Upon Reading Al-Azraqi

OLEG GRABAR UPON READING AL-AZRAQI It is altogether curious that so little scholarship has been frequently difficult to interpret sixth-century Byzantine devoted to the physical features of Mecca in early phials from Jerusalem is striking." Furthermore, the Islamic times. Except for the informative and detailed Muslim images all belong to a time when the sanctuary entries in the two editions of the Encyclopaedia of Islam,1 had acquired more or less the shape it would keep until most writing on Mecca has been concerned either with the momentous and irreversible transformations of re its socioeconomic and religious-cultural setting at the cent decades, a shape fixed in its major features by the time of the Revelation to Muhammad or, even more end of the ninth century. Even the principal often, with the pilgrimage, its complex liturgical prac monuments punctuating the holy place had been built tices , its concomitant economic and other practical by the fifteenth century, and such stylistic variations as problems, and, especially in more recent times, the occurred during reconstructions were rarely, if ever, powerfully moving emotional and spiritual experiences recorded on images. They were not meant to be of the faithful on th is holiest ofjourneys.2 descriptions of places, but evocations of holiness, and Yet, however fascinating and emotionally charged they do not provide any sense ofthe range ofemotion or the practices and symbolic associations of the reaction the faithful experienced as they reached the pilgrimage might be , they are only one part of the im sanctuary, nor do they express the complex memories pact the holy city has on the pilgrim. The Ka'ba, the carried away by pilgrims afterward. There is nothing in Masjid al-H aram, or Sacred Mosque, surrounding it, these depictions that is comparable in range to Ibn and the whole city of Mecca are today, as they were in Jubayr's rapturous but very precise description studded the past, part of a common visual memory of the with Koranic quotations," Ibn Battuta's chatty but Muslim community, even if colored by the emotional equally concrete account full of stories and minor make-up and sensitivities of each particular individual. human events," Ibn Khaldun's perfunctory statement Every Muslim has in common an awareness of its forms with a long reference to the letters he received and the and spatial compositions. important people he met in Mecca," or Ibn al-Arabi's Since the beginning of the twentieth century, transformation of the holy place and of the pilgrimage photographs and films have been available to serve as into a stunning cosmologicalvision." But even these reminders of the holy city and of th e events taking place literary examples are relatively late (the earliest author, in it. In earlier centuries people relied on printed, sten IbnJubayr, was born in 1145); they belong to essential ciled , drawn, and painted pictures rendered on paper, ly post-Fatimid centuries, when the Muslim world had cloth, tile , stone, or any other available material for the fully developed a material culture of piety around Mec images of Mecca that became the souvenirs or memen ca and probably other religious sanctuaries as well .? tos that were the permanent signs of a believer's What happened to the Meccan sanctuary between association with the city of the qibla." These representa the Prophet's glorious and official return to it in 631 tions are, however, for the most part very conventional and the, properly speaking, medieval restructuring of and stereotyped and, pending detailed investigation, the Muslim world from the eleventh century onward? Is contribute very little to an understanding of the holy it possible to imagine the attitudes of people during the city 's physical character and evolution. They are pious formative centuries of Islam toward the shape, the images, not historical documents, and reflect a physical form, of their holiest sanctuary? The inv estiga standard, toponymically accurate but visually tion I am proposing, of which this essay is only a very simplified vision of a rectangle with the places of com preliminary step , has as its long-range objective an memorative or liturgical importance clearly marked. understanding of the interplay between specific The contrast between them and the complicated and building activities-the erection of a colonnade or of a 2 OLEG GRABAR portico, the repaving of a court, the addition of some historical inquiries that are far removed from the art decoration-which can easily be documented through historian's or archaeologist's concerns and competence. an inscription or a chronicle's reference, and the prac A brief description of al-Azraqi's work will suggest tical, ideological, pietistic, and symbolic motivations the type of information that could be extracted from a and explanations attached to these activities. This type literary and structural analysis of this kind. Structurally of investigation may allow us little by little to develop a the book can be divided into four unequal parts: the profile of the syn chronic and diachronic mental at first covers the Ka'ba from the Creation to the titudes of Muslims and of the relationship between Yemenis' attempt to destroy the Ka'ba late in the sixth those attitudes and architecture. Because of its over century (pp. 1-84); the second, the "historical" Kaiba whelming importance to Muslims, the Haram in Mec and the immediately surrounding holy spots (Maqam ca can serve as an exemplar for this sort of investiga Ibrahim, Zemzem well) from the time of their tion, and whatever hypotheses or conclusions can be reconstruction by the Qurayah before the Revelation to reached for Mecca should apply to other holy buildings al-Azraqi's time, with sections on the chronology, and places as well. characteristics, and liturgical or daily uses of the holy There is no available archaeological record for the places (pp. 84-301); the third, the Masjid al-Haram, Haram, and none is likely to be forthcoming. We are i.e., the open space which surrounds the Ka'ba and therefore restricted to incidental references in which is entirely a Muslim creation (pp. 301-445); and chronicles, to the factual but, with a partial exception in the fourth, the living quarters of the city and a few the case of Maqdisi, remarkably sober descriptions in miscellaneous items (pp. 445-505). tenth-century geographies.l" and to the lengthy volume Except for the last section, which is fairly straightfor Kitiib Akhbiir Makka ("Book oflnformation on Mecca") ward and enumerative, each part consists of a large by Abu al-Walid Muhammad b. cAbdallah b. cAli al number of chapters, some as long as ten or fifteen Azraqi.!' The book was put together before 865 by a pages, some as short as a paragraph or a few lines. native of Mecca claiming descent from a Byzantine Some are purely descriptive, either of a building or of a soldier who was taken prisoner during the Persian wars fragment of a building (e.g., the nails and the gutter of of the seventh century. It is primarily a text completed the Ka -ba); some deal with an event (e .g., the Yemeni by a member ofhis family before 837, but, as preserved invasion) or with a sequence of events (e.g ., the various and edited, also includes references from as late as pieces of cloth put on the Kaiba and the scents sprayed 922-23. It was probably revised by a pupil of al-Azraqi on it over several centuries), or with good or bad prac called al-KhuzaiL'" Although there is some evidence tices and obligations (e.g., on p. 316, the virtue of cir that works on Mecca and on the Ka'ba were written cumambulating the Ka'ba in the rain). In other words, earlier, including one by Wahb ibn Munabbih in the the book is neither an account in chronological se early eighth century;' ? none has survived. Azraqi's quence nor is it an orderly description of space. There is mid-ninth-century work is therefore not only the a constant interplay between specific moments, usually earliest extant book on Mecca, but the earliest pre established quite precisely with names and dates when served example of a book devoted to a single city . An known, and equally specific places in the sanctuary. It added peculiarity is that it does not deal at all with the is as though the understanding of something seen re city's notables, as most Arabic literature on cities does, quires its connection with a historical or a mythical but with its buildings and their history. By its very event, often drawn from the lives of Abraham or nature, therefore, it establishes that Mecca's physical Hagar, which were connected with so many places in character and evolution had primacy over the people Mecca. who lived in it. The same events are repeated several times, and Several recent studies on early Muslim writers have while a coherent chronology can be derived from al begun to formulate methods for investigating written Azraqi's account, establishing a sequence ofevents does sources that will define the attitudes oftheir authors and not seem to be its main point. Only a careful structural explain the experiences and thoughts that lie behind a analysis of many passages'> in al-Azraqi's book and book's content and structure.!" Such investigations can their collation with other historical or religious sources be of great value to the historian and interpreter of would reveal whether he was using events to explain visual form s, but they also require complex and anomalous as well as regular features and practices, or painstaking philological, linguistic, critical , and whether he was seeking to connect sacred and, later,.

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