Where it is kept, the Mawlid and its surrounding season are marked by public and domestic celebration: processions, the decoration of homes, streets and mosques with lights and banners, communal meals and gifts to children and the poor. Its devotional heart is the recitation of poetry in praise of the Prophet, above all the mawlid poems that narrate his birth and life; the thirteenth-century Qasidat al-Burda ("Poem of the Mantle") of al-Busiri and, in South Asia, the singing of na't, are performed, and accounts of the Prophet's birth are read aloud, with the audience often standing at the moment of the birth.
Regional forms vary widely. In parts of the Arab world, Turkey, South and Southeast Asia and West and East Africa the day is a major public festival; in Sufi settings it may include dhikr and sama'; among communities that reject it, it passes unmarked or is actively discouraged. The uneven map of observance, from national holiday to quiet omission, makes the Mawlid one of the clearest illustrations within Islam of the boundary between the two canonical feasts, which all keep, and the many later devotions, which the traditions weigh differently.