stages in the life of the Prophet, his family and companions. One can still sense the perfume of his presence in that beautiful oasis city, al-Madinah, which Muslims cherish the world over.
Mecca and Medina in Later History
Through all the later vicissitudes of Islamic history, Mecca and Medina have continued as the spiritual and religious centers of the Islamic world, but the political heart of the Islamic world was to leave Arabia a little more than two decades after the death of the Prophet. Abu Bakr, Umar and Uthman, the first three caliphs, ruled the ever-expanding Islamic world from Medina, where they enlarged the Mosque of the Prophet as well as the limits of the city itself. But the fourth caliph, Ali, facing the rebellion of the garrison in Syria, moved to Kufa in Iraq to prepare an army to put down this revolt. His coming to Kufa, which henceforth became the capital until Ali’s assassination, moved the political center of Islam out of Arabia forever. For after Ali, the Umayyads who gained political power did not return to Mecca or Medina but made Damascus their capital while their successors, the Abbasids, built Baghdad as their capital. Both dynasties, however, influenced the architecture of the two holy cities. During the early Umayyad period, the people of both Mecca and Medina resisted strongly Umayyad directives. The grandson of Abu Bakr, Abd Allah, led a revolt in Mecca against the Umayyads, as a result of which the Ka’bah became seriously damaged and was rebuilt with the help of architects and craftsmen using Yemeni building techniques. But the city was attacked again by the Umayyad general al-Hajjaj and all of Abd Allah’s work on the Ka’bah was destroyed and the monument reconstructed. Likewise in Medina, many of the houses of the ahl al-bayt or household of the Prophet, including the house of Fatimah, were destroyed by the Umayyads. Some people believe, in fact, that the Umayyads built the monumental mosques of Jerusalem and Damascus so that Muslims would pay less attention to Mecca and Medina, but such was not to be the case.
Although raids and skirmishes continued from time to time, the most famous being that of the Carmathians in the fourth/tenth century during which they stole the Black Stone of the Ka’bah for twenty-one years, Mecca and Medina continued to be revered as the spiritual centers of the Islamic world. They even resisted the more worldly art that the Umayyads had developed farther north and had sought to impose upon the two holy cities. During the Abbasid as well as Mamluk and Ottoman periods, great attention continued to be paid to the two cities and many fine monuments were created, some of which survive to this day, for it was the greatest honor and responsibility to be custodian and protector of the two holy cities. Since 1926, after the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the defeat of the Hashimites of Mecca by the Saudis, Hijaz has been a part of Saudi Arabia. Under the new situation, the custodianship of the two holy cities continued to be seen as the greatest honor by the Saudis to the extent that the King of Saudi Arabia is not referred to as “His Majesty” but as “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques”.
During all the centuries of Islamic history, Mecca and Medina remained outside the major turmoils in the heartland of the Islamic world farther north. The tremors of the Crusades and the Mongol invasion hardly reached them, while they continued to be visited by streams of pilgrims from the east to the west of the Islamic world, many of whom, in fact, took refuge in the calm and peace of these cities from either turmoil in their place of birth, or the din of the life of the world, as we see in the case of Baha al-Din Walad, the father of Jalal al-Din Rumi who, fleeing the Mongol invasion in Khurasan, came with his young son to Mecca before settling in Anatolia; or Imam al-Ghazali, who spent years in seclusion in the holy cities. Many of those Islamic scholars, who are called Makki or Madani, hailed, in fact, from other regions of the Islamic world but settled in the two holy cities. These cities remained over the centuries as the heart of Islamic civilization whose more evident and well-known centers, as far as political, intellectual and artistic life are concerned, lay north, east and west of the sacred land of Hijaz, the birthplace of Islam. Hijaz itself continues to this day to be the religious center of the Islamic world as a result of the ever-living presence and continuing significance of Mecca and Medina.
The Ka’bah
This House of God and primordial temple dedicated to the One, which is the object of the Hajj and the focal point for the daily prayers or the qiblah of all Muslims, stands at the heart of Mecca as testimony to the nature of Islam as the pure monotheism which revived the monotheism of Abraham and ultimately the primordial message of unity revealed to Adam, at once the father of humanity and first prophet. The Ka’bah is the concrete symbol of the origin of Islam and, in Muslim eyes, of all religion. To come to the Ka’bah is to return to one’s origin. But it is also the supreme center of Islam by virtue of which all Muslims turn to it in their daily canonical prayers. Like all veritable traditional civilizations, Islam is dominated by the two realities of Origin and Center, and these two fundamental dimensions of Islamic life are present in the Ka’bah. Throughout his or her life on earth, a Muslim, whether living by one of the volcanic peaks of Java or in the desert of Mauritania, is aware of the Ka’bah as the point on earth which links him or her to the origin of himself or herself, of his or her religion, Islam, and ultimately of humanity as such. The Muslim is also aware that all points of space on earth are linked by an invisible line to a unique center which is the Ka’bah towards which one directs one’s face five times a day in prayer. The Muslim, therefore, has a relation to the Ka’bah which is at once static and dynamic, static for there is a constant link between every point of the space of the Islamic cosmos and the Ka’bah, and dynamic because it is toward the Ka’bah that one journeys during the pilgrimage. In a sense, the daily prayers (al-salah) represent that static relation and the Hajj the dynamic one. Together they confirm the overwhelming and majestic presence of the Ka’bah as at once Origin and Center in the Islamic religious universe, not because of the Ka’bah in its earthly reality but because of what it signifies as the House of God, for in reality it is God alone who is the Origin and Center of a Muslim’s life.
The Ka’bah is considered by Muslims to be a reflection here below of the celestial temple surrounding God’s Throne (al-arsh) except that by inverse analogy, here below, one can speak of surrounding the Throne while in the principal domain it is the Throne that surrounds all things as the Qur’an asserts. The archaic nature of the Ka’bah points to its primordial character. Being a cube (hence the name Ka’bah which means “cube” in Arabic) or almost a cube, it is 12 meters long, 10 meters broad and 16 meters high, possessing therefore dimensions which are in harmonic relation with each other according to the Pythagorean meaning of harmony. As a cube, the Ka’bah also symbolizes the stability and immutability that characterize Islam itself, a religion based on harmony, stability and immutability in its basic reality, hence the truth that Islam can be renewed but not reformed. It is of interest to note that the Holy of Holies in Jerusalem, in which the Ark of the Covenant was kept, was also in the form of a cube. And like the ark, the Ka’bah is considered to reflect the Presence of God. It is like a living body; hence its being dressed in the black cloth (al-kiswah), with golden Qur’anic verses. This dressing of the Sacred House of God, an old Semitic tradition not found in the Graeco-Roman world, is renewed every year and the old kiswah is cut up and distributed so as to allow the barakah of the Ka’bah to emanate among those to whom pieces of the cloth are given. From the earliest centuries of Islamic history, the kiswah was made in Egypt and carried with great care to Mecca, but now it is made near the holy city itself.
The Ka’bah is a structure with cosmic and even metacosmic significance. It lies on the axis which unites Heaven and Earth in the Islamic cosmos. It is situated at the hub of the world at the point of intersection between the axis mundi and the earth. Its properties reflect cosmic harmony. Its four corners point to the four cardinal directions which represent the four pillars (al-arkan) of the traditional cosmos. As for the Black Stone (al-hajar alaswad) at its corner, it is a meteorite, therefore from beyond the earthly ambience. Abraham (Ibrahim) and Ishmael (Ismail) are said to have brought it from the hill of Abu Qubays near Mecca where it had been preserved since coming to earth. According to the Prophet, the stone had descended from Heaven whiter than milk but turned black as the result of the sins of the children of Adam although something of its original luminosity survives. The stone also symbolizes the original covenant made, according to the Qur’an, between God and Adam and all his progeny, whereby all
