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In this blogpost I’ll share about the history of the Moulid Doll and why I made this project with Zest. If you want to know the full steps and details of the making of this project, check it on my instructables.

9th-10th of November was Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, or ‘Al-Moulid Al-Nabawi’ in Arabic, al moulid means carnival and al nabawi means of the prophet. In Egypt we have various special cultural traditions to celebrate it, all started by the Fatimid dynasty more than 1000 years ago. They brought back the celebrations by forming gatherings in big tents and talked and remembered the prophet and his teachings. They had a dedicated government role to create special sweets created with all kinds of nuts and sugar to give to people during the occasion, such as foleya, homoseya, ladida, basima, semsemeya and many more!

One of these inventions was the moulid sugar doll, It was created from a 2 part wooden mold and made by liquefying sugar and pouring it in the molds. These molds were inherited year after year and passed on through generations. After casting the doll, it was decorated by drawing on her features, adding gold leaf to make her crown, sometimes using corn husk fibers to make her hair and finally making three colorful fans that she wore on her back. The sugar industry was huge in Egypt during this period and they made many different sugar statues.

Why was the Moulid doll created? There are many stories I heard, some say it was made after ‘Al Moez li deen Allah’ and his wife when they used to go out during the Moulid Carnival and generously give out sweets to people. Others say it was made to celebrate the ‘marriage season’ during the rule of ‘Al Hakim bi Amr Allah’ because he only allowed people to get married and organize weddings during Al moulid! He was known for issuing very crazy laws.

The production of the edible sugar doll is rarely done now, I only found one or two dolls in an extremely bad condition. And that’s because they’ve been replaced by plastic made in china dolls, that look nothing like us. In general, less people bought the doll over the years, and that could be why vendors started selling everyday dolls that they decorated differently to fit the occasion, so that they can simply take it off and resell it again if it wasn’t sold. Also, the threats of making an inferior edible product that can cause poisoning have scared people and encouraged them to buy more plastic dolls. And the government instead of increasing regulations and quality control on the production of the doll, they banned the making of the doll in many areas in Cairo.

If you’re familiar with my work you’ll know by now why I decided to make my own edible version of the Moulid Doll.

All this plastic crap ends up in trash bins, in scrap markets, and tiny bit of it in my studio of course. It makes me sad because to me this doll represented how inventive we were, how we wanted to create beauty and happy memories in this world. Now it’s more about consuming more and more, and it reinforces this how much money you have correlates to your level of happiness.

This project was just one step forward, we wanted to start conversations about the Moulid Doll again, and show people how you can be inventive again, and it’s not about how expensive your resources are, on contrary, you can make use of anything around you to create something new and beautiful.