Book Review of: Mecca The Sacred City by Ziadduin Sardar Rating: Great Read Publishers: Blooomsbury (2014) Ziauddin Sardar is a famous travel writer and listed by prospect magazine as one of the top British 100 intellectuals. This is the first book by him, which I have read and made me laugh even while I was reading the introduction. Sardar covers the history of the holy city from the home of Hagar and Ishmael to the establishment of the Ka’ba, to the present day. Sardar worked for the Hajj research centre from 1975-1980 and is expertly placed to understand the workings of the holy city. Sardar wonders what it would have been like for Ibn Battuta to undertake the pilgrimage “one of the world’s great travel classics” had become something of a hero of mine.” So Sardar writes “ The travel bug, an interest in and respect for the diversity of humanity, the urge to learn and write about one’s experiences – these I regarded as Mecca’s gifts…They had made ibn Battuta the man he was, and I thought that perhaps sampling something of what he experienced would do the same for me.” However first the tricky problem of transport arose and Sardar wanted to travel by traditional four legged means. Camels had been turned into race animals and exchanged hands for extraordinary sums. So Sardar sought out a more humble beast, a donkey. He searched for one month in Jeddah for such an animal and finally he met a Bedouin prepared to offer him the animal for £2000. A lot of money back then and Sardar rather generously paid half the asking price, “There is one thing I must tell you in all honesty” said the Bedouin before handing me the lead. He was strictly observing the appropriate Islamic etiquette that is innately the Saudi way. ‘While I’ve fed him well, I have not been able to look after all his needs.’ What do you mean?’ I asked somewhat confused. Well there aren’t as many donkeys in this city as there used to be. So it is difficult to mate the animals. I’ve been trying for over two years, but alas.” The donkey is then given the name Genghis. A guide who handles donkeys is hired and Zia Sardar, his friend and a guide travel on the well worn road to Mecca. On the way danger looms ahead in the form of a donkey the guide tries to shoo the donkey away but fails. There is no need to worry the guide thinks since it a male donkey. Sardar’s donkey was not going to stop and raced off, having “caught up with the object of his desires, and the two moved closer. Zafar pressed his lower lip between his teeth, looked reproachfully straight at me and said “I think Genghis is making inappropriate physical contact with the other donkey. I suppose’, he added, ‘that the old Bedouin who sold him didn’t tell you that Genghis is gay.” A group of Bedouins now challenged the travelling trio as to what was happening. The Bedouins are in disbelief that the trio are walking when all modern buses are running on the motorway to Mecca, “Do you have permission to walk? And what are you doing with that donkey? He ahs abused my animal in front of my eyes. May God forgive me!” The old man roused himself to anger.” “Before either of us could reply, two police cars with flashing lights and blaring sirens pulled up beside us.” The police saved the trio but Genghis the donkey had fled. When Genghis was found he refused to move and Zafar would not permit the guide to cane the donkey into forward movement. So the donkey and the guide travelled by pickup to Mecca while Sardar and Zafar walked on their Meccan quest. “I have often wondered about both the standard biblical and the orthodox Muslim accounts of Abraham’s (PBUH) story. Abraham(pbuh) , supposedly a devout servant of God, turns out to be rather cruel, happy to abandon Hagar and his infant son in an arid, uninhospitable place” that Mecca then was without water until God delivered the waters of Zamzam. Sardar writes” recent research suggests that Abraham(PBUH) and his family were located not in Egypt or Palestine, but in the Asir Province, which shares its western border with Yemen, in the Southwest of Arabia. That, of course, would make the Muslim account more plausible” of regular visits by Abraham to Hagar. Ishmael and Abraham(PBUH) together built the Kaaba and when the cubic building was almost complete “an angel brought a special stone- it had fallen from Paradise onto the nearby hill of Abu Qubays. Abraham (PBUH) and Ishmael (PBUH) incorporated the black celestial stone (al-hajar al aswad) in the eastern corner of the Kaaba”. In the year 930 Qarmatians, an egalitarian sect following the Fatimids of Egypt attacked Mecca during the hajj season, putting the pilgrims to the sword and smashing the black stone into seven pieces. The leader of the Qarmatians “Abu Tahir drunkenly charged with hs sword drawn in his hand and halted before the Noble House (the Kaaba), where his horse dropped dung and urinated….The well of Zamzam and all the other wells and pits of Mecca were filled to overflowing with the remains of the martyrs. The Portuguese inquisitors from their base of Goa, established in 1510, sought to monopolize all trade in the Indian ocean but Admiral Sid Reiss put an end to such European pretensions and the ocean was secured by the Ottomans in 1538 including pilgrimage routes. Under ottoman Rule the city thrived under the direct tutelage of the Sherif of Mecca. Ottoman sultans, members of the royal family, competed with each other to build mosques, fountains, schools and public baths in the Holy City. With the rebellion of the Sherif of Mecca against the Ottomans and that of the Wahhabis, the British supported the latter to take control of what is today Saudi Arabia. A British Muslim, named Mahmoud Mobarek Churchward who journeyed on the Hajj in the early twentieth century when Mecca had become part o Saudi Arabia, was “keen on kebabs sold by a butcher near his guest house at much below the market price, but then his Meccan friends, watching the butcher’s abattoir from the roofs of their houses, noticed that he was luring street dogs into his den. The tasty kebabs were dog meat. The butcher was arrested, lashed, and driven out of the Holy City sitting backwards on a donkey.” In the 1950s new houses had to adopt the vernacular architectural design in keeping with the heritage of Mecca. “The new buildings had white washed walls with lattice screens and windows both to preserve privacy and to trap cool air in hot and humid Mecca…There were even plans to renovate the remaining historical buildings and cultural property (mainly old mosques), preserve the urban environment and open spaces and control development in the city to ensure continuity and compatibility with tradition and heritage. Mecca never looked better: a cosmopolitan metropolis that was both ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’.” In the narrow Meccan streets, pedestrians were shaded from the glare of the sun. It was a city built for its environment. The established families of the city traced their ancestry to the Sharifs of Mecca, and beyond to the Prophet Muhammed (S.A.W), and were proud of being Hijazis, people of the Hijaz. They considered themselves to be, and indeed were quite different from the Najdis, people from the northern province of Najd, the homeland of the Saudi rulers. …The Hijazis liked music and malud, the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday, and leaned towards Sufism, drawing on an urban tradition of religious mysticism. These things were anathema to the Najdi puritans, and the Hijazis were forced to hold their traditional ceremonies in secret within the four walls of their homes. Their honoured traditional occupations had now become redundant; even their religious scholars had been usurped by the state. ..For the Hijazis, Mecca was not just the centre of Islam, it was also a source of their identity. Its cultural heritage and sophisticated traditional architecture were intimately connected to their genealogies, essential to their survival as Hijazis…in the 1960s and 1970s, they had engineered a small boom in traditional Hijazi houses and buildings, mixing the Hashemite style with old Turkish, Egyptian and Moorish designs. All this was not threatened. Hushed murmurs spread through the city: the sanctuary had to be saved from the onslaught of rampant development, and the obsession with technology and modernity of the despised Najdis. Mecca actually consisted of several villages linked together and providing a supportive community and cohesion. All this was to be disrupted with what Sardar sees as likely consequences of depression and other social ills. Each city has certain limits within which it can expand within the given land environment and water resources. However, Western consultants who had never been to Mecca “were producing ever more grandiose plans of a damaging nature. If implemented, these plans would level the mountains, introduce skyscrapers, and rip apart the very fabric of the Sacred city. “ There was one brave architect who was deemed the leader of the Hijaz from a distinguished mercantile family, named Sami Angawi (and who was director of the Hajj Research Centre) ,“The challenge facing Mecca, Agnawi declared was to synthesize tradition and modernity, and thus to ‘fit the variables into the constants’. That task he concluded could only be accomplished through ‘interdisciplinary research’”. As far as the Saudis are concerned Mecca has no prehistory, no history after Muhammed (S.A.W), consequently the majority of historical sites have been deliberately destroyed to prevent them from becoming places of veneration. The Saudi masterplan for the city, will result in “large ugly buildings would flourish in a concrete jungle fed by the fertilizer of greed”. Sardar writes “Our research (from the Hajj Research Centre) showed that family units and associations necessary for social and psychological security would be broken mental illness would increase and traditional characteristics of the Hijazis would disintegrate. Mecca would become an inhuman concrete jungle where grotesque steel and glass buildings would jostle for attention.” “The Royal Makkah Clock Tower, which at 1,972 feet is the world’s second-tallest building after Dubai’s Burj Khalifa. It is part of a mammoth development…dwarfs the Kaaba and soars above the Sacred Mosque. The skyline above the Sacred Mosque is no longer dominated by the rugged outline of the encircling mountains. It is surrounded by the brutalism of hideous ugly rectangular steel and concrete buildings. “ ‘An estimated 95 percent of the city’s millennium-old buildings, consisting of over 400 sites of cultural and historical significance were demolished to build this eruption of architectural bling. Bulldozers arrived in the middle of the night to demolish Ottoman-era town houses. The complex stands on top of a bull dozed Al-Ayad fort, built in 1781 and no longer able to perform its function of protecting Mecca from invaders. At the opposite end of the Grand Mosque complex. As it is now called, the house of Khadijiah, the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W), has been turned into a block of toilets.” The Makkah Hilton stands on the house of Abu Bakr (R.A.). “With a seemingly casual disregard for history, the Saudis are rebuilding the Ottoman-era section of the Haram, the oldest surviving section of the Sacred Mosque. The interior of exquisite beauty, with intricately carved marble columns, built by a succession of Ottoman Sultans – Sultan Suleiman, Sultan Salim I, Sultan Murad III, and Sultan Murad IV- from 1553 to 1629, will give way to series of halls, eighty metres high. The columns, which are adorned with calligraphy of the names of the Prophet’s companions, will be demolished. History stretching back to Umar (R.A.), the second caliph of Islam, Ibn Zubair, who sacrificed his life to rebuild the Kaaba, and to the Abbasid Caliphs, will be replaced by an ultra modern doughnut shaped building.” Reviewer: Farrukh Husain. F Husain is a specialist employment lawyer, researcher to William Dalrymple and writer himself on Afghan history.
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 11:01:34 +0000