I explore representations of birth, midwives and material and political contexts of their expertise in contemporary Arabic fiction and Muslim convert narratives in Mexico. I read these through the increasingly sophisticated histories and ethnographies of colonial medicine and reproductive health in the region and my own ethnography of the new Muslim midwifery in Mexico. Muslim midwives in Mexico invoke the Quranic narrative of the birth of the prophet Jesus as paradigmatic of birth and their own role. Maryam labored and birthed alone, aided by the miraculous date palm which fed and sustained her. Birth is naturalized and sacralized as an instinctive act that a laboring woman achieves on her own, with the help of God. As midwives, they are companions and facilitators to this transcendental junction; thus they claim the midwife’s “cosmological-existential dimension” (Giladi 2015) at the heart of Ibn Khaldun’s Muqadimat. As pertains to postpartum, the core shift in convert miwives' experience reflects their sexualization of birth and support of birthing mothers' reclaiming of sexuality and sexual pleasure. In the fiction of Moroccan Tahar Ben Jelloun (L’Enfant de Sable, 1985), Algerian Nora Aceval (Contes du Djebel Amour, 2006), Omani Joha Al-Haarti (Sayyidat al Qamar, 2010), Saudi Raja Alem (Khatem, 2011), and the stage production of Palestinian Bashar Murkus (Milk, 2022), midwives presence or absence at birth are crucial to emplotment. In L’Enfant de Sable the midwife, described as both greedy and willing to twist the will of God, becomes an accomplice to patriarchal desire for a male heir. In Nora Aceval’s collection of Algerian fairytales, the substitution of a witch as birth attendant allows a Sultan’s jealous senior wives to make the desired male heir disappear at birth, and his wronged mother to be evicted from the harem. In Al-Haarti’s Saayidat, birth is a marker of social status, supported to a burdensome degree for the shaikh’s daughters, and as a lone, efficient procedure by slave women overtaken by labour at their tasks. In Alem’s Khatem, the absence of a midwife causes extreme suffering during labor, and the child’s uneasy gender assignation. In Murkus’ Milk, the material of a new birth and life is transfigured by death. Wasted breastmilk, that there is no one to drink, embodies the loss of one’s own, or mulk, in mothers’ unremitting grief for their dead children. Even the powerful experience of a new birth, on stage, cannot efface such loss.