Overall, the chapter seeks to capture and convey a sense of fundamental ambivalence that characterizes and accompanies maulidi performances and social experiences of different kinds of social actors on the Swahili coast, as they move between pious dedication and vivid and boisterous worldly partying. In Lamu, on the Northern Swahili coast in Kenya, the ambivalence of maulidi celebrations is present on different levels of social life and public discourse (among ordinary Muslims and scholars) and with a view to specific forms and kinds of socially embedded performance, engagement and interaction. In this chapter, I explore and discuss how this foundational translocal ambivalence plays out locally, looking at maulidi practices, performances, and contexts, as they are publicly engaged in, and contested and negotiated during this festive period. In the final part of this chapter, I present a brief contextual discussion of maulidi-related writings by relevant Swahili Muslim scholars – specifically Sheikh Abdalla Saleh Farsy, a leading modernist reformer – to show how references to the regionally specific maulidi practices and debates about them are reflected in their arguments about the propriety and acceptability of such celebrations.