has always been dependent on the movements of the greater
Mahommedan world. In the splendid times of the caliphs
immense sums were lavished upon the pilgrimage and the holy
city; and conversely the decay of the central authority of Islām
brought with it a long period of faction, wars and misery, in
which the most notable episode was the sack of Mecca by the
Carmathians at the pilgrimage season of A.D. 930. The victors
carried off the “black stone,” which was not restored for twenty-two
years, and then only for a great ransom, when it was plain
that even the loss of its palladium could not destroy the sacred
character of the city. Under the Fatimites Egyptian influence
began to be strong in Mecca; it was opposed by the sultans of
Yemen, while native princes claiming descent from the Prophet—the
Hāshimite amīrs of Mecca, and after them the amīrs of the
house of Qatāda (since 1202)—attained to great authority and
aimed at independence; but soon after the final fall of the
Abbasids the Egyptian overlordship was definitely established
by sultan Bībars (A.D. 1269). The Turkish conquest of Egypt
transferred the supremacy to the Ottoman sultans (1517), who
treated Mecca with much favour, and during the 16th century
executed great works in the sanctuary and temple. The
Ottoman power, however, became gradually almost nominal,
and that of the amīrs or sherīfs increased in proportion, culminating
under Ghālib, whose accession dates from 1786. Then
followed the wars of the Wahhābīs (see Arabia and Wahhābīs)
and the restoration of Turkish rule by the troops of Mehemet
ʽAli. By him the dignity of sherīf was deprived of much of
its weight, and in 1827 a change of dynasty was effected by the
appointment of Ibn ʽAun. Afterwards Turkish authority again
decayed. Mecca is, however, officially the capital of a Turkish
province, and has a governor-general and a Turkish garrison,
while Mahommedan law is administered by a judge sent from
Constantinople. But the real sovereign of Mecca and the Hejāz
is the sherīf, who, as head of a princely family claiming descent
from the Prophet, holds a sort of feudal position. The dignity
of sherīf (or grand sherīf, as Europeans usually say for the sake
of distinction, since all the kin of the princely houses reckoning
descent from the Prophet are also named sherīfs), although by
no means a religious pontificate, is highly respected owing to
its traditional descent in the line of Hasan, son of the fourth
caliph ʽAli. From a political point of view the sherīf is the
modern counterpart of the ancient amīrs of Mecca, who were
named in the public prayers immediately after the reigning
caliph. When the great Mahommedan sultanates had become
too much occupied in internecine wars to maintain order in
the distant Hejāz, those branches of the Hassanids which from
the beginning of Islam had retained rural property in Arabia
usurped power in the holy cities and the adjacent Bedouin
territories. About A.D. 960 they established a sort of kingdom
with Mecca as capital. The influence of the princes of Mecca
has varied from time to time, according to the strength of the
foreign protectorate in the Hejāz or in consequence of feuds
among the branches of the house; until about 1882 it was for
most purposes much greater than that of the Turks. The
latter were strong enough to hold the garrisoned towns, and
thus the sultan was able within certain limits—playing off
one against the other the two rival branches of the aristocracy,
viz. the kin of Ghālib and the house of IbnʽAun—to assert the
right of designating or removing the sherīf, to whom in turn
he owed the possibility of maintaining, with the aid of considerable
pensions, the semblance of his much-prized lordship
over the holy cities. The grand sherīf can muster a considerable
force of freedmen and clients, and his kin, holding wells and
lands in various places through the Hejāz, act as his deputies and
administer the old Arabic customary law to the Bedouin. To
this influence the Hejāz owes what little of law and order it
enjoys. During the last quarter of the 19th century Turkish
influence became preponderant in western Arabia, and the
railway from Syria to the Hejāz tended to consolidate the
sultan’s supremacy. After the sherīfs, the principal family of
Mecca is the house of Shaibah, which holds the hereditary
custodianship of the Kaʽba.
The Great Mosque and the Kaʽba.—Long before Mahomet the chief sanctuary of Mecca was the Kaʽba, a rude stone building without windows, and having a door 7 ft. from the ground; and so named from its resemblance to a monstrous astragalus (die) of about 40 ft. cube, though the shapeless structure is not really an exact cube nor even exactly rectangular.[1] The Kaʽba has been rebuilt more than once since Mahomet purged it of idols and adopted it as the chief sanctuary of Islām, but the old form has been preserved, except in secondary details;[2] so that the “Ancient House,” as it is titled, is still essentially a heathen temple, adapted to the worship of Islām by the clumsy fiction that it was built by Abraham and Ishmael by divine revelation as a temple of pure monotheism, and that it was only temporarily perverted to idol worship from the time when ʽAmr ibn Lohai introduced the statue of Hobal from Syria[3] till the victory of Islam. This fiction has involved the superinduction of a new mythology over the old heathen ritual, which remains practically unchanged. Thus the chief object of veneration is the black stone, which is fixed in the external angle facing Safā. The building is not exactly oriented, but it may be called the south-east corner. Its technical name is the black corner, the others being named the Yemen (south-west), Syrian (north-west), and Irāk (north-east) corners, from the lands to which they approximately point. The black stone is a small dark mass a span long, with an aspect suggesting volcanic or meteoric origin, fixed at such a height that it can be conveniently kissed by a person of middle size. It was broken by fire in the siege of A.D. 683 (not, as many authors relate, by the Carmathians), and the pieces are kept together by a silver setting. The history of this heavenly stone, given by Gabriel to Abraham, does not conceal the fact that it was originally a fetish, the most venerated of a multitude of idols and sacred stones which stood all round the sanctuary in the time of Mahomet. The Prophet destroyed the idols, but he left the characteristic form of worship—the ṭawāf, or sevenfold circuit of the sanctuary, the worshipper kissing or touching the objects of his veneration—and besides the black stone he recognized the so-called “southern” stone, the same presumably as that which is still touched in the ṭawāf at the Yemen corner (Muh. in Med. pp. 336, 425). The ceremony of the ṭawāf and the worship of stone fetishes was common to Mecca with other ancient Arabian sanctuaries.[4] It was, as it still is, a frequent religious exercise of the Meccans, and the first duty of one who returned to the city or arrived there under a vow of pilgrimage; and thus the outside of the Kaʽba was and is more important than the inside. Islām did away with the worship of idols; what was lost in interest by their suppression
- ↑ The exact measurements (which, however, vary according to different authorities) are stated to be: sides 37 ft. 2 in. and 38 ft. 4 in.; ends 31 ft. 7 in. and 29 ft.; height 35 ft.
- ↑ The Kaʽba of Mahomet’s time was the successor of an older building, said to have been destroyed by fire. It was constructed in the still usual rude style of Arabic masonry, with string courses of timber between the stones (like Solomon’s Temple). The roof rested on six pillars; the door was raised above the ground and approached by a stair (probably on account of the floods which often swept the valley); and worshippers left their shoes under the stair before entering. During the first siege of Mecca (A.D. 683), the building was burned down, the Ibn Zubair reconstructed it on an enlarged scale and in better style of solid ashlar-work. After his death his most glaring innovations (the introduction of two doors on a level with the ground, and the extension of the building lengthwise to include the Ḥijr) were corrected by Ḥajjāj, under orders from the caliph, but the building retained its more solid structure. The roof now rested on three pillars, and the height was raised one-half. The Kaʽba was again entirely rebuilt after the flood of A.D. 1626, but since Ḥajjāj there seem to have been no structural changes.
- ↑ Hobal was set up within the Temple over the pit that contained the sacred treasures. His chief function was connected with the sacred lot to which the Meccans were accustomed to betake themselves in all matters of difficulty.
- ↑ See Ibn Hishām i. 54, Azraḳī p. 80 (ʽUzzā in Baṭn Marr); Yāḳūt iii. 705 (Otheydā); Bar Hebraeus on Psalm xii. 9. Stones worshipped by circling round them bore the name dawār or duwār (Krehl, Rel. d. Araber, p. 69). The later Arabs not unnaturally viewed such cultus as imitated from that of Mecca (Yāqūt iv. 622, cf. Dozy, Israeliten te Mekka, p. 125, who draws very perverse inferences).
