeness, a singular figure whose greatness exceeds the limits of history, science, or human comprehension. The verse about the splitting of the moon – “Tukde hue jo chaand ke, duniya ke science-daan bhi hairaan ho gaye” – ties his power to a cosmic miracle that even modern science cannot explain, reinforcing his position outside ordinary worldly logic. Consider another couplet: “If history were to search for an equal to Muhammad, finding an equal would already be a great thing — but one will not even find his shadow.” The claim is that the Prophet is utterly beyond comparison. Even the attempt to imagine a saani (a peer, an equal) is futile. The line goes further: one cannot even find his saaya (shadow), meaning that no human being, no matter how great, can come close enough even to resemble him faintly. If no one can even resemble him, then ordinary believers cannot truly emulate him in daily life. His role becomes one of majestic authority and charismatic exceptionality, a masculine figure who stands above history rather than within it. This kind of phrasing moves devotion from imitation of the Prophet’s ethical life into veneration of his incomparable stature, which then feeds into the production of hierarchical forms of reverence and political authority.

The lyrics weave in distinctly masculine imagery, which helps produce him as a patriarchal role model rather than a moral teacher of egalitarian conduct. He is described as the ultimate “aqa” (master), someone for whom “bande to mil hi jaayenge, aaqa na milega” — servants can be found everywhere, but there will never be another master like him. This establishes a hierarchy in which the Prophet becomes the ultimate masculine authority figure, a sovereign to be obeyed, rather than a guide whose humanity could be followed in intimate, everyday practice. Even the bodily markers of his identity, such as the mohr-e-nabuwwat (seal of prophecy on his back), are turned into sacred signs that seal his role as the final messenger and anchor his exceptionalism in physical masculinity.

The song’s affective intensity comes through its disco-inspired beats and repetitive structure. The trance-like repetition of “Mere Nabi lajawab hain” operates as a sonic ritual that collapses distance between devotion and idolization. In effect, the Prophet is transformed into a figure of charismatic masculinity whose role is less about being emulated as an ordinary human being and more about being enthroned as a sovereign leader of all creation. This framing enables a patriarchal body politic where devotion to the Prophet translates into submission to hierarchical male authority in the community, reinforcing obedience, reverence, and masculine dominance rather than egalitarian imitation of moral action.

Patriarchal Body Politic

The bodily practices on display during the Milad procession – boys violently thrusting oversized green flags into the paths of bystanders, the dramatic bursting of water pouches from above, the incessant revving of motorcycles punctuated by wheelies and acrobatic stunts – form a dense theater of expenditure. None of these gestures accomplishes anything in the utilitarian sense. The flag, carried as a devotional emblem, does not remain a silent sign of reverence; it becomes a weaponized extension of the arm, slicing into the air and endangering passersby. Drinking water, precious and scarce, is not consumed but squandered through surprise bursts that produce laughter, shock, or irritation. The motorcycle, an ordinary vehicle of mobility, is converted into a sonic cannon, its roar and screech transformed into a declaration of power. In each case, the meaning of the act lies in the energy expelled (sound, spectacle, and risk) rather than in the object’s intended use. These actions express what Georges Bataille identifies as dépense, an expenditure that is “pure” precisely because it exceeds the logic of productivity or conservation. Waste, risk, and intensity are the point.

This circuit of expenditure is not incidental to the Milad procession but is integral to its function as a masculine public. The sheer refusal to economize – to preserve water, to respect traffic, to reduce noise – becomes a mode of sovereignty. In the very act of wasting, squandering, and endangering, young men proclaim their ability to dominate space and command attention. It is an ecstatic visibility, one that requires no justification beyond itself. The street becomes a stage on which excess is transmuted into political presence. The festival thus converts energy into legitimacy, with waste and disorder recoded as evidence of devotion.

Fanon’s reflections on muscular tension in The Wretched of the Earth illuminate the psychic stakes of such practices. He describes how the colonized body, rendered taut by repression and psychic injury, seeks release through collective muscular expenditure, “a muscular orgy in which the most acute aggressivity and the most impelling violence are canalized, transformed, and conjured away.” The Milad processions in Hyderabad, with their explosive bursts of sound, flag-waving, and motorized stunts, share precisely this quality of channeling accumulated psychic tension into orchestrated demonstrations of force. The bodies of young men, trembling with social exclusion, release their frustrations and affirm their collective potency through displays that obstruct traffic, dominate soundscapes, and generate public disorder.

The result is the production of a patriarchal body politic. The Prophet, already exceptionalized in song as beyond comparison, becomes the unreachable masculine apex. On the ground, his inimitability is translated into modes of reverence that take the form of expenditure and domination rather than ethical practice. During the procession, speakers were asking men to make way for women and children. By physically making way for women and children, the male participants are performing a miniature enactment of prophetic expenditure: their bodies assert dominance in the streets, their energy and risk-taking manifest communal potency, yet they are also tasked with protecting subordinate figures, producing a visible hierarchy of strength and care. The ethical dimension of emulating humility or justice is replaced with a display of control, courage, and disciplined excess. Public space becomes the stage where young men enact their proximity to the Prophet’s unmatchable stature through muscular expenditure and its temporary, disciplined withdrawal to protect those who are not as strong as the male Muslim. 

Secular Humanism

In 2014, there were calls by many Muslim groups to avoid DJs and unnecessary street crowds, alongside exhortations for youth to participate in blood donation drives. This points to an alternative model of devotion, which is rooted in action rather than spectacle. Here, love for the Prophet is expressed not through banners, noise, or physical obstruction, but through tangible acts that benefit the broader community. This approach also foregrounds the question of what it means to truly emulate the Prophet. Rather than reducing piety to the aesthetic or symbolic display of banners and flags, it invites reflection on the ethical and humanitarian dimensions of his life. 

The Prophet’s teachings emphasize care for the marginalized, attention to the material and spiritual needs of others, and the cultivation of justice and compassion in everyday practice. Public displays of love remain superficial: they demonstrate commitment only in the form of spectacle, without producing measurable benefit to the community. Direct engagement through charitable, educational, and humanitarian work, in contrast, translates devotion into concrete moral and social practice, allowing the principles of Islam to manifest in lived experience. Seen in this light, secular humanist interventions such as blood donation camps or neighborhood aid initiatives are not departures from religious life but extensions of its ethical core. This means that love for the Prophet need not be expressed through public spectacle. Instead, devotion achieves its fullest meaning when it is oriented toward concrete, transformative action, turning religious sentiment into socially generative practice.