University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2018 Sacred Orientation: The Qibla As Ritual, Metaphor, And Identity Marker In Early Islam Ari Michael Gordon University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Islamic Studies Commons, and the Islamic World and Near East History Commons Recommended Citation Gordon, Ari Michael, "Sacred Orientation: The Qibla As Ritual, Metaphor, And Identity Marker In Early Islam" (2018). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 3220. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3220 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3220 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Sacred Orientation: The Qibla As Ritual, Metaphor, And Identity Marker In Early Islam Abstract Scholars of early Islam often take for granted the title of this study—that facing the qibla (i.e. the geographic direction of worship) is an important Islamic ritual and that Muḥammad’s turn toward the Kaʿba after facing Jerusalem for prayer marked the identity of his nascent community. This postulate is rarely questioned, but the mechanisms by which the qibla expressed and inscribed a collective Islamic identity remain largely unexplored. Rather, study of Islam’s sacred direction tends to focus on either historical reconstruction of Islamic origins or on the science of qibla-calculation. The former seeks to question or establish the location of the original qibla, while the latter examines the mathematics, astronomy, and cartography used to ascertain the direction of prayer with growing precision from around the Muslim oikumene. This dissertation probes, instead, the discursive and ritual processes through which qibla-rhetoric and qibla-practice fostered a sense of group belonging and marked boundaries between Islam and other religious communities (mainly Christians and Jews).