eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
In this insighful book, Ziauddin Sardar unravels the meaning and significance of Mecca. Tracing its history, from its origins as a “barren valley” in the desert to its evolution as a trading town and sudden emergence as the religious center of a world empire, Sardar examines the religious struggles and rebellions in Mecca that have significantly shaped Muslim culture. An illuminative, lyrical, and witty blend of history, reportage, and memoir, Mecca reflects all that is profound and enlightening, curious and amusing about Mecca and takes us behind the closed doors to one of the most important places in the world today.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781620402689 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 10/21/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 448 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Ziauddin Sardar was born in Pakistan and grew up in Hackney. A writer, broadcaster and cultural critic, he is one of the world's foremost Muslim intellectuals and author of more than fifty books on Islam, science and contemporary culture, including the highly acclaimed Desperately Seeking Paradise. He has been listed by Prospect magazine as one of Britain's top 100 intellectuals. Currently he is the Director of Centre for Postnormal Policy and Futures Studies at East West University, Chicago, co-editor of the quarterly Critical Muslim, consulting editor of Futures, a monthly journal on policy, planning and futures studies, and Chair of the Muslim Institute in London.
www.ziauddinsardar.com
ZIAUDDIN SARDAR is an internationally renowned writer, futurist, and cultural critic. Author of some 30 books, he was recently appointed editor of Futures: The Journal of Policy, Planning and Future Studies. He has been actively involved in the futures movement for over two decades and is an executive board member of the World Futures Studies Federation.
Read an Excerpt
MECCA
The Sacred City
By Ziauddin Sardar
BLOOMSBURY
Copyright © 2014 Ziauddin SardarAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62040-266-5
INTRODUCTION
The Lure of Mecca
The pilgrim bus was stuck in an almighty gridlock. Through an early morning haze I surveyed the snarled jumble extending for miles. The buses, the standard yellow American school bus variety, were distinguished by large Arabic and English lettering on their sides. Around each bus lapped a churning tide of white cloth draped over countless pilgrim souls. The only sign that this ocean contained individual forms came from the varying hues of human flesh. Male pilgrims all wear the same traditional dress – two pieces of unstitched cloth, known as ihram – in such a way that one shoulder is left bare. This vast seething mass of humanity, between 2 and 3 million people, is drawn from every corner of the world, all rushing at the one appointed time to this one place: Mecca.
Once gathered, pilgrims move en masse around the city and its environs progressing from one sacred site to another. This particular tide was to take them from Muzdalifah, where they had spent a night under the stars, to Mina, some three miles away, where they would symbolically humiliate Satan by casting stones at three pillars of rock. But like some powerful bore attempting to force its way up a narrow channel, the onrush had backed up, a white-crested wave as yet unable to generate any hint of forward motion. From my vantage point it was not the fluid dynamics of this impasse that fascinated me. The jostling stasis before me was becoming as traditional as the pilgrim garb has always been. Frequent congestive interruptions are modernity's answer to manoeuvring multitudes of people from place to place by the most up-to-date means. Already I found these hiatuses at odds with my exalted expectations and cherished ideas of the experience offered by this place at this time. Perhaps it was the detachment of ideal and reality that captured my mind. Perhaps it was something in the power of this place. As I surveyed the scene before me I was drawn through the myriad host to just one bus and just one face.
The bus was stuck in a colossal traffic jam. Through one of its windows, I saw one pilgrim sitting perfectly still. A wrinkled face illumined by eyes whose resolute gaze was focused beyond the horizon. Mesmerized by that look, I transported myself through the hubbub as if floating timelessly towards this old man. As I inveigled my way through the crush I understood that he was aware of me, though his gaze had not shifted nor had he made any movement. Only when I got close to the bus did he move. With the deliberation of age and infinite effort he negotiated his way against the tide to leave the bus. It seemed to take for ever. I watched each tottering step until he stood before me. Face to face, I knew what had drawn me to this one old man. Serenity emanated, a blissful calm surrounded him. Without a word, he stretched out his hand and gave me the two pieces of bed linen he had been clutching. Instinctively I took hold of his bundle and followed. He led me beyond the crowds.
At a quiet spot beyond the roadway he indicated that I should lay his sheet upon the ground. It billowed like a sail in the morning breeze. When I had smoothed it out, he lowered his frail body onto it and settled himself down. As he lay there at rest he nodded to me and I understood his gratitude. I sat beside him – I don't know for how long. We did not talk. There was nothing to say. And then I knew he had traversed the horizon. Gently, with reverence, I spread the second sheet to cover his body. Only then did I become concerned. What should I do next? What memorial, what procedure, who to tell, how to keep his body from being trampled by some sudden eddy of the crowd? I was left with questions. He had his answer, his final destination.
It was 16 December 1975. I was fulfilling one of the most important religious duties of a Muslim: Hajj, or pilgrimage, to the sacred city of Mecca. I was excited, enraptured, and somehow connected to over 2 million other pilgrims who were performing the Hajj. I hoped to return spiritually uplifted. Yet the old man had come to die. I felt that he understood the inner meaning of Hajj better than me.
Mecca, birthplace of Islam and also of the Prophet Muhammad, is Islam's holiest city. It is a city that I, in common with almost all Muslims, have known all my life. A once-in-a-lifetime visit to Mecca is a key obligation. Most Muslims, however, will never see Mecca, and yet will have learned, perhaps even memorized, its geography from the moment they were taught to pray. The first lesson for any Muslim child preparing to pray is to identify the location of Mecca, and then to prostrate in the direction of the city, not once, but five times daily.
Our house in Dipalpur, Pakistan, where I was born and spent my infant years, had one tattered old calendar on the wall. In fact, it was very likely the only item of decoration in our house. The calendar had a picture – rather gaudy, I now realize – of the Sacred Mosque that stands at the heart of Mecca with its soaring minarets amid the encircling hills. The heart of the Mosque, the centre of the picture, was the Kaaba. The Kaaba drew the eye. It was an abrupt, arresting presence, a simple cuboid structure enveloped by a drapery of gold-embroidered black cloth. If you peered intently at the picture you could just make out that the streams of white swirling around this focal point were a mass of pilgrims. The word 'Allah' was written in bold Arabic letters just above the minarets.
Time has moved on, but the image of the Kaaba on our decorative calendar is fixed, burnt into my memory. The very first picture I ever saw confirmed in me the certain knowledge that, while God is everywhere, in some special sense the divine power is focused in this one place; that the Kaaba is quite simply God's House. This picture so clearly indicating God's presence formed a primal bond that I knew connected me, inseparably, for all time to this one place. It was a childish innocence, and yet everything I learnt was to strengthen this conviction. It grew up within me as I added new layers of understanding. This sense of personal attachment is not mine alone. It is a love and devotion, a yearning and a dream that I share with more than a billion others. It is a common bond between Muslims: Mecca and I is at one and the same time Mecca for all. To be at Mecca is the taproot of individual identity and the common link of an entire worldwide community.
My first religious lessons were all about Mecca. When my mother taught me to read the Qur'an as an infant, I learned that the Sacred Text of Islam was God's Words first revealed to Muhammad at Mecca. The stories I was told about the life of the Prophet Muhammad made Mecca and its environs more familiar to me than the country in which I lived: the cave at Hira, on the outskirts of Mecca, where the Prophet received his first revelations in 611; the town of Medina, which was called Yathrib during the days of Muhammad, where the Prophet sought refuge from persecution in Mecca; and the well of Badr and the mountain of Uhad where the Prophet fought his battles. But in Islamic tradition the history of Mecca long pre-dates the seventh century. The holy precincts around the Kaaba contain stories stretching back to the very beginning of time. Adam, who in Muslim tradition is the first Prophet, visited Mecca and was buried there. Prophet Ibrahim, or Abraham, the father of monotheistic faiths, built the Kaaba with his son Ismail, or Ishmael. Every Muslim child grows up with these stories, internalizing their geography as a personal landscape whose contours and history define who they are.
But Mecca is so much more than a place where things happened once upon a time in history. Mecca matters because, as my mother often explained, it was there that God revealed to the Prophet Muhammad his guidance on how to lead a moral life. So what the Prophet taught, what he said and how he did things provided the examples that I was told I should try hard to follow in order to grow up to be a fine human being. What happened in Mecca was alive in the simplest daily activities of my life, in all the strictures with which adults seek to tame youthful exuberance and the knotty deliberations that a gregarious youngster like me encountered in determining whether I was being naughty or not so nice. There was never a doubt that I must always look towards Mecca if I was to amount to anything worthwhile in this world.
When I was sent to more formal religious lessons the supple sympathy of my mother's approach was replaced by the sterner discipline of the madrassa. The lessons I was required to master fed my fascination with Mecca. Like all Muslim children I learnt that one of the five pillars of our faith was an obligation to visit Mecca, if I was able, at least once in my lifetime to perform the Hajj, to be part of the great annual pilgrimage that is the highest expression of Muslim existence. I drank in all the details: one had to walk around the Kaaba – for real. The other stations of the pilgrimage became landmarks in my growing sense of geography: the hamlet of Mina, where the pilgrims were required to spend a few nights; the plains of Arafat, at the foot of the Mount of Mercy – here pilgrims prayed the noon prayer in unison; the parched landscape of Muzdalifah, where pilgrims spent a night under the open sky. What an adventure it would be – to cross continents and stand where the Prophet had stood, to walk in his footsteps performing the same rituals he established and be part of that ocean of brotherhood that united people of every race and nation. And ultimately to stand with this vast gathering to ask God directly for His mercy and blessing – of course I was determined, like Muslims everywhere, that one day I would go to Mecca. I would be a pilgrim, Mecca would not always be a picture: one day I really would be there.
My family did cross continents, though we bypassed Mecca as we journeyed from Pakistan to settle in London. We changed the course of our lives in many ways – but Mecca remained a fixed point. We had of course to locate it from a new direction, but it was still central to our shifting identity. Our new home raised complex new questions, from the existential to the utterly practical, in which Mecca was a vital feature of the choices we made. A moral compass does not cease to function because one's surroundings are new and strange, or else it is no compass at all.
As I grew up in London, Mecca continued to be my lodestone and objective. I studied the glories of Muslim history, I read about other cities – Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, Fez, Samarkand, Granada and Delhi, the source of my own Mughal heritage. They encompassed the birth of science, the glories of architecture, literary achievements, subtlety of debate, the history of ideas, legacies that enriched the whole of human history as they were appropriated far beyond the confines of Muslim lands. Wherever these achievements occurred, they emerged only because of Mecca, the progenitor of their values and virtues. Obviously, this was why the Hajj existed, the perennial annual return to the source that should spiritually replenish and rejuvenate Muslims everywhere.
And then, as I dreamt about Mecca and planned to visit the city during my mid-twenties, Mecca actually came to me. It came as an offer of the job of a lifetime. This was to become part of the team at the newly established Hajj Research Centre, based in Saudi Arabia's port city of Jeddah. The Centre was located on the campus of the newly established King Abdul Aziz University, and my job was to study and research the logistic problems of Hajj, as well as the past, present and future of Mecca.
From the birth of Islam to just before the discovery of oil, Mecca would host on average 100,000 pilgrims each year, arriving on foot, by sea, or riding on the backs of animals. But that world has now vanished and modern transport links mean that up to 3 million Muslims perform the pilgrimage each year, making it the greatest gathering of humanity anywhere on earth. The sudden influx of oil wealth created the possibility of meeting this immense logistical challenge in entirely new ways. Plans were afoot to transform Mecca, I was told. Modernization, however, brought consequential problems and threatened collateral damage. Everything was happening fast. There was little time to learn how to manage the coming change with a better understanding of the dynamics of pilgrimage and appreciation of the historic significance and environment of Mecca. How could I refuse? I would walk within the primal image I had cherished from childhood, be part of the greatest adventure I had ever conceived – and be paid for the privilege!
I was going to Mecca. And that's how I came to be in Mecca in that momentous December of 1975.
I worked at the Hajj Research Centre for some five years. I took part in the Hajj itself for each of those five years, studying the comings and goings of Hajj pilgrims, and also those who would come for the year-round 'lesser' pilgrimage that is known as Umra. The rituals of Umra are a subset of the Hajj and can be performed at any time of year outside the designated Hajj season, which falls in the twelfth and final month of Islam's lunar calendar. During those years I became intimately familiar with Mecca and its environs, I watched them change, almost never according to the ground plans and advice we devised at the Centre. In those years, and since, I have travelled to and from Mecca many times, by various means to and from many places in the world. And still nothing quite prepares you for the experience. Nor is there anything I can compare to the very first time I entered the city of my heart's longing and found myself within the Sacred Mosque.
It was late afternoon. I went through the main gate, Bab al-Malik. I began to tremble as I walked through the cool shaded building upheld by innumerable archways and approached the final colonnade. The light beyond the shade rebuffed me. It was not daylight. It was some intensified glorious glow, a luminosity peculiar to this place, contained within the open plaza at the heart of the Mosque. The oxygen drained from my lungs. 'I am here.' The thought reverberated through my body with each gulp for air. 'I am here.' The words struggled to emerge from my open mouth. My head was spinning, yet my eyes were focused on the Kaaba. I stood in awe and wonder, reverence and astonishment, elation and perplexity; a profound sadness and an irresistible smile of infinite joy took possession of me simultaneously in a moment that seemed to last for ever. I felt an urge to spread my arms and embrace everyone, enfold everyone in my exultation. And yet I was blissfully unaware of other people here in this place. It was me and the Kaaba. How could it be here? How can I be here? How can it be here before me? It was beyond imagination, beyond comprehension, more than reality. It was the point at which there is only prayer.
I was rooted in humility, standing stock-still before the sight of the Kaaba, humbled by the feelings overpowering me, struggling with all my might to take hold of the sensations I felt, to keep possession of every aspect of this experience. The sight, the light – and gradually there was a smell. What was the odour of sanctity? It infused this atmosphere. I could identify the lingering grace notes of incense, mingled with a miasma of dust, the infinitesimal fine particles of airborne sand mixed with motes of woollen fluff stirred up by the throng of feet traversing a bed of carpets. This melange blended with the effusions of human bodies. And there was something else. Some edge, some sharp, acrid something. Suddenly a flight of pigeons took to the air in the open space before me. The beating of their wings startled me, jolting me back to time and place and a simple realization – the added ingredient was pigeon droppings. Out of slime we all came, the Qur'an says, and though we can ascend higher than angels the footprints of humanity remain in the mud. So why should the odour of sanctity not include the savour of pigeon droppings?
I needed no thought to know what must happen next. Automatically I took my place, merging into the flow, becoming part of the stream of people moving ceaselessly around the Kaaba. One is required to complete seven circuits, round and round that fixed point. Counting was beyond me. I could have walked for ever. I had become one with my earliest image, one with the tide of history, with all those who had walked here before me, and one with myself. 'I am here.' It is the pilgrim's phrase, 'Lab-balk.' 'I am here.' It is the only statement that makes sense, the only thing one can say in this place at any time.
I have stood before the Kaaba many times since. I have seen it at all times of day and night in every season. It is not true of course that there are actual sharply defined seasons in Mecca. There are enormous differences of temperature and changes in humidity, which can be experienced in a day as well as over the course of a year. At the height of summer temperatures soar to well over 40 degrees Celsius. When the sun sets, the heat rapidly recedes and the nights can be chilled, even feel bitterly cold. Summer nights begin by being as warm as a hot summer's day in northern Europe, and end with a dawn that has a distinct autumnal chill. The contrast between the intense heat of the day and the cold of late evening can make you reach for a woolly jumper or wrap up in a warm shawl.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from MECCA by Ziauddin Sardar. Copyright © 2014 Ziauddin Sardar. Excerpted by permission of BLOOMSBURY.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Map, vii,Introduction: The Lure of Mecca, xi,
1 The Valley of Weeping, 1,
2 'I Love Thee More Than the Entire World', 33,
3 Rebellions at God's Earthly Throne, 65,
4 Sharifs, Sultans and Sectarians, 104,
5 Love and Fratricide in the Holy City, 141,
6 The Caravans of Precious Gifts, 174,
7 The Wahhabi Threat, 214,
8 Camels, Indians and Feudal Queens, 244,
9 Western Visitors, Arab Garb, 275,
10 Mecca Under the Saudis, 313,
11 The Reconfigured Utopia, 343,
Chronology, 365,
Notes, 373,
Acknowledgements, 393,
Index, 395,