A Rare Coincidence of Onam and Eid Milad Un Nabi Coming Together: Time to Reaffirming Unity in an Era of Division.
Today, 26 August 2026, marks an interesting alignment and coming together of the two important festivities – Onam and Eid Un Nabi, which are dependent on the solar and lunar calendars, respectively.
Onam marks the grand harvest festival celebrated by Malyalis across the state of Kerala and around the world, wherever they have migrated, and the Eid marks the solemn birth anniversary of Prophet Muhammad (Milad-un-Nabi),
Wishing you all a very happy Onam and Eid Milad Un Nabi
The coinciding of these two festivals - coming together on the very same date - is nowhere more important than in the state of Kerala where these two festivities and their celebrations resonate deeply with all the Malayalis in Kerala—a state historically celebrated as a beacon of pluralism, where the call to prayer, temple bells, and church chimes harmoniously weave into the fabric of their daily life.
Onam itself has long transcended religious boundaries in the state, serving as a secular, cultural festival of abundance and social equality where every Keralite, regardless of faith, comes together as one family.
This rare convergence serves as a reminder of the often quoted “India’s Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb” and Kerala’s quintessential unity amidst diversity, proving that shared cultural heritage can comfortably coexist with individual religious beliefs and devotion that everyone must respect and appreciate.
Yet, recent reports of restrictive dictums issued in certain educational environments serve as a wake-up call. Exclusivism poses a challenge to the pluralistic values of India that built our community resilience. Progress demands that we honour our distinct faith traditions while cherishing the and respecting the common cultural heritage that binds us together.
Here I am sharing my thoughts on the genesis of these two sacred observances and why Kerala’s legacy of pluralism must be preserved and celebrated.
Eid Milad-un-Nabi: Remembering the Birth of Prophet Muhammad
Tradition holds that Prophet Muhammad was born in Mecca around 570 CE — a year remembered in Islamic history as the "Year of the Elephant" — to his parents Abdullah and Bibi Amina. His exact date of birth is not settled with certainty even among Islamic scholars, but the 12th of Rabi-ul-Awwal, the third month of the Hijri calendar, has come to be widely observed as his birth anniversary. Because the Islamic calendar is lunar and runs about ten to eleven days shorter than the Gregorian year, this date drifts steadily backward each year — which is why the observance fell in late September a few years ago and has now moved to late August, and will keep moving earlier still.
The day is known by several names — Mawlid al-Nabi, Mawlid-un-Nabi Sharif, Eid Milad, and simply Milad-un-Nabi. The Arabic word *mawlid* itself means "birth." Interestingly, 12 Rabi-ul-Awwal is also traditionally regarded as the date of the Prophet's death in 632 CE, so for the majority Sunni tradition, this single day marks both events.
Not all Muslims mark the same date, however. A significant section of Shia Muslims — followers of the Twelver tradition — observe the 17th of Rabi-ul-Awwal instead, a date that in their tradition also coincides with the birth of the sixth Shia Imam, Ja'far al-Sadiq.
The Prophet's Message
Muslims believe that in 610 CE, at the age of forty, Muhammad received his first revelation in a cave near Mecca — the beginning of a series of revelations that were later compiled into the Quran, Islam's holy book. Central to his teachings was a strict monotheism, and to this day Muslims across the world orient their five daily prayers toward the Kaaba in Mecca and regard the Hajj pilgrimage there as a duty to be performed at least once in a lifetime by those who are able.
Eid Milad-un-Nabi is observed by recalling the Prophet's life and character — his teachings on compassion, his forgiveness of even his adversaries, and his conduct as a moral exemplar. Observances typically include Quran recitation, *naat* (devotional poetry in his praise), Seerah (biography) lectures, processions, and charitable giving.
A Festival with a History of Its Own
What is less commonly known is that the Mawlid celebration itself has a documented and somewhat contested history — it was not observed in the Prophet's own lifetime or by his immediate companions, and its emergence as a public festival came centuries later.
The earliest recorded court observances trace to the Shia Fatimid dynasty in Egypt at the end of the 11th century, which marked four separate mawlids — for the Prophet, for Ali, for his daughter Fatimah, and for the reigning caliph — through formal court processions. The celebration most historians credit as the first Mawlid festival in the Sunni tradition, however, was organised in 1207 CE at Erbil (in present-day Iraq) by Muzaffar al-Din Gökböri, a governor and brother-in-law of the celebrated Ayyubid sultan Salahuddin (Saladin). From there, the practice gradually spread and gained popular acceptance across much of the Sunni Muslim world over the following centuries.
That contested origin is precisely why the celebration remains a live theological debate within Islam even today. Scholars in the Salafi and, in South Asia, the Deobandi tradition regard Mawlid as *bid'ah* — an unwarranted innovation with no basis in the Quran or in the practice of the Prophet and his companions, and argue that Islam formally recognises only two festivals, Eid-ul-Fitr and Eid-ul-Adha. Against this, the Barelvi school of thought — to which a majority of Indian Muslims historically belong — holds that commemorating the Prophet's birth is a legitimate expression of devotion and love (*ishq-e-Rasool*) rather than an act of worship in itself, and has continued the practice with much enthusiasm, including public processions and the illumination of mosques and homes. This Barelvi–Deobandi difference, which took shape in 19th-century colonial India and hardened over the decades that followed, remains one of the more enduring fault lines within Indian Sunni Islam, and Eid Milad-un-Nabi is one of the clearest occasions on which it plays out publicly every year.
In parts of the Middle East too, the day is not universally celebrated: in Saudi Arabia and some neighbouring countries, where a more austere, Salafi-influenced interpretation prevails, public Mawlid celebrations are actively discouraged.
Celebrated, Yet Debated
That the debate persists after eight centuries is, in its own way, a reflection of the diversity within Islam itself — a faith practised by nearly two billion people across vastly different cultures, each interpreting devotion to the Prophet in its own idiom.
This year brings with it a happy coincidence. Thiruvonam, the culminating and most important day of Kerala's ten-day Onam festival, also falls today, 26 August 2026 — the two calendars, one lunar and Islamic, the other solar and Malayalam, rarely align this way, and when they do, it tends to be remembered.
Onam itself is rooted in Hindu mythology — the legend of the benevolent Asura king Mahabali, whose annual homecoming from the netherworld, granted to him by Vishnu in his Vamana avatar, is what Malayalis across the world commemorate with the pookalam (flower carpet), the elaborate Onasadya feast served on banana leaf, boat races, and the Pulikali tiger dance. Yet for generations, Onam in Kerala has been something more than a Hindu festival — it has functioned as the state's unifying cultural occasion, celebrated by Hindus, Christians and Muslims alike as an expression of shared Malayali identity rather than a strictly religious observance. It is not uncommon, even today, to see Muslim students in hijab join their classmates in Thiruvathira dances, or families of different faiths exchange Onam greetings and sadya invitations with the same warmth as they would for Eid or Christmas. The Syro-Malabar Church, for its part, has formally clarified that Christian participation in Onam is a matter of cultural belonging rather than religious ritual — a framing that has historically allowed Kerala's syncretic social fabric to hold together.
It is this spirit that has, this week, made news in an unhappy way. At a residential school in Feroke, Kozhikode, a last-minute order barring students from wearing traditional attire — sarees and mundu — for their Onam function led to a group of Plus Two students being denied entry until parents and students protested; the restriction, unprecedented in previous years, was eventually withdrawn. It is one visible instance of a wider and long-standing debate: a section of religious opinion within the Muslim community, invoking Islamic theology, has for years discouraged participation in Onam festivities on the ground that they are rooted in Hindu myth, and there have been fatwas to that effect in the past. Despite this, younger Kerala Muslims have continued to participate with visible enthusiasm, and it is this quiet, everyday coexistence — not the occasional controversy — that has defined Kerala's reputation for communal harmony.
What is worth pausing on is why this now attracts more attention than it once did. Malayalis have long taken a certain pride in narrating Kerala's communal amity as something exceptional within India — a state where language, not religion, has historically been the stronger marker of identity, and where festivals of one community have routinely drawn genuine, unselfconscious participation from others. That older pattern has not vanished, but it now visibly competes, in a way it perhaps did not a generation ago, with a harder-edged religious assertiveness on more than one side — a reluctance in some quarters to be seen crossing communal lines, matched by a political climate across India in which every such gesture, or its withdrawal, is quickly read for what it signals. Neither impulse is unique to Kerala or to any one community; it is simply that Kerala's older culture of mixing makes the erosion more noticeable when it happens.
That two such different occasions — one marking the birth of the Prophet of Islam, the other the mythical homecoming of a beloved Asura king — should fall on the same day this year feels, in the end, like a gentle reminder of what is genuinely at stake. Kerala's syncretism was never built on everyone believing the same thing; it was built on people finding it entirely natural to celebrate what mattered to their neighbours as well as to themselves. That instinct is worth protecting, deliberately, in an age when it can no longer simply be taken for granted.
On this day, once again, my warm wishes to all my Muslim friends on Eid Milad-un-Nabi, and to all my Malayali friends on Thiruvonam.
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