Cultivating an affective bonding with the Prophet Muhammad has been widely considered as a central virtue among Muslim communities worldwide. Alongside the attempts to emulate and reproduce his ideal life according to Islamic discursive laws and their interpretations, popular discourses and techniques of Prophetic adulation have existed across the Islamic world since the very early period of Islam. Throughout history, these discourses were reproduced and articulated in diverse geographical localities. From this perspective, this study explores the various practices of loving the Prophet Muhammad and the devotional world they create among the Mappila Muslims of Kerala. The thesis captures this complex transfiguration in embodying Prophetic adulation with a series of interrelated questions: What are the techniques and modalities used historically in embodying and reproducing devotional love, emotion, and affect among the Mappila Muslims? How does approaching the Prophet through different religious rationalities produce a distinctive religious habitus that shares the contrasting dispositions of loving the Prophet since the early twentieth century? What was the socio-cultural context that produced these differing religious habitus? How do late modernity and its global cultural flows continue to reformulate the devotional world of loving the Prophet Muhammad among the Mappilas? What are the new meanings, techniques, and traits that emerge in the context of late modernity? The study proposes that the love for the Prophet Muhammad has a theology, history, sociality, cosmology, and episteme that are articulated through texts, discourses, rituals, actions, interdictions, contestations, objects, genealogies, communities, economies, and spaces in each regional context. Hence, the cultivation of dispositions and articulation of religious emotions that one sees in Muslim’s love and affection toward the Prophet is on the one hand socially emergent and on the other closely interconnected with intra-religious dynamics and formation of the pious self, deeply embedded in Islamic discursive tradition. The study proposes that the reflexivity of religious habitus helps one to perceive the formation and embodiment of the love toward the Prophet as an assemblage of these diverse dimensions.



KEYWORDS: Islam, Prophet Muhammad, Religious Habitus, Tradition, Modernity,

Embodiment.