by Leslie Farmer

During the six weeks in which I was traveling through the Arab world for this study of Arab women I devoted a rather disproportionate amount of time to the subject of the harem—in Arabic, “harem”—in hopes of dispelling some of the mystery—and misinformation—has clouded the West’s view of this now nearly extinct system of polygamy,

This did not involve, as some might imagine, bypassing ferocious retainers and double-locked doors to meet groups of secluded beauties; to uncover any remnants of the classical harem system would have required travels longer and further than mine. Today, in fact, the word “harem” simply means “women” not, as it once did, “inviolable” or “forbidden,” the sense which was beloved by story tellers and which still lingers, hardly less vividly, in Western imagination.

The origin of polygamy of polygamy have been variously ascribed to a superfluity of marriageable women and to the assumption that men must acquire as many women as possible for labor and for producing children—primitive society’s basic form of capital. Whatever its origins, polygamy existed well before Islam—in some cases, by thousands of years—in such diverse areas as India, China, Babylonia, Egypt, Persia, the Arabian Peninsula and Europe. But it was during the rule of the Ottoman sultans in Istanbul that the institution reached its greatest extension in Islam. Historians report top figures of up to 1,200 women, each with a certain rank in a formal hierarchy. The head of the harem was the sultan valideh, the mother of the ruling sultan. Next in importance after the sultan valideh were the four kadines (few sultans ever took legal wives) ranked in order of arrival, the first highest. A women of any grade could be promoted to a higher one, with its accompanying benefits of more luxurious accommodations and cloths and more servants, if she won the favor of the sultan.

Besides waiting hopefully for the sultan’s summons, the women of the harem acted as servants in various capacities if in the lower ranks, and took instruction in whichever fields they showed aptitude – cooking, accounting, music or other subjects. Sometimes laying their rivalries aside, they all danced or played music for the sultan. Occasionally they were allowed out of the palace for a carefully chaperoned boat trip on the Bosporus. That the harem became a byword for intrigue of all kinds is not precisely unfair. All of the women yearned to rise in wealth and prestige within the hierarchy, and some had a taste for politics as well. One, not at all atypical, who combined both interest—and started the so-called “Reign of Women” in the middle 16th century—was a Russian girl called Roxelana. Second kadine, and a great favorite of the sultan. She managed to have her two main rivals for power—the first kadine and the grand vizier—respectively demoted and exiled and herself soon became, next to the sultan, the strongest power in the empire. The following succession of weak and often degenerate sultans provided a vacuum of power—and the women moved to fill it For a century and a half the harem ruled the empire, making and unmaking sultans, the power shuttling between the sultan valideh, the first kadine and occasionally the chief black eunuch, and intrigue, bribery, extortion and sometimes murder the order of the day.

The great harems in Turkey ended with the deposition and exile of the Sultan Abdul Hamid in 1909, but polygamy lived on. As late as the 1930’s about 10 percent of families in the older generation in Beirut and Cairo, still accepted it, with the percentage somewhat higher in the countryside. Today, although it survives in isolated areas it is increasingly rare.

Seclusion is another matter. Up to five years ago there were women in Arab countries who literally never left their houses. They also disappeared when male visitors arrived and others never sat beside their husbands when driving.

Many older women, I must point out, are well content with this arrangement. As one women said, “They don’t want to give up being pampered.” But some educated younger women are beginning to show signs of discontent. As a young married women in Bahrain put it, “I want to know men’s ideas, and not just from books. I think sometimes we have the wrong ideas about men, and they about us.”

The image of the large and rigidly secluded harem—an institution which fascinated western imagination—was formed largely in the West by highly romanticized travel books and colored writings of not-too-objective missionaries. Burton’s English translation of the Arabian Nights, which appeared in the 19th century and circulated widely in America, was taken to present an accurate picture of current conditions. Even today an advertisement for one major airline features an Oriental potentate of some sort, complete with turban, whip-wielding slave—and some three dozen white veiled women trailing behind him.

Such concepts, as they become further and further divorced from present reality, are a sore point among educated Arabs. Characteristics, perhaps, of both the amusement and the annoyance they awake, is the remark of one peninsular amir (not apocryphal) recently planning an official visit to a western community. “Please don’t let the ladies start asking me about how many wives I have,” he begged an American friend. “If I tell them one, they won’t believe me; if I tell them two or three, they’ll wonder why I don’t have all I’m allowed; and if I tell them four they’ll think it’s too many!”

by Leslie Farmer

In the last part of the eighth century, in the reign of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid in Baghdad, the marketplaces of the Abbasid empire buzzed with rumor. The rebellious sect of the Kharijis in Iraq was up in arms and its forces under Layla—poet, beauty and rebel leader—were giving battle again and again to the troops of the Caliph.

In 1970, over a thousand years later, the suqs of the Arab world again ran with talk of a Layla. This time it was a young woman with an enigmatically lovely face and a background of teaching school and of guerrilla training with one of the most extreme Palestinian commando groups. This Layla had forced one plane to land in Damascus in 1969 and now had attempted to seize another en route to London—tough political gestures which again drew world attention—if also condemnation—to her cause.

In the more than a thousand years between the two militant Laylas, rare indeed were the Arab women who took such an active part in their people’s history. Even more so than the generality of western women, from medieval times almost up to the present, Arab women have lived out their lives in the shadow of men.

From earliest recorded history human society has been patriarchal, women confined mainly to the home and the nearby fields, treated as the property of their husbands, and generally forbidden the society of men outside their families. The lands which are now part of the Arab world inherited this historical pattern, though women occasionally broke it to the extent of ruling as independent monarchs—the Queen of Sheba, Egyptian queens acting as regents, and the famous and tragic Zenobia of third-century Syria.

In the societies of the eastern Mediterranean which were to form the roots of western culture, the patriarchal tradition also persisted. The nomadic Hebrews were strongly patriarchal, in the city-state of Athens, the “freewoman” took no part in public life and was perpetually under the guardianship of her father or husband. And the attitude of writers and theologians of the early Christian church was often inspired rather literally by the tradition of Eve created from Adam and a paradise lost. In fact, the epistles of St. Paul, who shaped the new faith, and masses of early church writings fairly breathe misogyny: woman is useful solely for procreation; outside that she functions only as a temptation to sin and had best stay at home when she is not going to church.

In the Arab world, the triumph of Islam in the seventh century basically codified the position of women with its laws of spiritual and civic conduct. It banned female infanticide, limited polygamy to four wives, forbade sexual relations outside marriage and spelled out women’s rights in marriage and inheritance. But part of this codification was to place women, in unequivocal language, below men: “Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property” (in support of women). (Surah IV, v. 34). Some modern Islamic writers and thinkers believe that, taking the Koran as a whole, women are given an equal-but-different status rather than an inferior one. But most Muslim laymen and scholars, living, it should be remembered, in an already patriarchal civilization, have taken such verses the way many Christians take the story of the Creation and the Fall: literally.

Even so, up to the 10th century, veiling and seclusion were not generally practiced. During the Abbasid era, two royal princesses went off in chain-mail to fight the Byzantines, Arab women composed poetry and music and vied with men in cultural salons and competitions, Harun al-Rashid’s wife Zubaydah appeared at caliphal receptions in all her jewels and brocades, and in Muslim Spain ladies danced the zambra with their suitors. But with the exception of some women in agricultural communities, Bedouins, and a few women who ruled behind the caliphs, veils, seclusion and subordination had become general by the end of the 10th century and over the next millennium would remain so.

In the western world, during the same millennium, women were not faring much better. During the Middle Ages, despite a temporary elevation in their status when chivalry was in fashion, the legal position of women—especially with regard to property rights—declined. In the Industrial Age, as princely courts disappeared, the status of women who had been appreciated and encouraged in those courts waned. The same fate was in store for working women as guilds, in which they wielded some power, were replaced by factories. Cultivated hostesses in French salons did continue to receive the intelligentsia, but in the same era working class English women were toiling long hours in unhealthy factories and some English countrymen claimed the right to sell their wives. As late as the Victorian Age, despite challenge from rebels like George Eliot and Florence Nightingale, an Englishwoman could not attend a university, and could be sure that in divorce even the most erring husband would automatically take the children. The same erring husband could legally beat his wife, keep her at home for weeks on end and spend all her money.

There were exceptions. Working women in England, unlike upperand middle class women, had a certain social freedom, not unlike that enjoyed by women in the colonies of North America. There the scarcity of women on frontier and farm and the necessity for cooperation and companionship in rough, often isolated conditions, tended to modify the patriarchal traditions of the Old World.

By mid-19th century the anti-slavery struggle in the United States had begun to awaken American and English women to their own legal and social disabilities. In 1837, Mt. Holyoke became the first American college to admit women. The women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, was only the first of many such meetings. In the United States and England women’s legal disabilities gradually faded and married women’s rights over their own property increased. Gradually women began in increasing numbers to enter professional life then, finally, to push for the vote. Actually, women were first given the vote in New Zealand (1893); Australia and Scandinavia followed. Russia (1917) beat both England (1918) and the United States (1920). France, Italy and West Germany didn’t give the vote to their female citizens until the 1940’s and Switzerland still doesn’t.

Worldwide today, it is still difficult for a woman to go on to higher education, to obtain equal pay for equal work, or to reach the top in any field no matter what her ability. Legal discrimination has also been slow to recede: before 1965 a French husband could dispose of all his wife’s assets as he liked unless she was gainfully employed—but she could not work without his permission. In Spain a decade ago if a man caught his wife in flagrante and killed her out of hand, the worst punishment he could expect would be a short term of exile.

On the brighter side, in 1970 the world had three women premiers (none in a western nation) and two Japanese women successfully scaled 24,857-foot Annapurna in the Himalayas; the year before America’s National Council of Churches elected its first woman president, the first woman jockey raced on a recognized race track and six women scientists were scheduled, for the first time, to work out of an American base in the Antarctic. Women in the United States and Britain furthermore, have in the Women’s Liberation movement forged a formidable weapon that promises even more change.

In the Arab world, the position of women saw little of such changes until the 20th century. But the relatively few decades since then have seen a positive explosion of women’s education throughout the entire area, the end of the “classical” harem, a substantial decline in polygamy, the gradual recession of the veil, the granting of the vote except in the Peninsula, and, in the major cities, the easing of restrictions on social mixing of the sexes and the rise of the Arab career girl.

Even these changes have touched the lives—and consciousness—of relatively few. The most important improvements in the status of women are just now beginning, and the most difficult to effect will not be in government-provided facilities or in legal provisions, but in attitudes—attitudes that are the more stubborn because they are rooted not only in Arab civilization but in civilization itself. To obtain full equality for women in the Arab world as in the western world, the change that must still be made is in the minds and hearts of men.

Conspiracy theories paradoxically confirm both our powerlessness and our importance.

by Dr. Carl Trueman

Most people like a good mystery, whether it’s a book or a movie. Indeed, if you pass your local cinema or browse the shelves at your local bookstore, you will see just how popular, how marketable mystery stories are. Yet in amongst the various whodunnits and crime novels dealing with run-of-the-mill murders and crimes, you will also find a good number of books in the fiction and non-fiction sections which deal with crimes and mysteries on a bigger scale, ones which describe vast and elaborate conspiracies. Television too provides plenty of evidence for that the public enjoy a good conspiracy. In the nineties, The X-Files were all the rage; now it is a series like 24. The details vary but the basic formula remains the same: reality is not quite what it appears to be; and there are knowing forces out there who really run things behind the scenes.

Many real-life conspiracy theories surround the deaths of famous people. For example, there are a large number of books written about the assassination of President John F Kennedy. Officially, he was shot by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald; but Oswald was himself shot and killed before he faced trial, and this has led many to claim that he was not acting alone but was merely the fall guy for any number of secret organizations, from the Mafia to the KGB to Cuban dissidents. The same kind of literature also surrounds the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Officially, she was killed in a car crash as she was driven at high speed through an underground tunnel by a chauffeur who had drunk too much; but many claim that she was assassinated by agents of British intelligence acting for the Royal family. Similar conspiracy theories surround the death of many other famous people, from James Dean to Marilyn Monroe to Pope John Paul I. Just watch Godfather III to see a movie version of the death of that pope, with Mafia, Freemasons, and even members of the Catholic clergy being implicated. It seems that we just find it hard to believe that special people – whether leaders or celebrities – can die in mundane or banal ways.

In each of these examples, the official version makes perfect sense of the evidence surrounding each of the deaths; and yet the public seem to have an insatiable appetite for alternative theories as to why these tragedies happened. These theories are always more far-fetched than the official version, and so the question that comes to mind is `Why do people believe such crazy theories when the official version seems to be quite credible?’

There is probably no single answer to this, but here are some thoughts. First, let’s be honest: many of us enjoy a good mystery. There is a certain excitement and thrill to reading or watching a good detective story or suspense thriller; and conspiracy theories are often part and parcel of these things. There is, therefore, the thrill-and-entertainment factor which makes them attractive.

Following on from this, a second is that life, for many of us, is rather routine and humdrum. We have steady jobs, nice houses, plenty of food and good things; and, while this is good, it also makes our day to day lives somewhat boring. At some point, most of us have asked the questions: Isn’t there more to life than this? Is this all there is? And, again, mysteries and conspiracy theories help to fill that gap, offering us at a harmless level entertaining diversions or, perhaps on occasion more seriously views of life and reality that appeal precisely because they seem to make the world a more interesting place.

Third, and perhaps most significant of all, two things have happened in Western society in the last fifty or so years which have made our culture particularly susceptible to the appeal of conspiracy theories. On the one hand, we all increasingly feel powerless in the face of all that is happening around us. Politicians are elected by us; but it seems to make little difference who is in power. Multinational companies, the oil industry, the international banking system, to name but three of the most influential sectors in the modern world: all of these things have served to transform the world in which we live; and we are more and more acutely aware of how little influence even our governments, let alone we as individuals, have over the events which happen on a world-scale and yet which profoundly affect our own little lives. We are left feeling powerless in the face of such forces.

On the other hand, those in power have been exposed again and again as using their power for their own ends. Politicians exposed for fraud; company executives plundering pension funds; unions infiltrated by corruption and special interests. Time and time again, the old saying that power corrupts has been shown to be true; and this has made many of us utterly cynical about those in positions of authority. From Watergate to Enron, public trust in leading citizens has been betrayed again and again; and it makes us suspicious of the motives and behaviour of anyone who has a position of power or influence.

Put these two things together – our feelings of powerlessness, and our suspicion of those with power – and you have a culture which is very receptive to the ideas put forward in many conspiracy theories. Such theories allow us to make some sort of sense of absurdities. We think Diana was too beautiful and special to die an ordinary death in an accident caused by alcohol and stupidity; given this, elaborate theories of an assassination by MI5 on the order of the Duke of Edinburgh seems not so much far-fetched as an opportunity to make even her death special. As we all struggle with rising oil prices, it is somehow easier to believe it is all part of some conscious conspiracy by a secret group of wicked individuals than to acknowledge that it is the result of impersonal, irresistible economic forces which we can neither control nor resist. And, if we are being really honest, there is a perverse way in which we feel more important when we think that somebody is taking the time and effort to deceive us in such elaborate ways. Conspiracy theories paradoxically confirm both our powerlessness and our importance.

This leads, of course, to the final question, one which relates especially to the sort of conspiracy theory put forward in The Da Vinci Code: why has the Church been a particular target for such theories over the years? There are, I think, a number of reasons. First, the Church’s beliefs and her actions have frequently been at odds with each other; only a liar or an idiot would claim that the Church has not been responsible for some terrible crimes. In this, the Church is typical of those who have been shown to use power for corrupt ends. Second, while the Church has, at times, wielded awesome power, she has also frequently appeared to be very secretive about her activities. In particular, both the Catholic Church’s arcane religious orders and its record until recent days of suppressing dissent and censoring reading material . This aura of power and secrecy, wrapped up in the outward trappings of medievalism and suppressing individual thought and conscience, make her a soft target for conspiracy theorists.

Strange to tell, the church’s own holy book, the Bible, begins with what is quite possibly the original conspiracy theorist: the serpent. In the Garden of Eden, the serpent tells Eve that God told her not to eat of the fruit of the tree in order to stop her becoming like God (look the story up in Genesis 3). In other words, God, the all-powerful one, was accused of using his power to oppress an individual. This was the original conspiracy theory; and it has been the task of the church since not to elaborate this theory but to expose it for the lie that it is.

by Grace Halsell

In Bukhara, Uzbekistan, I felt lucky to be in the home town of Ibn Sina, born in 980 and known in the West as Avicenna, a philosopher and the greatest physician of his time–indeed, the greatest name in medicine until about 1500. He wrote The Canon of Medicine, a systematic encyclopedia based on the achievements of Greek and Arab physicians: The work was translated into Latin and used as a textbook in medieval Europe.

For centuries considered the “prince of all learning,” Avicenna’s works are still studied in theological, philosophical, pharmacological and medical circles.

Walking around modern Bukhara, a city of half a million people, I reflected on the library where Avicenna studied. Now obliterated, it urns one of several private libraries in the city that were open to public use at a time when manuscripts were “published” only through the tedious labor of copyists. Writing 1000 years ago, Avicenna reports on the free use of a sultan’s royal library in Bukhara:

I found there many rooms filled with books which were arranged in cases, row upon row. One room was allotted to works on Arabic philology and poetry, another to jurisprudence and so forth, the books on each particular science having a room to themselves. I inspected the catalogue of ancient Greek authors and looked for the books which I required; I saw in this collection books of which few people have heard even the names, and which I myself have never seen either before or since.

I tried to imagine what life was like back in the days of al-Biruni, born near here, in Khiva, in 973, who searched into every branch of human knowledge: history, law, sociology, literature, ethics, philosophy, mathematics and science.

It was al-Biruni who anticipated the principles of modern geology and laid the foundation for astronomy. He composed an astronomical encyclopedia and made vital contributions to geometrical problems. Al-Biruni gave an accurate way to determine latitude and longitude, investigated the relative speeds of sound and light, and – 600 years before Galileo – discussed the possibility of the earth’s rotation around its own axis.

In Vestiges of the Past, written in the year 1000, he urges, “We must clear our minds from all causes that blind people to the truth-old customs, partisan spirit, personal rivalry or passion [and] the desire for influence, in order to be able to record historical events with objectivity and accuracy.”

Bukhara is full of impressive architectural gems, many so old that 1 felt transported back in time a thousand years. I was especially impressed by a mausoleum built by Ismail Samani, a ninth-century ruler, for his father. Both Ismail and his father are buried in this “tomb of the Samanids,” which, though small, is striking in its simplicity and beauty.

I stood in awe of the free-standing Kalyan minaret, built of honey-colored bricks that, laid in protruding and receding patterns, produce a unique texture. The minaret, rising 45 meters (150 feet) – and the tallest structure in Bukhara -stands in a small square near the massive tiled portals of a mosque and the Bukhara theological school or madrasa. In architectural perfection and beauty, I believe that nothing in our modern cities can surpass this 12th-century gem. The minaret is on UNESCO’s list of historical monuments that should be preserved as part of the world’s cultural heritage.

By the beginning of the 20th century, Bukhara had 360 mosques. Today it has only 120 mosques and madrasas, most no longer in religious use, but still preserved as monuments.

Bukhara’s sister city, Samarkand, is equally a center of learning and history. Beyond that, however, it is a gem of early city planning. Here Timur (Tamerlane) created a series of royal gardens so numerous, wrote Clavijo, a Spaniard who visited Samarkand in 1404, “that a traveler who approaches the city sees only the mountainous height of trees, and the houses embowered amongst them remain invisible.”

Timur, born near Samarkand in 1336 back to the city armies of craftsmen and artisans from the extensive lands he conquered them put to work embellishing his capital.

But it was Timur’s grandson, Ulugh made his grandfather’s capital into what had dreamed: “Samarkand the Golden, of Muslim civilization. An artist himself, Ulugh Beg enriched Samarkand with superb building such as Shah Zinde, a honeycomb of 60 mausoleums and mosques, of which 20 remains today. Domes and arches and other Islamic architectural splendors glisten with intricate Arabic calligraphy and geometric design must have dazzled the early caravan travllers just as they amaze today’s visitor.

An artist and scholar and, above all an astronomer, Ulugh Beg created an observatory in Samarkand that was one of the wonders of the world. He sought to verify and correct Ptolemy’s computations, and in so doing wrote his own Catalogue of the Stars, an encyclopedia containing the knowledge of time, the course of the stars and the position of fixed stars. His calculations, translated into Latin, were widely studied in Europe his remarkably accurate calendar brought him posthumous honor in the West when it was published in 1652 at Oxford.

Earlier year of 1974 King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, a devout Muslim, protector of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina, and the leading proponent of Islamic unity, made a significant remark that was widely quoted in the world press. “My greatest wish before I die,” said the 70-year-old King, “is to pray in Jerusalem.”

Muslims everywhere immediately understood and sympathized with King Faisal’s wish, but to Westerners unfamiliar with the Middle East the King’s statement came as something of a surprise. Undoubtedly, many persons today know that Muslims consider Mecca and Medina, both in Saudi Arabia, as Holy Cities and that the Ka’bah, in Mecca’s Sacred Mosque, is the point toward which, five times each day, the world’s 600 million Muslims face in prayer. But Jerusalem? From both the Bible’s Old and New Testaments Westerners know Jerusalem’s deep associations with Judaism and Christianity. But what has Jerusalem to do with Islam?

The answer is: a great deal. Jerusalem is as holy a city to Muslim—and for many of the same reasons—as it is to Jews and Christians, and it also figures importantly in religious traditions particular to Islam. There are also for Muslims some 1,300 years of historical ties.

The historical ties are not completely unknown in the West. Even those with a limited exposure to Middle East history probably know that in the year 637—13 centuries ago—crusading Muslims from Arabia besieged Jerusalem, accepted the surrender of its Byzantine overlords and ruled there almost continually until the Christian Crusaders from Europe came in 1099. They probably recall too that less than a century later Saladin, the gallant Muslim leader famous for his encounters with Richard the Lion Hearted, recaptured Jerusalem from the Europeans and that the subsequent Arab dynasties and later the Ottoman Turks, who controlled the Holy City up to World War I, were Muslim.

What has escaped the casual reader, however, is that Islam’s religious ties with the Holy City are equally long and much deeper. How many Western pundits now puzzling over King Faisal’s statement realize that the large rock atop Mount Moriah in Jerusalem, where tradition says Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son, is also holy to Muslims because they believe it is the place from which Muhammad began his ascent to Heaven? Or that Arabs too believe they are descended from Abraham, prophet and father of the Jews, that they too revere him as a prophet and that he is mentioned in the Holy Koran as being a Muslim? And how many realize that John the Baptist and Jesus are also both accepted and revered by Muslims as prophets?

This lack of understanding, widespread and of long duration, is due in part to the historic hostility of Western nations toward Islam, a hostility probably originally engendered by Islam’s attempts in distant centuries to conquer Europe. As one result, Western religious history rarely mentions that Muslims, Christians and Jews share many nearly identical beliefs—such as the oneness of God, the need for total submission to His will and the clash of good and evil—and that in Islam, the last of the three great monotheistic religions, many of the individuals, events and places sacred to Jews and Christians are equally sacred to Muslims.

The Prophet Muhammad, to whom God revealed His truths, grew up in Mecca, then a center of pagan idolatry although both Judaism and Christianity, being Semitic religions, were known in Arabia. Muhammad was a ready instrument when God, in the year 610, spoke to him through the Archangel Gabriel—himself familiar to many Christians—and entrusted to Muhammad His final revelations, a confirmation of the Abrahamic line of revelations, the message of Islam.

This aspect of Muslim belief is crucial to any understanding of a Muslim presence in Jerusalem. For Muhammad, from the beginning, emphasized that he was only the last in a long line of prophets through whom God has spoken to mankind, and that he was only completing and fulfilling God’s often-revealed message. Thus he taught reverence for the prophets of the Old and New Testaments and respect for Jews and Christians as fellow monotheists and “People of the Book.” In the Holy Koran, which is God’s word as He revealed it to Muhammad, Biblical figures such as Adam, Noah, David and Solomon, and prophets such as Elijah, Moses, John the Baptist and Jesus, with his mother Mary, all have their place. To put it another way, their ties to Jerusalem are also Islam’s ties.

Above all, Muhammad stressed reverence toward Abraham, father of the Jews and Arabs.

According to Muslim belief, Arabs are descendants of Abraham through his son Ishmael, as Jews are descendants of Abraham through Isaac. Indeed, Abraham, according to the Koran, was a Muslim himself. When, on God’s command, Abraham took his son to a rocky summit and prepared unflinchingly to sacrifice him to the one God, it could be considered, as the first example of complete submission to God’s will—the essence of Muslim belief—a starting point of Islam. As Sura 16, verse 120 of the Koran says, “Abraham was indeed a model, devoutly obedient to God, true in faith, and he joined not gods with God.”

Later, as God continued to reveal the message of Islam to Muhammad, the ties to Jerusalem became more direct. One night God, through the Archangel Gabriel, summoned Muhammad from Mecca to Jerusalem on a Nocturnal Journey (Isra’). According to Muslim belief, Muhammad was carried aloft on the back of a winged mare named al-Buraq to Mount Moriah and the Holy Rock. From its summit he ascended (Mi’raj) through the stages of Heaven, meeting and praying with the previous prophets including Abraham, Moses and Jesus. In the Seventh Heaven Muhammad appeared before the throne of God, Who spoke to him. The Prophet then returned to the Holy Rock and, mounting al-Buraq, was back in Mecca by dawn.

As the embarkation point for this journey to God, Jerusalem thus became even more established as a Holy City. As Sura 17, verse 1 of the Koran says, “Glory be to Him, who carried His servant by night from the Sacred Mosque (Mecca) to the Farthest Mosque (Jerusalem), the precincts of which We have blessed, that We might show him some of Our signs …” Indeed, for a short time early in their history Muslims prayed toward Jerusalem, and it is called in Arabic Ula al-Qihlatain, “First of the two Qiblas,” —”directions”—the second being Mecca. It is also called al-Quds ash-Sharif, “the Holy and Noble City,” or simply, al-Quds, “the Holy.” In addition to the Koranic blessing, there is a Hadith, or saying attributed to the Prophet, that Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem are equally deserving of pilgrimage.

For all those reasons, it was inevitable that the Muslims would want to implement their spiritual rights to Jerusalem. In 637 they did. By that time, the empires of Persia and Byzantium, successor to Rome, were deadlocked after years of exhausting struggle to control what is now the Middle East. And although Muhammad had died, the faith of his followers was such that they had routed the Byzantine forces from every major city between the Tigris and the Mediterranean except Jerusalem. Now, in 637, they approached the city, pitched their tents on the Mount of Olives and prepared to take it.

Inside the walls of Jerusalem, then called by its Roman name, Aelia Capitolina, the Byzantines, nearly defenseless, debated whether to surrender or fight—as they had 20 years before when the Persians were at the gates, resulting in ruthless and indiscriminate slaughter. Those arguing for surrender pointed out that when Damascus fell to the Muslim armies two years before, there had been no slaughter. Furthermore the terms of surrender had been extremely lenient, with Christians being allowed to continue praying in their churches upon the payment of a poll tax which guaranteed for them as well as Muslim citizens, the “Security of Islam.”

As news of this had leaked into besieged Jerusalem, the Greek Patriarch, Sophronius, sent word out that he would surrender the city without a struggle, but only to the Caliph Omar personally. Omar, then in Damascus, agreed and in one of the great scenes of Muslim history entered Jerusalem alone, except for a servant. Because his clothes were torn and dusty from the ride from Damascus, and because his manner to his servant was so courteous, the Byzantines, arrayed in pompous splendor to meet him, assumed the servant was Omar and greeted him effusively—to the quiet amusement of the Caliph. Thus did Islam come to Jerusalem.

Omar’s behavior on that occasion was symbolic of his later approach to the Christians and to Jerusalem. Once his identity was clarified, Omar asked Sophronius to show him the city’s holy places, and Sophronius led him first to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. As it was prayer time the Patriarch invited the Caliph to pray there with him. Omar declined, saying that to do so might later encourage his followers to convert the church into a mosque. Instead he prayed outside a little to the south, a place commemorated today by a 10th-century mosque called the Mosque of Omar and built in a small garden across the courtyard from the entrance of the Holy Sepulchre. (Aramco World, March-April, 1965).

As the Caliph Omar was especially eager to see the site of the Prophet’s ascendance to Heaven, the Patriarch led him to an ancient, crumbling platform on the eastern edge of the city. Seeing that it was piled with the debris of the Persian destruction and more recent accumulations of municipal refuge, Omar personally began the task of clearing the rocky summit so that the site could be reconsecrated. This area today is in the center of a 34-acre compound in the southeast corner of the Old City called al-Haram ash-Sharif, “the Noble Sanctuary.” The whole area in Omar’s time was known as al-Aqsa, “the Furthermost,” a reference to Muhammad’s ultimate journey. The Caliph ordered that a simple wooden mosque be built on the southwestern corner of the platform near the great wall where, tradition held, the Prophet had tethered his mare al-Buraq.

Traveling with the Muslim army was a man named Bilal, who had been the Prophet’s own muezzin, or prayer caller. On the first Friday after the discovery of the sacred rock, Omar went to the enclosure to worship and there Bilal himself, for the first time since Muhammad’s death six years previously, called the faithful to prayer. Al-Quds, Holy Jerusalem, was in Muslim hands.

Omar’s covenant with the Byzantines of Jerusalem followed the pattern of Damascus. With the payment of the poll tax and the acceptance of the “Security of Islam,” Christians were given self-government under their ecclesiastical leaders and Christian pilgrimages from the West were permitted. This is part of the text of Omar’s treaty:

“In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate. This is the covenant which Omar Ibn al-Khattab, the servant of Allah, the Commander of the Faithful, grants to the people of Aelia, the Holy House. He grants them security of their lives, their possessions, their churches and crosses . . . they shall have freedom of religion and none shall be molested unless they rise up in a body. . . They shall pay a tax instead of military service . . . and those who leave the city shall be safeguarded until they reach their destination. . .”

As John Gray, an English historian, puts it, Omar’s decree was “less of a treaty imposed by a conqueror than a guarantee by a victorious faith confident in its inherent strength and conscious of its responsibilities.”

In the years that followed, Omar’s successors set to work on what is possibly Islam’s most beautiful shrine: the Dome of the Rock, so called because it encloses the rock from which Muhammad ascended. Built during the reign of the Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, it was finished in 691, and is one of Islam’s oldest existing monuments. Despite extensive modifications and repairs throughout the centuries it is today essentially the same: a magnificent structure with a great golden dome that, until the present government began to build high-rise apartment houses on surrounding hilltops, dominated the city’s skyline.

Close by the Dome of the Rock is the also famous Aqsa Mosque. Built near the site of Omar’s wooden mosque in 715, al-Aqsa has a special place in Muslim affections, because by unspoken tradition it is more a house of prayer than a monument. Five thousand worshipers can pray inside. Remarkably, these two edifices, the main symbols of the Muslim presence in Jerusalem, have survived all the difficult centuries that followed.

The pattern of religious tolerance established in Jerusalem by Omar and maintained by the Umayyad caliphs became uncertain under their Abbasid successors, deteriorated further under the Fatimids and vanished in 1099, when the Crusaders captured the Holy City (Aramco World, May-June, 1970). Not only did the European conquerors massacre all but a handful of Jerusalem’s Muslim defenders, but also burned the small Jewish community in its synagogue and slaughtered great numbers of Arab and Orthodox Christians. The Crusaders also converted the Muslim shrines to churches. A gold cross was raised on top of the Dome of the Rock, which the Crusaders then named the Templum Domini. Another was placed on the dome of al-Aqsa Mosque, which was named the Templum Solomonis and became the headquarters of the militant religious order, the Knights Templar.

But if defeated, the Muslims were not conquered. In 1187 under the great Saladin, they decisively defeated the Crusaders at Hattin near Galilee and, on October 2, the anniversary of the Prophet’s Nocturnal Journey, rode back into Jerusalem. Then, fulfilling the vow of his predecessor Nur ad-Din, who had dedicated a magnificent cedarwood minbar, or pulpit, made in Aleppo to the capture of the city, Saladin installed the pulpit in al-Aqsa Mosque. Though isolated coastal outposts remained in Christian control up to 1291, al-Quds, the Holy, was again part of the Muslim empire.

Under Saladin, whose chivalry was a legend even among his enemies, the tolerance of Omar was restored. His merciful occupation of the city was in glaring contrast to the policies of the Crusader conquest. He spared all lives, offered the “Security of Islam” to those who sought it and, although removing the crosses and altars from the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa, left all other Christian shrines intact.

During the Ayyubid dynasty, which came next, it became traditional that at times the various sultans would clean al-Aqsa with their own hands before dispensing alms. The sultans of the Mameluke dynasty, which came to power in the 13th century, assumed the title “Servants and Guardians” of the holy places in Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. They were notable not only for the substantial restorations and redecorations they carried out in both of Jerusalem’s two major shrines, but also for the steps they took to provide for their future. The Mamelukes purchased substantial properties in Jerusalem, especially in the Magharibah quarter just west of the Noble Sanctuary, and through the establishment of waqfs, or perpetual sacred trusts (Aramco World, Nov.-Dec, 1973), dedicated their income to finance the upkeep of the holy places and establish, maintain and operate Muslim schools, religious institutes, pilgrim hospices and kitchens for the poor. Those institutions, plus the homes and neighborhood mosques of the devout who settled close to the two great mosques, made up an intimate, if humble, part of the Muslim presence for five centuries.

Today this presence, if weakened, is still obvious, particularly in al-Haram ash-Sharif, “the Noble Sanctuary.” On or near this site, to be sure, there occurred some of the great events of Biblical history. It was here that tradition says King Solomon built the Temple. It was here, Christians believe, that the boy Jesus was found by Mary and Joseph preaching to the elders and that he later chased the money changers from the Temple. But it should be remembered that it is a central site for Muslims too, being the holy spot from which Muhammad ascended to Heaven to pray with former prophets and appear before the throne of God.

Within the Dome of the Rock, in a small cave beneath the rocky summit of Mount Moriah are Muslim shrines to Abraham and Elijah. Here, tradition says, is the site of the Last Judgment. Beneath it is the Well of Souls, where spirits await the Day of Judgment in prayer and apprehension. And scattered about the Sanctuary are other shrines which, with quiet eloquence, remind Western visitors of how many more of their own traditions are shared by Muslims: the Dome of Moses, the Dome of Solomon, the Dome of Gabriel—all built by Muslim caliphs through the centuries. In the far corner is a small dome to mark the spot where, Muslim tradition says, Mary and the infant Jesus rested before starting down to Egypt. Across the valley on the Mount of Olives, a small mosque commemorates the site of his ascension to Heaven. Around the edge of the platform are a series of graceful arches, the mawazeen, from which, according to tradition, the balance scales will be hung on the Day of Judgment. Toward the south is the silver dome of al-Aqsa, “the Furthermost,” the blessed mosque, now being patiently restored after it was severely damaged by arson in 1969, in which every devout Muslim hopes to pray.

And in the center, towering above all, is the Dome of the Rock, Islam’s holy shrine built on a rocky mountain top above which Abraham, Jesus and Muhammad worshiped together and where, before he dies, an aging King hopes some day to pray.

The Ka’ba is a cubical structure located at the center of Masjid al-Haram in Mecca. The Baqara verse, revealed to the Prophet Muhammad, established the Ka’ba as the direction (qibla) towards which Muslims must address their five daily prayers, and as the destination of annual pilgrimage, or hajj, required once in the lifetime of every Muslim.

Each year, worshippers gather in the courtyard of Masjid al-Haram and encircle the Ka’ba seven times (tawaf), during which they kiss and touch the Black Stone (al-Hajar al-Aswad), a Muslim object of veneration embedded in the eastern corner of the Ka’ba. As it stands today, the cubical structure is fifteen meters tall and measures ten and a half meters by twelve meters on the exterior. It is oriented such that its four corners align roughly with north, south, east and west.

View of the Ka’ba from south showing the black kiswa, embroidered with Quranic verses in gold thread

The structure predates Islam and is believed to have been first built by the Prophet Abraham and his son Ismail, although there are no archaeological findings to support this argument. It is known, however, that the pre-Islamic Ka’ba was rebuilt several times by the tribes ruling Mecca, who used it to house sacred objects, including the Black Stone. During the lifetime of Prophet Muhammad, the Quraysh tribe rebuilt the Ka’ba with alternating courses of stone and wood. The inner space was divided into two rooms, one of which housed the Black Stone. The interior walls were decorated with paintings of Abraham, Mary, Jesus, angels, prophets and trees; and the exterior was covered with the habrat cloth from Yemen.

During the conflict between Ibn Zubayr, ruler of Mecca, and Umayyad Caliph Mu’awiyah, the Ka’ba was set to fire. The Black Stone broke into three pieces and its parts were reassembled with silver by Ibn Zubayr. Ibn Zubayr also ordered the rebuilding of the Ka’ba in stone, in accordance with its original dimensions believed to be set by Abraham, and paved the open space around it. The shrine at this time had two doors and a wooden staircase for roof access. In 692, after taking over Mecca, Umayyad Caliph Abdul Malik bin demolished the Ka’ba and rebuilt it based on the Qurayshi version.

The Abbasid Caliphs contributed to the design of the Ka’ba by covering it with the kiswa, a black cloth brought from Tanis in Egypt. The kiswa comprised of eight curtains (a pair on each side of the cube) embroidered with gold calligraphy expressing the Muslim shahada, or oath, “There is no God but Allah and Muhammed is the Prophet of Allah.”

Following Mamluk rule of the Hijaz, which lasted from 1269 to 1517, Mecca came under the control of the Ottoman Sultans. In 1553, Sultan Süleyman I (1520-1566) renovated the roof of the Ka’ba and ordered the wooden ceiling painted with golden calligraphy and floral patterns. Damaged in a flood in 1611, the Ka’ba was rebuilt once again by Sultan Murad IV (1623-1640) in 1629. The new foundation was laid according to Abraham’s plan, while the upper structure was built with large granite blocks resting on a twenty-five centimeters high marble base. Three columns were built to support the roof on the inside; they were covered with golden decorations. Silver and golden lamps were suspended from the ceiling. At this time, the silver door offered by Sultan Süleyman I was placed off-center on the northeast wall, two meters above ground level. The Ka’ba was then covered with two kiswas, a red cloth covered with a black one, that were annually replaced.

On the southwest side of the Ka’ba is a semi-circular wall about one and a quarter meters tall, which represents its border (al-hatim) as built by Abraham. The Black Stone is embedded in the eastern corner, one and a half meters above the ground. During the first Saudi extension to Masjid al-Haram in 1976, the interior of the Ka’ba was decorated with gold geometric motifs and inscribed with Quranic verses.

Sources:

Al-Hariri-Rifai, Mokhless. 1990. The Heritage of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Singapore: Eurasia Press, 200-212.

Creswell, K.A.C. 1989. A Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture. Aldershot: Scholar Press, 3-4.

Damluji, Salma Samar (ed). 1998. The Architecture of the Holy Mosque Makkah. London: Hazar Publishing Limited.

THE SINBAD VOYAGE

by John Lawton

ONCE UPON A TIME there really was a man called “Sindbad the Sailor” – at least according to the crew and captain of the Sohar, a replica of a ninth-century Arab dhow that they sailed from Oman to China.

The point of the voyage was to prove that Sindbad’s legendary voyages are rooted in historical fact – and they certainly proved that the voyage itself is possible. In a hand-built craft stitched together with coconut string, and navigating with medieval navigational instruments, British author-explorer Timothy Severin and a crew of 25 sailed the dhow 9,600 kilometers (6,000 miles) between Muscat and Canton.

Severin and his crew, of course, did not have to cope with the innumerable monsters that plagued Sindbad’s voyages, but they did face other hazards. On several occasions they were nearly crushed by giant tankers; another time their mainsail spar broke; and for almost a month they were becalmed with little food and water. Finally, as they raced the monsoons across the South China Sea, they faced the threat of pirates.

In all, the voyage took just under eight months. In addition, however, Severin spent some three years in research, travel and construction during which he traced the history of Arab seamanship back to Egypt and followed its development in places like Oman, China and India.

The first people known to have used the sail were the ancient Egyptians; the earliest record of a sailing boat – a drawing of a ship with a mast amidships and a broad square sail hung from it – dates back to about 3900 B.C. And it was an Egyptian who provided the first known mariner’s tale: an anonymous first-person account of a shipwreck in the Red Sea around 2000 B.C. – in which the mythical embellishments of the Sindbad period are instantly obvious.

“I had set out for the mines of the king in a ship 180 feet long and 60 feet wide; we had a crew of 120, the pick of Egypt. A storm broke and we flew before the wind. The ship went down; of all in it only I survived. I was cast upon an island… then I heard the sound of thunder and thought it was a wave; trees broke and the earth quaked. I uncovered my face and found a serpent. It was 45 feet long and its beard was two feet long. Its body was covered with gold and its eyebrows were real lapis lazuli.”

The serpent’s looks, it turns out, were deceiving; it was a most considerate creature. It took the sailor tenderly up in its mouth, carried him to its lair, listened sympathetically to his story and then comforted him with the news that one of the Pharaoh’s ships would soon come along and take him back home. When the rescue ship, as prophesied, did come along, the serpent sent the sailor off with a cargo of incense, and two months later he was safely home.

Later, and farther east, the people living on the shores of the Arabian Peninsula also learned to sail and in time discovered that they could earn a profit by risking their lives on the sea. Among them were the boat builders and sailors of Makkan (or Magan) – today’s Oman – who traded copper and ivory with Mesopotamia. Copper was mined in Makkan itself, but the ivory could only have come from India – or Africa and the implication seems clear: Omani traders, even in 1000 B.C., probably ventured beyond the Arabian Gulf and sailed the open waters of the ocean.

About 500 B.C. these seamen – the early Arabs – also introduced the dhow: a broad-beamed, shallow-draft vessel with lateen-rigged sails, ideally suited for the coastal waters of the Arabian Gulf and the comparatively mild waves of the Indian Ocean. Although relatively flimsy, it was light and maneuverable and could speed quickly out of the path of threatening weather. Its triangular sails, moreover, were designed to catch even the slightest breeze.

The key to their success, however, was the ancient secret of the monsoon winds: the fact that they could rely on prevailing winds to carry them eastward in winter and westward in summer across the Indian Ocean. They could not explain these “monsoons,” but this is not surprising since even today there are mysteries about them. One theory is that when the summer heat of India causes the air to rise over the subcontinent, winds from the Indian Ocean rush into the vacuum left by the rising air; by the same token, the comparative coolness of Indian winters causes a reverse movement of winds from India to Africa. Whatever the cause, by the first century A.D. the south Arabian merchants were riding the monsoon winds eastward as far as Ceylon, and by the sixth Century according to one geographer, had established a monopoly of the sea trade with China.

In that era, the 6,000-mile voyage from the Arabian Gulf to China took at least 120 days and was then the longest sea trading route in the world: the ocean equivalent of the old Silk Road. It was probably the most dangerous too, with corsairs from theHadhramaut prowling the Indian Ocean and Vietnamese pirates preying on shipping in the Gulf of Tonkin. Those that survived, or bought off the pirate threat, might still disappear without trace: sunk to the bottom of the sea, wrecked on some lonely, hostile coast or blown completely off course into the Pacific where, the Chinese believed, the drain spout of the world’s ocean sucked the unwary sailor into oblivion.

For those who did succeed, however, profits were high. Because no European power had ever found a sea route to China, the Arabian role as intermediary in East-West trade grew and flourished. By the middle of the eighth century the flow of such precious goods as gold, ivory and gems from India, and silk and fine porcelain from China, had made Baghdad the most important commercial center in the world, and for the next 500 years Muslim dominance of East-West trade continued.

In the 13th century, however, the Mongols appeared and, in conquering China, razed the great port towns. As a consequence, Far East trade waned, and though it continued sporadically for some time – with Arab merchants meeting their Chinese counterparts in Ceylon and Malaya – the heyday of Arab trade with China was over – partly because of the Mongol destruction, but mostly because, 200 years later, Vasco da Gama, a Portuguese explorer, rounded the Cape of Good Hope and opened a new trade route between Europe and the East.

This voyage, completed in 1448, effectively ended more than 700 years of Arab domination of Eastern trade. Ironically, though, it was an Arab seaman, the great navigator Ahmad ibn Majid, who guided the Portuguese on the last vital leg of the voyage.

By then, of course, the Arabs had left an indelible mark on Southeast Asia; their dhows had not only carried merchandise, but had also spread Islam and Islamic culture as far as Indonesia and China. By then, too, the intrepid Arab sailors, roaming through 9,600 to 16,000 kilometers of unknown territory (6,000 to 10,000 miles), had brought back endless tales of mishaps and adventures – as well as reports of exotic kingdoms bordering the Indian Ocean and China Sea. These stories-repeated, embroidered, expanded and exaggerated – were the basis of the epic of Sindbad the Sailor, as immortalized in A Thousand and One Nights.

Until recently, the consensus among scholars was that Sindbad, the world’s most famous sailor, never actually existed. The scholars said that the fables spun around him may have been versions of actual exploits and gave examples. One was Sindbad’s method of collecting diamonds from a serpent-filled canyon: by dropping chunks of raw meat into the canyon and retrieving the meat – with gems stuck to them – through the use of large birds. This story, they said, was first told by troops of Alexander the Great returning from India.

Another example was a story of an island that turns out to be a great fish. This tale, as Severin had cause to know, also figures in the life of the Saint Brendan, the medieval navigator-monk; on his voyage to Newfoundland, Saint Brendan and his Irish sailors did exactly what Sindbad and the Arab seaman did: they aroused the huge creature by lighting fires on its back.

In Oman, however, where the modern Sindbad voyage was launched, some Omanis firmly believe that Sindbad was real. “We believe,” said Musalam Ahmad, one of the nine Omanis on Sohar, “that there really was a sailor called ‘Sindbad’ who had some adventures.”

Severin agrees. “The Sindbad chroniclers took one captain and added other adventures to his own,” he said, adding that it was this embellishment and expansion of his exploits, that eventually turned Sindbad from a man – “who came from Sohar but operated out of Basra” – into a myth. Severin and the Omanis, in fact, believe this so strongly that they named the dhow that they planned to sail to China Sohar, after the town in Oman where they say Sindbad was born.

In a sense, Severin, a tea planter’s son born in India, is the ideal man to explore aworld where fact and fantasy mingle. While an undergraduate at Oxford, he rode a motorcyle along Marco Polo’s route to China – a trip resulting in his first book Tracking Marco Polo. This was followed by Explorers of the Mississippi – for which he navigated the length of the river by canoe and launch – and four other books on the history of exploration.

Those journeys, however, were just practice for his first major success: sailing an open leather boat across the North Atlantic to show that Irish monks could have been the first Europeans to reach North America, as medieval legends about Ireland’s sixth-century Saint Brendan suggested. In a boat of oxhide – a type used by medieval Irish sailors – Severin survived fierce storms off Greenland and a puncturing caused by a small iceberg and then wrote a book about it: The Brendan Voyage which became an international best seller translated into 16 languages.

The Saint Brendan voyage, Severin says, also led to the Sindbad voyage. “We were sitting off the coast of Newfoundland, when I suddenly realized I had a winner: building and sailing replicas of ancient boats.”

But to create public interest, he went on, he also had to have a character like Saint Brendan. “Suddenly/’ he says, “the figure of Sindbad appeared in my mind”.

It was a natural. The legendary voyages of the world’s best known mariner, never seriously studied before, “were ripe for investigation.” On publication of The Brendan Voyage? therefore, Severin began to pore over ancient trading documents, maps, shipwrights’ plans and museum exhibits. Later, when his research led him to Oman, he also began to walk the coastline – measuring and sketching the rotting rib-cages of long-abandoned dhows half buried in the sand.

At first, the Omanis took little notice of the stranger poking around their beaches. “I had written to tell them about my project but apparently they had forgotten,” says Severin. But then, on the eve of his departure, he was asked by the Ministry of National Heritage and Culture to give a lecture and showed his audience, which included the minister himself, a film he had made of The Brendan Voyage.

Severin, of course, thought he had finally attracted some attention, but though he was presented with an old Omani sword in appreciation, nothing more was said. Hardly had he returned to his home in County Cork, Ireland, however, when he received a telegram asking him to return immediately to Oman. There the ministry, with approval of His Majesty Qaboos bin Said, Sultan of Oman, offered to sponsor Severin’s Sindbad project.

“I never actually asked them to sponsor it,” says Severin, “they simply decided to do it themselves”.

At that point, the research phase ended and the construction phase started. With the help of Omani shipwrights, Severin set about building an authentic replica of the kind of boat Sindbad might have sailed to China over 1,000 years ago. Based on early Arab and Persian sketches and written descriptions of ninth-century, deep-sea trading vessels, he and the shipwrights designed a ship 26 meters long (87 feet), with a 6.4 meter beam (21 feet), and two meter draft (six feet). It was built of hand-sawn wooden planks sewn together with hand-rolled coconut rope – no nails – and was powered by two Triangular cotton sails-no engine. They quickly found out, however , that both the materials for such a craft – and the craftsmen were scarce. To find both, Severin had to scour the most backward and remote places of the region – where traditional boat – building methods still survive. He found some shipwrights in Oman, for example, But to recruit the resst also had to go to Laccadive Islands, a territory of India off India’s western coast. For timber for the hull he had to go to the forests of southern India ; there Arab shipweights of long ago had found and selected their timber and had it hauled out by elephants. The coconut rope,also from India, was far more difficult to find. As it would be the only thing holding the ship together,it had to be very strong, but most Indian rope makers had long since abandoned the practic eof socking it in seawater- a process once used to give it the strength Severin needed . For weeks, therefore, Severin roamed the west coast of India chewing rope – literally. “People thought I was mad, but it was the only way I could tell it had been soaked in salt water,” says Severin .

Finally, form the island of Agatti, came some coconut rope soaked in seawater. But as he was forbidden by government restrictions to go there himself, Severing had to remain on the mainland “tasting” coils of rope sent over by the islanders until he had enough: in all 640 kilometers (400 miles).

At last, however , Severin was able to assemble his men, his wood and his rope at Sur, on the southeast tip of the Arabian Peninsuula. Once one of the busiest boat building and trading towns of the Gulf, Sur, when Severin arrived, was a ghost town in which declining trade with India and East Africa, had forced its traders to sell their boats,and had compelled its famous shipwrights to put away their tools .

The arrival of Tim Severin, his 45-man work force and their tons of materials and supplies soon revived Sur. Spurning modern accommodation, for example, the boat builders chose as their headquarters a 300-year-old, sea front home, empty since the drowning of the owner and his six sons in a sea tragedy 30 years before. Severin and his “green shirts” – so called because of the green smocks his Arab shipwrights wore – gave the rambling, two-story house a fresh coat of whitewash, moved in and set to work building the Sohar.

The first step was to shape and lay the single 16-meter keel log (52 feet). Next, hand-shaped planks were placed edge-to-edge and sewn into position with criss-cross stitches of coconut rope. Then wadding, from 75,000 coconut husks, was packed into the seams; when wet they would swell and make the hull watertight.

Those steps, of course, are only the basics; in addition, the finished dhow would require four tons of rope for rigging, hawsers to carry its 23-meter-long main spar (76 feet) and four tons of sail. Nevertheless, the Sohar was completed in a record seven months – two years before western shipwrights had predicted – partly, says Severin, because of the dedication of the workmen. “It seems to have touched a chord,” he said, “some appreciation of their heritage.”

Next, Severin and his crew had to learn to sail their ship – as well as test it. They took a shake-down cruise across the Arabian Sea to practice ancient Arab sailing techniques and methods of navigation; their aim, after all, was to live and sail as Sindbad might have done 1,000 years before, not simply retrace his route. Apart from scientific apparatus and essential safety gear, the Sohar had no modern equipment aboard. There was no auxilary power, all meals were prepared on a charcoal fire on deck, and their only guide to China were the stars – plus an early Arab navigational aid known as the kamal.

The oldest known instrument for latitude observation at sea, the kamal dates back to before the 10th century and is still in use in some Arab dhows even today. It is a rectangular board with a cord running to its center point and with knots in the cord – or wooden tablets strung from it – corresponding to the latitudes of the ports of call.

To use it, the navigator holds the selected knot or tablet to his eye – the board in front of him at the full stretch of the string – aligns the star with the top edge of the board and the horizon with the bottom edge and measuring degrees of latitude in isba, the width of one finger; the depth of the board is four isba and 224 isba were considered to equal 360 degrees.

Ingenious though it was, however, the kamal was but one of a number of navigational instruments developed by Arab mariners. Indeed, says Severin, “the Arabs invented astral navigation.”

This is not just rhetoric. Arabs, for example, wrote navigational treatises in the form of poems to make it easier to memorize the immense amount of data – and one, by Ibn Majid, has 1,082 verses containing such data as Pole Star altitudes for places on the coasts of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, “compass” bearings, sailing dates and distances. The poems on record today date from the 15th century, but the tradition dates back to 1000 A.D. and possibly earlier.

The Arabs were not only master navigators, but also experienced meteorologists and geographers – true scientists of the sea. In keeping with this tradition the Sohar carried three marine scientists, who carried out numerous experiments during the voyage, along with a film crew, an artist, a photographer, a driver, a radio operator, a doctor and a cook.

On November 21, 1980 – almost three years after Tim Severin first conceived the Sindbad project – the Sohar set sail from Sur. As its departure coincided with celebrations marking the 10th anniversary of Sultan Qaboos’ accession to the throne, the dhow was given a rousing send off and was escorted to international waters by ships of the Omani navy. Severin’s last words, shouted back across the waves as the Sohar headed out to sea were: “Thank you Green Shirts” – a heartfelt tribute to the men who built his boat.

At first the ship was a brute to handle. “It didn’t sail well at all,” says Peter Hunnam, the expedition’s scientific leader.

One of the problems was that the European and American scientists and technicians, who had also to double as crew, were not experienced sailors like Severin and the Omanis. “We had to teach them,” says Musalam Ahmad. To raise the enormous mainsail, for example, was a tremendous task; hauling it and its 23-meter spar to the top of the mast (76 feet) took at least eight men. “The Omanis,” says Severin, “would break into old sea chanties and continue until the task was done.”

With experience however, the performance of crew and boat greatly improved. “Things got much better as we went along,” says Hunnam. “Lashings improved and you got to know which rope was going to be a ‘pig’ and which wasn’t.” And soon, says Severin, the Sohar was sailing “like a witch.” With a good wind behind her, he said, she “rose out of the water like a high-speed train.” In fact, added Ahmad, a former merchant seaman and officer in the Omani navy, the Sohar proved a “better ship” then any of the modern ones he had ever sailed in.

From Sur, the Sohar had headed east across the Arabian Sea, then south down India’s Malabar Coast to the Laccadive Islands and the expedition’s first landfall was Calicut, on the south-west coast of India, just before Christmas, 1980. Here the crew gave the Sohar a “1,000 mile service check” – removing and cleaning her ballast, and checking the coconut rope stitches that held the ship together. “She was in remarkably good shape and had stood up to the first leg of our journey in a way that made us all truly proud of her,” said Severin.

It was at Calicut too that Severin learned that three weeks after the Sohar left Sur, a French archeological expedition had dug up in Oman a porcelain Buddha astride a Chinese lion – establishing, beyond doubt, Oman’s long trading links with the Far East. “And there we were,” said Severin, “on our way to China.”

On January 10,1981, the Sohar resumed its journey in what turned out to be the most pleasant leg of the voyage – sailing down the coast of India to the southern tip of Sri Lanka. The wind pattern led them to the port of Galle, and there, says Severin, “not 500 meters from our anchorage (1,600 feet) was the first Islamic shrine ever to be built on Sri Lanka.”

This indicates he says, that “this was the area the first Arab sailors came to all those hundreds of years ago on their way to the East,” adding that the now-famous gem mines of Sri Lanka may have been Sindbad’s “Valley of the Diamonds.”

The Sohar’s average speed during the two-month voyage from Sur to Galle was between three and a half and four knots-its fastest speed in a storm was seven knots. After leaving Sri Lanka, however, their progress slowed; caught in the Doldrums or Equatorial Trough, renowned throughout history as a serious sailing hazard, the Sohar was becalmed, in merciless temperatures, for nearly a month. Eventually, as a result, food and water began to run short and the 25 men on board had to exist on a diet of Omani dates, rice and fish caught from the sea and to catch rain water in hastily rigged tarpaulins during the occasional rain storms. As undoubtedly happened during the original Sindbad voyages, tensions developed among the crew. “Trivial things,” says Hunnam, “became major issues.” As the days crept by with nothing to do but keep watch, read, play cards and listen to cassettes – one of their few modern comforts aboard – one British biologist developed a “longing for cream cakes,” while another lamented later: “We couldn’t even make a cup of tea.”

Finally, however, the wind rose and the Sohar set her sails again for Sumatra. But hardly had the ship escaped from the Doldrums when she was once more crippled – this time by too much wind. At 4 a.m. one morning, when most of the crew were sleeping, a sudden gust caught the mainsail on the wrong side of the mast, sending the 23-meter horizontal spar (76 feet) holding the sail crashing into the upright and snapping it in two. Fortunately no one was injured in the incident, but it led to further delays, and only by jury-rigging a spare sail was the crew able to continue. Finally, nervous and exhausted, the crew and their crippled ship limped into Sabang, on the northern tip of Sumatra, on April 19th.

Their problems, however, were not yet over. They were now in a main shipping lane, and sailing through the narrow straits between Sumatra and Malaysia they were nearly run down several times at night by giant freighters.

“One ship came within 50 feet of us,” says marine biologist Andrew Price, a former Aramco consultant. “We flashed lights against our sail to attract attention but there seemed to be no one on watch. We changed course by 90 degrees but they still kept coming at us. Then at the very last moment they saw us and veered away?’

After that incident, the crew fixed a powerful strobe, used for light while filming, to the top of the Sohar’s mast. “It was so bright,” says Hunnam, “that one ship actually took us for a lighthouse and stopped.”

Sharks proved bothersome too. Once, when the diver went overboard to renew frayed ropes lashing the rudder to the hull, a particularly vicious White Tipped shark suddenly appeared close to him. But the diver turned around and growled at it – a personal technique he had developed for scaring off sharks – and it swam away. On the other hand, sharks also provided food while they were becalmed. “We once caught 15 sharks in 15 minutes,” says Musalam Ahmad proudly. Grimaced Severin: “It was shark for breakfast, shark for lunch and shark for dinner”.

The Sohar crew was also on the lookout for whales – but for a very different reason. One of the marine surveys they carried out was a “whale watch” to chart their types, numbers and positions in the Indian Ocean. The fact that they saw very few, says Hunnam, should provide further ammunition for conservationists fighting to protect whales.

Hunnam also hopes that information collected by the Sohar will prompt some action to save the dugong or sea cow – whose nursing breasts may have given rise to stories of “mermaids.” Sea cows are an even more seriously endangered species than whales. “We sighted only two dugongs in 750 square kilometers (300 square miles) of prime habitat off Sri Lanka, which indicates they are now almost extinct,” says Hunnam.

Yet another Sohar survey focused on barnacles. The purpose of this study was to collect information which may help chemists develop a barnacle repellant paint for ship’s hulls.

Curiously, the Sohar, although a replica of a 1,000 year old craft, proved far more suited for some types of marine research than many modern vessels. Because the boat was relatively small and slow moving, it provided an excellent platform near the sea surface from which scientific observations and recordings could be made.

Because fair winds in the Strait of Malacca enabled Sohar to make up some of the time it had lost in the Doldrums, it sailed into Singapore on June 2, only two weeks behind schedule.

Again, though, there was danger. Entering the third-largest port in the world, and one of the busiest, was terrifying. “We came at night under full sail the wrong way (against outgoing traffic),” said Severin. “We went right under the anchor chain of a super-tanker. My hair was going white.”

Finally, though, Severin dropped sail and waited for a tug to tow them into harbor, where they were greeted on the quayside by a traditional Chinese dragon dance welcome. “When I was small I saw an Indian movie about Sindbad the Sailor and grew up thinking he was Indian,” said a cheery Port Authority official watching the arrival. “Later I saw an English movie about Sindbad and thought he must be English. Now after all these years I finally learn the truth – he was an Arab.”

Correcting Western and Eastern misconceptions about the Arabs is one of the main purposes of Severin’s voyage. “Most people consider Arabs people of the desert,” said the tanned and bearded explorer as he relaxed at Singapore’s famous Raffles Hotel after landing. “But they are also people of the sea. I want to prove that the Arabs are a people who have not only come to prominence recently because of oil, but also have great seafaring history.”

Evidence of this abounds in Singapore’s old Arab quarter – you can still buy Omani dates in “Muscat Street” – although it is fast disappearing as developers bulldoze the old parts of town to put up new multi-story buildings.

The last leg of the voyage, from Singapore to Canton, was the one that worried Severin most. “There are still pirates in the South China Sea and we could run into storms,” he said before leaving Singapore.

For this reason, one British scientist said, they were “armed to the teeth,” and had aboard an Omani “weapons expert” and an ex-member of the famous British Special Armed Services.

As it turned out, however, there were neither pirates nor storms in the South China Sea, and the Sohar reached the mouth of the Pearl River in the last days of June, well ahead of schedule. In fact, they had to cool their heels for more than a week at Whampoa before sailing triumphantly up to Canton, on July 6, for the official Chinese welcoming ceremony that, some thought, probably equalled the reception given Sindbad.

From Canton, Severin sailed the Sohar to Hong Kong for transportation, via the Omani navy, back to Sur, where, perhaps, the gallant dhow may become either a tourist attraction or a training ship. Whatever happens to it, the story of its epic voyage will certainly go down in the annals of Arab seafaring history -alongside “The Adventures of Sindbad the Sailor.”

The Sindbad Voyage
‘an extraordinary’ explorer independent
Putnam Adult; 1st American ed edition, (February 15, 1983)
ISBN: 0091505607

The Sinbad Stories

by Samuel Pickering 

The Arabian Nights appeared in English in the 1740’s when John Newbery began publishing children’s books in London, and by the end of the century three tales from the Nights had established themselves as children’s “classics” in both Great Britain and the United States: Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp and, perhaps the most popular in the New World, Sinbad the Sailor.

Sinbad first appeared in an American children’s book in 1770, when a portion of the third voyage – in which he killed a cyclops – was tacked on to a version of Jack the Giant-killer.

Jack-the-Giant-killer was not the only adventurer with whom Sinbad associated in children’s books. Much as Sinbad’s third voyage had been tacked on to the account of Jack and the giants, an early American children’s book added The Celebrated Travels and Adventures of the Renowned Baron Munchausen to the end of an account of Sinbad’s voyages.

Since Munchausen and Sinbad always traveled to new lands, American children could easily identify themselves with them. America, then, was a new land and thus the youngsters could easily imagine themselves journeying into the unknown. To the west were broad plains, and beyond stood uncharted mountains – just the sort of place where a Roc might build her nest – while to the north there were vast fields of ice and to the south deep swamps crawling with alligators and snakes.

To American children of that era, therefore, Sinbad was believable. More important, he was reassuring; because in early America infant mortality was very high and death hovered over childhood like an ogre, Sinbad’s victories offered reassurance and hope. Buried alive in the Cavern of the Dead, for example, Sinbad simply refused to die and finding a way out of the cave metaphorically overcomes death itself. As Sinbad escapes the tomb and returns to Bagdad wealthier than before, so a determined child might hope to escape the clutches of death and look forward to a richly rewarding life.

This reassurance, of course, is true of many fairy tales. Jack-the-Giant-killer suggests that by using their intelligence, underdogs can overcome oppressive, threatening forces or people. And as Jack tricks giants, so does Br’er Rabbit outwit foxes, Puss in Boots fool ogres and Sinbad escape monsters: serpents with bodies thicker than the trunks of palm trees, cannibals who fatten his comrades like sheep and eat them, and the Old Man of the Sea wrapping his legs around Sinbad’s neck like an iron yoke.

To adults, the Sinbad stories have a deeper appeal; simultaneously they touch both our duties and our dreams, the adult and the child.

At the beginning of the tales, Sinbad the Porter, staggering under a heavy burden, rests outside a magnificent palace, and laments his laborious lot in life. Suddenly a page invites him inside where he meets the owner – and his namesake – Sinbad the Sailor, and for seven days is entertained with accounts of Sinbad the Sailor’s fabulous travels. In addition Sinbad the Sailor gives Sinbad the Porter 100 pieces of gold at the end of each visit. The two Sinbads, then, represent two aspects in everyone, one a responsible citizen, the other an adventurer. The two Sinbads meet in the morning and enjoy each other’s company throughout the day, but at night go separate ways as in life dreams and responsibilities often diverge and pull a man in different directions.

Today, Sinbad’s appeal to adults may be even stronger than it was to children. Although it is impossible to match Sinbad’s discoveries – a valley glittering with diamonds – or adventures – sailing across the sea on the back of a whale, and flying through the air tied to a Roc’s leg, many men – and women – still search for excitement. Across the globe groups of aspiring Sinbads clamber over icebergs in Antarctica, back-pack through the Himalayas, or snorkel in the Great Barrier Reef. By making seven voyages, one for each day in the week, Sinbad symbolically traveled forever. So long as man lives, Tennyson implies, he will dream:

“Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.”

Tennyson, of course, was speaking for Ulysses, but he might well be speaking for Timothy Severin, too, who, not content to “rust unburnished,” has set out to prove that though the Sinbad voyages may have been dreams, they were not myths.

The Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun

Arnold Toynbee, one of the most distinguished modern historians, called Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah (“Introduction to History”) “undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place.” Yet neither the Muqaddimah, nor the universal history that followed it, made any impact on European scholarship until the 19th century, when western scholars suddenly discovered that Ibn Khaldun had anticipated many of their theories of social and historical development by nearly 500 years.

What Ibn Khaldun did was to recognize, before anyone else, that history was “more than information about political events, dynasties and occurrences of the remote past, elegantly presented and spiced with proverbs.” History, he wrote, was a “new science” that should uncover an “inner meaning” and find “the causes and origins of existing things and deep knowledge of the how and why of events.”

To find this inner meaning, Ibn Khaldun developed a rational, analytical approach in which he discarded clichés and conventional ideas and rejected superstition and unsupported data. Too often, he commented, history had been written without a critical attitude, without thorough research, without knowledge of politics, custom, civilization and social organization. Figures were exaggerated – armies, revenues, wealth – and stories were accepted without any examination of their probability, or with errors of interpretation.

As one example, Ibn Khaldun pointed to the Arabian Nights tale about the famous Caliph al-Ma’mun that had been repeated in many histories. “One night, on his rambles through the streets of Baghdad” Ibn Khaldun wrote, “al-Ma’mun is said to have come upon a basket that was being let down from one of the roofs by means of pulleys and hoisted cords of silk thread. He seated himself in the basket and grabbed the pulley, which started moving. He was then taken up in to a chamber of extraordinary magnificence. Then a woman of uncommonly seductive beauty is said to have come out from behind the curtains. She greeted al-Ma’mun and invited him to keep her company. He drank wine with her the whole night long. In the morning he returned to his companions… He had fallen so much in love with the woman that he asked her father for her hand.”

To Ibn Khaldun this tale was utterly unacceptable as history. “How does all this accord with al-Ma’mun’s well-known piety and learning, his emulation of the life of his forefathers…? How could it be correct that he would act like one of those wicked scoundrels who muse themselves by rambling about at night, entering strange houses in the dark, and engaging in nocturnal trysts…? And how does that story fit with the position and noble character of al-Hasan ibn Sahl’s daughter, and with the firm morality and chastity that reigned in her father’s house …?” Such stories were always cropping up in the works of the old chroniclers, he said, adding that the true historian must distinguish silver and gold from dross and base metals.

Furthermore, Ibn Khaldun wrote, historians must be aware that conditions and customs do not remain constant. Earlier, for example, al-Mas’udi, one of the great historians of Islam, had described the conditions of the world, the sects and customs, the countries and the dynasties—and his work had become a basic reference for historians. But in the intervening centuries the face of the earth had changed. Populations had shifted. Climatic conditions had altered. The Black Death had swept the inhabited world, weakening tribes and dynasties, laying waste cities, emptying villages. In sum, the world had changed, and in his new history of it Ibn Khaldun traced the extent and searched for an explanation of these changes.

History, Ibn Khaldun explained, was information about human social organization. Man was distinguished from other animals by his sciences and crafts; by his need for restraining influence and authority; by his economic activities; and by civilization—in other words, by his need to live in villages and cities with other human beings “for the comforts and companionship and for the satisfaction of human needs, as a result of the natural disposition of human beings toward cooperation in order to be able to make a living.” The ability to think, and therefore cooperate, was given to human beings to compensate for their lack of the fangs, claws, horns, thick hides and powerful muscles that protected the animals.

Human social organization, he went on, was necessary to provide food, shelter and clothing, as well as defense against other animals and against men own natural aggressiveness. And once civilization had been achieved, the authority of a ruler also became necessary as a restraint against injustice and aggression.

According to Ibn Khaldun’s theory of history, social organization developed in two fundamentally different environments: desert, or Bedouin, and town, or sedentary. In the first setting, rural people—sometimes nomads, sometimes villagers far from the great population centers—lived a simple existence, restricting themselves to the bare necessities. They were governed by their natural leaders and bound together by ‘Asabiyah group solidarity stemming from blood ties and family traditions—a term traditionally used to describe narrow bias, clannishness and atavism, but used by Ibn Khaldun in a positive sense.

From this reservoir of civilization, Ibn Khaldun explained, sedentary society developed. As population increased and created a surplus of labor, crafts and sciences developed and, in turn, provided better and more varied food, more comfortable houses, more elaborate clothes and other luxuries. As population increased, so did ‘Asabiyah, and with it the Mulk, the worldly or practical rule of a leader; he at first was merely the Ra’is, or chief, but his simple political organization anticipated the state proper.

Social organization, Ibn Khaldun believed, arose from this beginning and followed a predictable cycle in which, over the generations, dynasties rose and fell. Nonetheless, civilization’s better qualities were preserved because succeeding generations tended to maintain the civilized customs of the past. In sum, political and cultural life move in never-ending circles of decline and re-birth, but civilization remains. The only occasions when the cyclical movement is interrupted are when certain turning points in history occur; in his own era these were the Black Death and the Mongol invasions.

To this cyclical movement of states and dynasties Ibn Khaldun admitted but one exception: the rule of the first four caliphs of Islam, the successors of Muhammad the Prophet. To Ibn Khaldun the formative period of Islam, pure and unworldly was the ideal state.

Many of Ibn Khaldun’s concepts and attitudes, in fact, had their sources in Islamic theology and philosophy. Yet he was a profoundly original thinker, as well—in many ways the first modern historian. In addition to being the first to take an analytical view of human society, he was the first to perceive the importance of economics in political history, to draw distinctions between the impact of rural and urban life and to stress the role of the city in the emergence of civilization and of the state. His other striking contribution was the idea of ‘asabiyah group solidarity—as the driving force of political action.

The Muqaddimah is the best-known part of Ibn Khaldun’s universal history, but the volumes that followed this introduction were great accomplishments in themselves. The first four dealt with the pre-Islamic world and with Arabia and eastern Islam; the last two were devoted to the history of the Berbers and the Muslim dynasties of northwest Africa—Maghrib—and concluded with Ibn Khaldun’s own autobiography. The chapters on the history of the Maghrib—much of which Ibn Khaldun himself had witnessed—is, even today, the most important sources of information about northwest Africa of that era.

“The physical axis of the Muslim world, a focal point toward which Muslims all over the world pray five times a day…”

Of all the questions asked by Westerners about Muslim beliefs, one of the hardest to answer adequately is: “What exactly is the Ka’bah ?”

In purely physical terms, the answer is easy: the Ka’bah is a stone structure about 50 feet high, roughly cubical in shape, which sits in the middle of the vast courtyard of Mecca’s Sacred Mosque, its four corners more or less aligned with the cardinal points of the compass. Alongside the northwestern wall of the Ka’bah is an open area—the Hijr—enclosed by a semicircular wall and containing the traditional sites of the tombs of Hagar, wife of Abraham, and Ishmael, their son. Inside the structure there is an empty chamber and in the southeastern corner of the exterior wall there is, embedded in the wall in a silver frame, a fragment of polished black stone called simply the Hajar al-Aswad , the Black Stone.

After the rise of Islam it became customary to cover the Ka’bah with a cloth, the color of which varied with the color of the banner of the reigning caliph. Now it is draped with a black cloth—the Kiswah—on which are embroidered verses from the Koran in gold thread. Renewed each year, the Kiswahs were formerly made in Egypt and sent to Mecca with the annual Egyptian caravan. Now they are woven in a special Saudi Arabian Government factory in Mecca itself. Over 80 craftsmen weave the more than 2,500 feet of material required on handlooms and embroider it with verses from the Koran in magnificent calligraphy. The finished cloth weighs almost 5.000 pounds.

Each year on the eve of the Pilgrimage dignitaries from the Muslim world wash the Ka’bah thoroughly and sweep the chamber. Later, on the 10th of the month of Dhu al-Hijjah , during the Pilgrimage, the Ka’bah receives its new draping.

In comparison with the architectural extravagance of Christian cathedrals and basilicas—St. Paul’s, Notre Dame, St. Peter’s—the simple construction and relatively modest dimensions of the Ka’bah might strike some observers as unimpressive. Yet its very simplicity, as Muhammad Asad (see p. 14) wrote, is its incomparable glory. “There it stood, almost a perfect cube … entirely covered with black brocade, a quiet island in the middle of the vast quadrangle of the mosque: much quieter than any other work of architecture anywhere in the world. It would almost appear that he who first built the Ka’bah—for since the time of Abraham the original structure has been rebuilt several times in the same shape—wanted to create a parable of man’s humility before God. The builder knew that no beauty of architectural rhythm and no perfection of line, however great, could ever do justice to the idea of God: and so he confined himself to the simplest three-dimensional form imaginable—a cube of stone.”

In historical and spiritual terms, the answer is more difficult. For the Ka’bah—”the House of God”—is not a temple, not a church, not a shrine. Not, at least, in the usual sense. It is rather the physical axis of the Muslim world, a focal point toward which Muslims all over the world pray five times a day and around which pilgrims to Mecca must perform the Tawaf . It is a symbol, as Muhammad Asad wrote, “of God’s oneness; and the pilgrim’s bodily movement around it is a symbolic expression of human activity, implying that not only our thoughts and feelings—all that is comprised in the term ‘inner life’—but also our outward, active life, our doings and practical endeavors must have God as their center.”

In the Koran, the significance of the Ka’bah is fundamental—as Sura II, verse 25 makes clear: “Remember We made the House a place of assembly for men and a place of safety; and take ye the Place of Abraham as a place of prayer, and We convenanted with Abraham and Ishmael that they should sanctify My House for those who compass it round, or use it as a retreat, or bow, or prostrate themselves (therein in prayer).”

The Ka’bah is also referred to in the Koran as the “first house established for mankind,” meaning, according to the foremost medieval commentator on the Koran, al-Tabari, that it is the first building ever consecrated to the worship of God.

In medieval times popular legend held that the Ka’bah was created before the earth and floated for 1,000 years upon the surface of the waters covering the earth, coming to rest in Mecca only when the waters receded and the earth emerged. Thus the Ka’bah was already in place when Adam and Eve, after their expulsion from Paradise, made the first Pilgrimage as atonement for their sins. Such traditions, however, are rarely given much attention by Muslim historians anymore, and even less credence. To them what occurred before Abraham is of doubtful historicity. As Ismail Nawwab says (see p.12), “It all begins with Abraham.”

There are also varying traditions about the Black Stone, which Muslims on the Pilgrimage either kiss or touch. One legend, widely diffused, states that the Black Stone was a precious jewel taken out of Paradise by Adam and put into the corner of the Ka’bah when he made the first Pilgrimage. Another, noted by al-Azraqi, the oldest historian of Mecca, says that the stone was given to Ishmael by the Angel Gabriel.

Because of such stories. Westerners frequently misinterpret and overemphasize the significance of the stone. To quote Muhammad Asad again: “This Black Stone… has been the cause of much misunderstanding among non-Muslims, who believe it to be a fetish taken over by Muhammad as a concession to the pagan Meccans. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just as the Ka’bah is an object of reverence but not of worship, so too is the Black Stone. It is revered as the only remnant of Abraham’s original building; and because the lips of Muhammad touched it on his Farewell Pilgrimage, all pilgrims have done the same ever since.”

This misunderstanding is not new. In the year 929 the Carmathians, an heretical sect based in al-Hasa, in eastern Arabia, sacked Mecca and carried the stone off with them in hope of attracting pilgrims to al-Hasa rather than Mecca. But although they held the stone more than 20 years, the attempt failed, as orthodox Muslims attached little significance to the Black Stone itself. As the Caliph Omar said, “I know that you are a stone, incapable of doing good or harm. Had I not seen the Messenger of God kissing you, I would not have done so.”