9
A panoramic photograph of Mecca, taken from the fort on Mount Abu Qubays in 1880, shows the city in its full traditional splendour. The prime focus is the Kaaba within the open courtyard of the Sacred Mosque. The houses around the Sanctuary, up to five floors high with mashrabiya, wooden fretwork window screens, facing outward and with internal courtyards, are elegantly spread out over the sharp-peaked hills bristling around the Haram. Within the Haram itself, dome structures designated for the four schools of thought – Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi and Hanbali – are plainly visible; as are the Haram library and the clock house used for determining the times of prayer. The city is clearly in a bad state of repair: the houses adjacent to the Abu Qubays fort are either derelict or in ruins, and there are not many people in the Sacred Mosque. Photographs depicting the main congregational Friday prayers around the Kaaba show that it is far from crowded. This is not surprising. Given the political turmoil in the city, with the mass exodus of the inhabitants a regular occurrence, the population was fluctuating wildly. During the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Mecca’s population had fallen to fewer than 40,000 inhabitants. It would rise only slowly during the next decades, moving up to 60,000 – still considerably fewer than the 150,000 reported in previous centuries.
The photograph is part of an enormous collection (around 36,000) known as the Yildiz Albums.1 Among the first photographs to be taken of the Holy City, the albums were commissioned by the opera-loving Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II (r. 1876–1909), whose hobbies also included carpentry – he made his own furniture, which I admired on a visit to Istanbul’s Dolmabache Palace. The sultan assigned military officers to photograph buildings, schools, castles, forts, military barracks, government offices, Mecca and the Kaaba to provide a record of the entire journey undertaken by the pilgrims coming from Istanbul via Lebanon to Mecca. The photographs depict the routes that the pilgrim caravans traversed, the towns and cities they visited, the guesthouses where they stayed, and notable natural, cultural and military locations from Beirut, Medina and Mecca to all the ritual sites (Arafat, Muna, Muzdalifah) of the Hajj.
One could buy such pictures of the city, and the Sacred Mosque, in the bazaars in Mecca. Also available in the city’s bookshops were postcards of the Hajj, scenes at Arafat, Muna, and the Stoning of the Devils, as well as of the royal surre caravans. The bookshops in the Holy City offered almost exclusively books printed in and imported from Egypt. The works on offer were largely theological, commentaries on the Qur’an, the life of the Prophet, works of canon law, along with calligraphy and Arabic poems and literature. The Arabian Nights2 was widely available and very popular. Another regular bestseller was The Assemblies of al-Hariri.3 This eleventh-century text, which contains fifty ‘encounters’ or short stories each with a particular moral, accompanied by well-known proverbs, phrases and segments of classical poems put into the mouths of characters, was partly or wholly committed to memory by more educated Meccans. Also available were a few works by Meccan writers, among them the popular text the Six Discourses by Sheikh Haqqi, printed in Cairo in 1882. The sheikh’s warning against infidel modern culture echoed the tenor of general thinking in Mecca. Western culture, he wrote, has placed ‘on all wares that are used by men pictures of living creatures so that there is now hardly a house, shop, market, bath, fortress or ship without pictures’. This is surely a sign of the Devil and of ‘things that lead into Hell’.4
Books on science and arts, even those written by Muslims, seldom survived the censor’s wrath. The bookshop also stocked a couple of local newspapers. Al-Qibla, the official gazette, started appearing in 1885 when Osman Nuri Pasha, the Ottoman wali, established a printing press in the city. A weekly newspaper consisting of four sheets half in Turkish (then written in Arabic script) and half in Arabic called The Hijaz was also available. These local newspapers seldom reported news of the outside world.
The photographs, printed books and newspapers were all harbingers of the arrival of modern communications in the Holy City. A new age was dawning, and the new sharif tried to reflect the spirit of the times. He was Aun-al-Rafiq, son of Sharif Muhammad ibn Aun. He became the ruler of the Holy City in 1882, after the death of Sharif Abdul Muttalib, at the age of fifty. Amongst his first actions, to the surprise of his citizens, was to have himself photographed. What was a passion for the sultan was good enough for the sharif.
The picture appears in the annexe to Mekka in the Later Part of the 19th Century by the respected Dutch Orientalist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857–1936).5 While the photographic record of the Hajj and Mecca was being made in 1880, Hurgronje was receiving his doctorate at Leiden University for a dissertation on ‘The Festivities of Mecca’. The Dutch government ruled over a large Muslim population; its East Indies colonies comprise what is today the most populous Muslim country on earth, Indonesia. Seeking a suitable agent to study the problem of rebellious natives, they lighted upon Hurgronje, a scholar of Islam with an expert’s command of Arabic. He set off for Arabia in the pay of the Dutch government, though the money was channelled through the Royal Institute for Linguistics and Anthropology in a classic demonstration of the relationship between ‘scientific investigation’, ‘intelligence-gathering’ and ‘covert operations’ that runs through the history of Western colonialism in general, and attempts to penetrate the forbidden city of Mecca in particular.
Hurgronje based himself at the Dutch consulate in Jeddah for some months while he made useful contacts before moving to spend six months in Mecca during 1884–5. He assumed the Muslim name Abd al-Gaffar and intended to perform the Hajj – a desire that remained unfulfilled, as he was expelled from the Holy City by the Ottoman wali. The story of his exit has more than a touch of the Indiana Jones about it. Hollywood’s popular hokum about the archaeologist, adventurer and covert agent Dr Jones are nostalgia for and ostensibly pastiche of a certain kind of film-making. Nevertheless, beneath all the pizzazz they do reflect something authentic about the interconnections that existed in the late nineteenth century between the scramble for knowledge and artefacts and the scramble for empire. Hurgronje’s misfortune was the result of a little malicious activity on the part of the French vice-consul in Jeddah. Two scientists, one German and one French, had come across a fascinating stone inscription in South Arabia. The Frenchman was then promptly assassinated, and questions arose about repatriation of their possessions, including the enigmatic inscription, which had been left in Jeddah. Hurgronje merely translated the correspondence for the French vice-consul, who was conversant in neither Turkish nor Arabic. In the process the vice-consul conceived the notion that Hurgronje was trying to gain possession of the artefact at the heart of the matter, the Taima Stone, for Germany and denounced him in an article that appeared in a French newspaper, and that quickly came to the attention of the Turkish and Meccan authorities. Until that point Hurgronje had been accepted in good faith as a scholar and a convert to Islam. The newspaper article made everyone think they had been cruelly used, betrayed, taken for a ride. Hurgronje was immediately persona non grata. Though he was later exonerated by the Turkish authorities of any wrongdoing in the affair, he never sought to return to Arabia. He himself went to great philosophical and philological lengths to maintain ambiguity about the true meaning and nature of ‘conversion’, while making it evident that he had not actually converted to Islam.
While in Mecca Hurgronje enjoyed total freedom and the confidence of the citizens, and learned first hand how they taught and learned, talked politics and discussed issues of faith in mosques, divans, coffee houses and living-rooms. He married a Meccan woman and devoted a great deal of time to extensive research on the daily life of the citizens. When he was ordered to leave, he left his wife behind. Like any good anthropologist, or agent, what Hurgronje needed was a reliable informant who could be an effective research assistant. The wife would have been invaluable in that respect. And so was a young Javanese student, who, tellingly, was desperate for a sponsor to help him get a job with the Dutch administration in his homeland. Hurgronje found that he would do anything asked of him and go to inordinate lengths to satisfy the research agenda of his employer. We have no knowledge of what happened to the wife or the student once Hurgronje left the city.
His unceremonious expulsion from Mecca did nothing to dim Hurgronje’s career. He became a policy adviser to the Dutch government in the East Indies. His principal advice was remarkably similar to the infamous Education Minute provided to the British in India in 1835 by the colonial governor and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay. Macaulay advocated Western education to build a compliant class of natives who would be clones of the Raj, capable of administering the empire on its behalf. Hurgronje advocated Western education to bypass Islamic religious education and advance compliant peaceable governance through indigenous elites to serve and preserve the purposes of empire. After his time in the East Indies Hurgronje returned to the Netherlands, where he became a noted academic, and was among the founders of the modern discipline of Islamic Studies.
The photographs Hurgronje amassed of Mecca are not without their own frisson of empire. Divided into three parts – ‘Views of Mecca’, ‘A Gallery of Mecca’s People’ and ‘Portraits of Pilgrims’ – his book contains exquisite and remarkable pictures. A panoramic photograph, much sharper than that in the Yildiz Album, shows a well-planned city nestling in a valley between mountains, with handsome, evenly distributed houses surrounding the Sacred Mosque. The Meccans, mostly sitting and in formal dress, look serious but elegant. The pilgrims, photographed in groups and in their national costumes, appear tired, but happy to be photographed.
The photograph of Sharif Aun-al-Rafiq in the collection has him standing looking away from the camera. He has a stylish moustache, a small beard and a smooth, dark complexion. Clearly he has abandoned the huge turban and gold gowns of his predecessors, and is wearing a small, undistinguished white turban and a black, richly embroidered dress, with a light black shash, a scarf, with white borders holding the dress together. A large star hangs from the button of his robe. On his travels, the sharif was even more simply dressed, often like a Bedouin. He made it his policy to avoid talking politics in public. This seemed strange to the Meccans, but on the sharif’s part it was an attempt to deflect the attention of Turkish agents and a cover for his intense hatred of Ottoman rule. He did not have the support of the Turkish wali, Osman Pasha, who has his portrait over the page in Hurgronje’s album. The pasha wears a similar dress but with a fez in place of a turban. Full-bearded, with a stern face, he stands on a carpet grasping the sword that hangs by his side. A man of immense energy and capability, he was appointed at the same time as the sharif. The two seem to be eyeing each other warily, suggesting that trouble was in store.
They had similar administrative powers and clashed frequently. Osman Pasha tried, and succeeded, to reduce the sharif’s power by virtue of his control of the customs duties from Jeddah. The sharif’s share was now paid not as a right but as a salary. The pasha paid the sharif’s guards directly, and took over the administration of justice, allowing the sharif to hear only the cases concerning his own family and clan and those of the indigenous Meccans. Moreover, the wali also took charge of public works in the Holy City. He improved the water supply, repaired the Zubaidah aqueduct, and built a new government office, new barracks and guard houses. This was a direct encroachment on the sharif’s territory; and Aun-al-Rafiq saw this as an affront to his office and dignity. He would not see his authority eroded further; decisive action against the wali had to be taken.
Sharif Aun-al-Rafiq decided to follow the example of the Prophet Muhammad. There was to be a hijra – a migration from Mecca to Medina. One night he quietly slipped out of the city, along with his family and most of the jurists, scholars, and the nobles and merchants of Mecca. In the morning the Turks found themselves alone in the city, apart from pilgrims and visitors. Most of the houses in Mecca were empty and locked. Some had placards reading: ‘Entrance to Paradise, without payment of bribe, for he who rids Mecca of its cursed and corrupt Wali’.
In Medina, the sharif wrote letter after letter to the sultan complaining about the excesses of Osman Pasha. Eventually Istanbul conceded, and Osman Pasha was dismissed in 1886. The sharif and his people returned triumphantly to Mecca. A new stone was now erected in front of his palace. The carving in large letters on the stone announced: ‘Office of the Noble Emir and of his Glorious Government’. A string of walis now came and went. The sharif, however, always managed to keep them in their place and/or have them replaced. Only those who turned a blind eye to his dealings, or were satisfied with a bribe or two, could keep their appointments.
After his death in 1905, Aun-al-Rafiq was succeeded by his nephew, Ali ibn Abdullah ibn Muhammad ibn Aun. He emerged on the recommendation of Ahmad Ratib Pasha, the wali of Mecca at the time. The two were friends and mutual admirers and were able to administer Mecca jointly for four years. But a revolution was brewing in Istanbul. It had become obvious that the ageing and tottering Ottoman Empire – with its centralized bureaucracy, suppression of all opposition, obsession with spying on its citizens, together with loss of territory and prestige – was reaching its final stages. There was unrest and rebellion throughout the Empire. In Istanbul, the conviction that the economic penetration of foreign powers could only be checked by the dissolution of the Empire had taken hold. The Young Turks, leaders of the reform movement, were agitating against Sultan Abdulhamid II and campaigning for parliamentary government under their control. The success of their movement provided a certain symmetry to the reign of Abdulhamid II. He became sultan when his brother was deposed, and was succeeded by another brother when he too was deposed in 1909. There was, however, one major difference: when Mehmet V became sultan he was a mere figurehead with no powers, thanks to the new Turkish Constitution, which was proclaimed in late 1908. Ahmad Ratib Pasha, the wali of Mecca, was considered by the Young Turks to be incurably loyal to the old regime, so he was summarily dismissed. When Sharif Ali met a similar fate he sought refuge with the British in Egypt.
The British had effectively become the pre-eminent power in Egypt when they bought out the khedive’s shares in the Suez Canal in 1875 under the noses of the French. It took decades before Britain and France eventually settled the equivocal status of the country between themselves. It was never a formal colony, but in constructing the Entente Cordiale the French agreed that Egypt was to be in the British sphere of influence while they had free rein in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. For Egyptians it made little practical difference: the administration of their lives remained under foreign ‘guidance’. With Sharif Ali gone, his replacement was to be Abdilla, brother of Aun-al-Rafiq, who was as old and ailing as the Sublime Porte. Overjoyed by his appointment as sharif of Mecca, Abdilla decided to visit the grave of his son to say farewell. While saying his prayers at the gravestone, he had a massive stroke and died on the spot.
The news of his death in Mecca brought the old rivalries between the two branches of the sharif clan, Dhawi Zaid and Dhawi Aun, to the fore. Dhawi Zaid put forward Ali Haider, grandson of Ghalib, as their candidate. Haider, a cultured, moderate man who abhorred violence, had spent most of his life in Istanbul. Although highly respected and trusted by the Ottomans, he was generally seen by the Meccans as pro-British, a view reinforced by the fact that he was married to an English woman. Hussain, the Dhawi Aun candidate, too had spent a long time – around fifteen years – at the court of the sultan in Istanbul. Self-obsessed, cantankerous and expert at politicking, he outmanoeuvred the gentle Haider with relative ease, won the support of the Porte and became the sharif of Mecca in 1908. He was to be the last sharif to rule Mecca.
Sharif Hussain took over Mecca at the same time as the Hijaz railway was being inaugurated. It was to be a major turning point in pilgrim travel. The train from Damascus to Medina and then on to Mecca was to replace the Syrian caravan. For the Ottomans the project had additional significance: a cheap and convenient way of supplying and reinforcing their garrisons in the Hijaz. They presented the project not as an imperial Ottoman activity but as an Islamic endeavour, a service for the pilgrims to carry them to their spiritual journey’s end – Medina and then Mecca. The railway was financed as a waqf, or Islamic endowment, and Sultan Abdulhamid II sought donations for the project from all over the Muslim world. In return, he promised that the railways would be built solely with workers and material from Muslim lands. And with the exception of a German engineer and tracks and cars from Europe, he lived up to his promise. The bulk of the labour was supplied by the Turkish army; other work was carried out using Egyptian and Indian workers. After eight years of effort, the first part of the project, Damascus to Medina, was complete. For the small cost of a third-class ticket, £3.10s, the pilgrims could travel over a thousand miles in relative comfort and safety.
On board the train on its inaugural journey from Damascus to Medina was Arthur J. B. Wavell, a twenty-five-year-old soldier in the Welsh regiment. Wavell was but the latest of the explorer-spies to arrive in Mecca. Trained at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, he had already fought in the Boer War and served British intelligence in his travels in southern Africa (Swaziland, Tongaland and parts of Zululand) and later in East Africa, travelling to Mombasa. Wavell was one among many British spies roving around Arabia, gathering information and intelligence. The British had serious interest in the region, both to gain a foothold in the Muslim Holy Lands and to undermine the Ottoman Empire. The Middle East in general was of interest to the British, being a vital link in the chain of communication and connection to India. Galvanized by Napoleon’s foray into Egypt and resolute after the opening of the Suez Canal, they bolstered their efforts throughout the region. They had interests in Kuwait, Persia, and with the sheikhdoms around the Persian Gulf; and what happened in Istanbul and Mecca mattered to them, just as it did to the Dutch authorities. The British ruled over a vast Muslim population across the Indian subcontinent as well as in the Malay states.
The British also funded John Lewis Burckhardt’s travels. He was followed by the most famous, and flamboyant, Englishman to visit Mecca: Sir Richard Burton. Burton arrived in Mecca in 1853, aged thirty-two, after spending seven years in India (in the province of Sind) as a soldier for the East India Company, where he acquired a well-founded reputation for spying. His decision to visit Mecca, and perform the Hajj, was in fact a smart career move. The point of the journey, he told his supporters at the Royal Geographical Society, was to further scientific knowledge and provide the East India Company with valuable information on Arabian trade routes. With precocious talents as a linguist, Burton travelled in disguise, switching his initial false persona of a Persian to that of an Afghan once he appreciated the hostility faced by Shia pilgrims. However, he had little to add to Burckhardt’s descriptions of Mecca, so little in fact that he contents himself merely with quoting what Burckhardt had written. Burton was nevertheless the Victorian adventurer par excellence. After Mecca he accompanied John Hanning Speke on the expedition to identify the source of the river Nile. Always wayward and truculent, his manner caused squabbles, and Burton felt underappreciated for his achievements. He turned his attentions from exploration to translation, notably of The Arabian Nights. When he realized that it was not so much the ancient tales of Sheherazade that titillated the British public as his raunchy footnotes, he gave them the exotica of the Orient in full measure with his translation of The Perfumed Garden.6 It was a fitting culmination in many ways, the sexual laxity and appetites of the Meccans having been a consistent theme of so many travellers’ tales.
Another probable spy was Eldon Rutter, who performed the Hajj in 1925, and also provided one of the most comprehensive and detailed accounts of life in Mecca. The unique selling point of his two-volume account was that he travelled to Mecca from the south, something entirely new in the annals, since all other visitors had arrived from the north.
These non-Muslim English visitors to the Holy City spoke excellent Arabic. Many were highly knowledgeable about Islam and Muslim customs, and entered the city in Arab garb with Muslim pseudonyms. Burton used various disguises; Wavell travelled with a black-market Turkish passport and two travelling companions, a Swahili-speaker from Mombasa called Masaudi, and an Arab, Abdul Wahid, from Aleppo, who had lived in Berlin. Rutter became a Syrian and took the name of Salah ed-Din. The British were by no means the only nation sponsoring such visitors. Apart from Hurgronje on behalf of the Dutch, the French, with increasing colonial responsibilities for Muslim populations across north, west and central Africa, were also in the game. Ten years after Hurgronje’s visit, the French dispatched Gervais Courtellemont on a secret commission to the Holy City. The mystique of Mecca added to the challenge faced by these explorers and spies. It was absolutely essential to be inconspicuous in a city forbidden to non-Muslims. Courtellemont, even by his own admission, seems to have violated this prime directive by being almost unbelievably tactless and awkward. His travelling companion, Ali, was frequently at his wits’ end and called upon to rescue the situation by placating the authorities. But for all his misadventures Courtellemont was a skilled photographer, and in a period that seems dominated by the urge to take pictures he provided a number of excellent photographs of Mecca.
Wavell was the first who did not have to endure extreme privations on the journey. After arriving in Medina on the Hijaz railway, he made his way to Mecca, where he spent several months. During the Hajj of 1908, he came across Sharif Hussain’s camp. It stood, he wrote,
on an artificially raised platform, [and] comprised four high marquees and many smaller tents. Lines of troops formed a passage and kept back the crowd. Bands paraded up and down the empty spaces between them. The various grandees present arrived one after the other with their proper escorts and were received by the Shareef seated on a dais at the far end of the largest marquee . . . [after the grandees had left the Sharif held] a sort of levee to which everyone was admitted who cared to go . . . While quite alive to the dignity of his position, he endeavours to revive the old traditions of the Prophet and the earlier Caliphs, who were accessible to all and sundry, and put into actual practice the theory of equality and fraternity inculcated by the Koran.7
In Mecca itself, Wavell discovered that not all postcards in the bookshops depicted innocent scenes of the city and the Hajj. In a bookshop in the short street leading to the main gate of the Haram, he was shown a few postcards that, ‘in England at any rate, it is not advisable to use for correspondence’. Thinking that he was interested in more saucy illustrations, the proprietor, a Meccan by birth, ushered him into ‘the darker recesses at the back of his shop and brought out an album of pictures, the nature of which need not be indicated more particularly’.8 The customers of the bookshops were almost exclusively foreigners, pilgrims and visitors like Wavell, as the Meccans themselves were hardly interested in reading.
The only book that most Meccans themselves read was the Qur’an. An educated person in the Holy City was someone who had memorized the Qur’an and could write its verses elegantly. Consequently, children’s education was focused solely on the art of recitation and calligraphy. At the tender age of three or four, children would be marched to traditional Qur’anic schools, known as kuttab, where memory was considered the only important human faculty. Pupils were treated harshly and the most sadistic teachers were held in highest esteem. The Saudi journalist and social critic Ahmad Suba’i (1905–84) was taken by his father to the kuttab of al-Shish Alley near the Mudda quarter. ‘Sir,’ his father told the teacher, ‘the flesh and sinew are for you and the bones for us. Sir, you are entitled to break his bones and we will fix them.’9 Consequently, Suba’i tells us in his autobiography My Days in Mecca, the teachers showed neither tolerance nor kindness to the children under their control. They ‘regularly disciplined us by generously thrashing us with a falagah, a big stick with a knotted rope at the end – part and parcel of the kuttab system’.10 There were no breaks during the classes; children had to sit all day memorizing the Qur’an verse by verse. After three years memorizing the Qur’an, he moved on to memorize the Book of Grammar, and the works and biographies of famous poets.
Suba’i, the first modern historian of Saudi Arabia, grew up in Mecca during the days of Sharif Hussain. Like all children in the Holy City, he was raised with draconian discipline. Children had to strictly follow the rules of public dress: a turban with the regional igal (headband), a belt around the robe, and traditional shoes – all were required. Children had to show utmost respect to their elders, particularly their fathers. When he sat in front of his father, Suba’i had to sit in a way that showed absolute respect and submission. He was not allowed to utter a single word in front of his father. Failure to comply would result in a severe thrashing. Indeed, frequent beating was the norm at any perceived misdemeanour: ‘whether I was guilty or innocent, the beating would take place anyway’.11 He saw so much cruelty in the city – both to humans and animals, especially the abuse of donkeys – that he became traumatized, and rebelled. As a teenager he was desperate to read anything other than the Qur’an or works on grammar and theology. But a young boy with an inquiring mind could find little to read in the Holy City. He read stories of Sufis and jinn, and books of dubious science, with such titles as The Beauty of Flowers, The Wonders of the World and Mysteries of the Sea. ‘I had to learn about seven different levels of the earth and the different jinn population of each level. I also read about the sources of the Nile and how it originally flowed from paradise.’12
Despite its anti-intellectualism, the Holy City was a magnet for international students, mostly from India, Africa and southeast Asia. These students did not attend the kuttab but studied under noted scholars and jurists. The most prestigious place to learn and teach was the Sacred Mosque, where professors vied for students. Spaces were reserved for various distinguished teachers throughout the Mosque, and classes were held, between prayers, throughout the day and at night between evening and late-night prayers. The lectures were free and anyone from the age of sixteen to sixty could attend the classes. Apart from classical commentaries and books of Islamic law, the basic text was The Revival of Religious Science by the twelfth-century theologian and jurist Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111).13 Even though al-Ghazali was a philosopher, philosophy itself was prohibited. Indeed, the ideas and works of the rationalist school of Islamic thought, the Mutazilites, who were regarded as heretics and compared to ignorant heathens, were strictly forbidden. All students needed to know, the professors would announce, was that ‘the Mutazilites were stupid pigheads who held human reason to be the measure of truth – a terrible superstition’.14
The professors had to pass an examination before they could teach and receive a stipend. The potential candidates applied to the sheikh of the ulamas, the scholars, who was usually appointed by the government. When the sheikh decided that the candidate was suitable and prepared for the examination – a decision that required some persuasion, representations from established scholars and perhaps even a bribe – the candidate would be called. The examination usually took place in the afternoon, at a specific spot in the Sacred Mosque, and in public. The sheikh and his assisting deputies would sit in a circle, with the candidate sitting in front of them, while the candidate’s friends and members of the public sat in the background. A small group of professors, there to witness the proceedings, sat at a distance. The examination consisted of a single question: the candidate was required to provide a commentary on bismillah (‘In the name of God’), the prayer uttered before reading any verse of the Qur’an or at the commencement of any undertaking. Through the exegesis provided by the candidate, the examiners could judge his knowledge of Arabic language and grammar, logic and theology, the classical commentaries on the Qur’an and canonical texts of Islamic law, and therefore his ability to pass judgements on issues of faith.
There was fierce competition amongst the scholars and professors. Those from the Shafi school of thought and educated at Al-Azhar University in Cairo were held in the highest regard. The scholars from India and southeast Asia were seen in a less favourable light, and few were able to teach in the Sacred Mosque itself. Normally they held classes in their own houses, teaching mostly students from their own backgrounds, and survived on donations from pious foundations funded by Indian princes. It was not uncommon for one scholar to denounce another, perhaps from a different school of thought, or to write tracts denouncing certain practices. There were frequent clashes between sheikhs of Sufi groups, who wrote tracts denouncing each other’s mystical practices as un-Islamic. Hurgronje reports one such incident between a learned scholar and the Sheikh of Ulama. The scholar, the son of a converted Copt, circulated amongst his followers a treatise that argued against smoking and suggested that it was an un-Islamic practice. The Sheikh of Ulama, who enjoyed his shisha, immediately wrote a counterblast. ‘If tobacco smoking was unholy,’ he argued, ‘the smokers, that is to say nearly all Mekkans, were, from their unholiness, unfit to be witnesses to marriages, and therefore most of the Mekkan marriages were invalid.’15 Hence the original contention must be wrong, absurd and itself un-Islamic. In disagreements between scholars, custom and orthodoxy, rather than arguments, often prevailed. And not infrequently such clashes led to the banning or burning of books, even to the imprisonment of the authors, labelled as heretics.
Given the emphasis on reciting and memorizing the Qur’an, those who recited were naturally held in high esteem. They regarded themselves not as scholars but as artists akin to opera singers, and commanded high fees for reciting the Qur’an at formal and informal gatherings. On the whole, and much like some opera singers, many were also often vain and jealous of their competitors. When paid what seemed to them too low a fee, they deliberately performed below par, to the displeasure of the audience.
When not reading or listening to the Qur’an, or attending to pilgrims during the Hajj season, the Meccan men had little else to do. An average day in Mecca was a leisurely affair for its male citizens. The Meccan would wake up an hour and a half before daylight on hearing the Azan, the muezzin’s call to morning prayers. He would perform his toilet and ablution in a little stone closet, and with a twig-style toothbrush known as a miswak in his mouth, run to the Haram to offer his prayers. (The miswak remains popular today and is made from a shrub called arak: the end of the shoot is chewed to separate the fibres, which function as a toothbrush to rub the teeth, using the sap of the branch as toothpaste.) After morning prayers, he would go home for breakfast, which usually consisted of bread, a bowl of beans, some eggs and several glasses of sweet tea. After breakfast, a few hours would be spent discussing domestic matters and smoking the shisha. A visit to the bazaar to buy meat and vegetables and other provisions for the day would follow. The main chore of the day complete, it was time to sit in the mogo’od, one’s favourite sitting place – usually a small room on the ground floor, or a raised platform at the entrance hall – where friends and guests would be received and entertained and more shisha would be smoked, till the call came for midday prayer. After the midday prayer, the Meccans would rest or sleep until the Asr or afternoon prayer. The main meal of the day would normally consist of boiled rice mixed with lentils, a dish of stewed sheep or goat meat, with a few tomatoes and onions added for flavour, and a dish of vegetables, which were usually boiled marrow or spinach or eggplant. The meal would be followed by some more rest and a bit of sleep until sunset. Then, after the evening prayers, it was time to go out in the cool twilight air to chat and smoke the shisha.
Not surprisingly, most Meccans did not want the outside world interfering with their idyllic existence. The Hijaz railway was thus seen as an intrusive nuisance shedding unwanted attention on the Holy City. Sharif Hussain had another concern: he saw the railway as a direct threat, as it could bring the Turkish army to Mecca more easily and rapidly. For his Bedouin allies it represented a loss in revenue: the pilgrims did not have to cross their land and hence they could not impose any taxes, nor could they be easily robbed. Thus all concerned, the sharif, the citizens and the Arab Bedouins, were strongly against the project being completed.
The consensus in the city was to prevent the extension of the Hijaz railway from Medina to Mecca. Fortunately for the Meccans, Turkey was now embroiled in the First World War; the Ottoman passion for the railway had evaporated. In the game of shifting international alliances that had bedevilled the Ottomans throughout the days of their slow decline, they had opted to enter the war on the side of Germany. Sharif Hussain was faced with two stark options: to stand by Turkey at this key moment in its history and thus earn its grateful recognition; or to seek freedom for Mecca and the Arabs in open revolt. Although Sultan Mehmet V was merely a figurehead, he was notionally still a caliph, successor to the Prophet and commander of the faithful. His last notable action was to declare jihad against the allied forces ranged against Germany and its Turkish ally. The declaration was clearly designed to rouse the Muslim subjects of France, Britain and the Netherlands against their imperial masters.
The call to jihad would have greater force with the support of Mecca. Sharif Hussain received numerous communications from Istanbul asking him, as ruler of the Holiest City of Islam and the religious leader of Muslims, to join in this call for jihad. It was the religious duty of all Muslims, the Turks argued, to join them in their battle against the ‘infidel’ Europeans. The sharif gave enthusiastic replies: he was with Turkey in spirit, he wrote back, he prayed for their success, gave them all his blessings. But the situation on the ground, as the sultan in his infinite wisdom knew well, prevented him from publicly declaring jihad. The Red Sea was dominated by the British and they could blockade its ports, starving Mecca and the people of the Hijaz. His hands were tied. In fact, secretly the sharif was communicating with the British, who were seeking his support against the Turks. He was also in touch with clandestine groups in the Middle East, especially the ‘Union’ society in Mesopotamia and the ‘Freedom’ society in Syria, who advocated open rebellion against the Turks. He liked the idea of Mecca as an independent city state, and began to dream about becoming the king of Arabia.
However, the sharif feared that an open revolt might fail and thus lead to dire consequences. He was also convinced, with good reason, that Britain and France had designs on acquiring further territory in the region such as Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. Preventing the colonization of more Arab land meant that, initially at least, he would have to stand by Turkey. If the war ended with victory for Britain and France, he feared, these Arab territories could suffer the same plight as those of Turkey.
He decided to provide enough encouragement to keep the British interested, and sent emissaries to Arab rulers in the region to discover if they were fully prepared for a revolt. He received emphatic replies. Still he hesitated. If you want me to remain quiet, he wrote to a Turkish commander in the region, you must recognize my independence – not just in Mecca but the whole of the Hijaz. And, he insisted, establish me as a hereditary king. The Turkish response was muted.
In contrast, the British policy towards Mecca was more obvious. It was made clear in a letter to Sharif Hussain from Lord Kitchener, the secretary of state for war. The letter
contained a definite promise to Hussain, that if he and his followers were to side with England against Turkey, the British government would guarantee his retention of the dignity of the Grand Sharif with all the rights and privileges to it and would defend it against all aggression. It held out a promise of support to the Arabs in general in their endeavours to secure freedom, on condition that they would ally themselves to England. It concluded with a hint that, in the event of the Sharif being proclaimed Caliph, he could count on England’s recognition.16
It was a reassuring message. The sharif entertained the idea of being a caliph. Moreover, the British were happy to hand over unlimited amounts of gold to the sharif, through Colonel T. E. Lawrence of the British military mission. A wonderful self-publicist, much in the mould of the travellers who had ventured into Arabia before him, T. E. Lawrence was not the romanticized figure portrayed in the 1961 film Lawrence of Arabia. After graduating from Oxford, Lawrence had spent much time travelling in the Middle East ostensibly as an archaeologist. Indeed his first assignment of the war, along with the noted archaeologist Leonard Woolley, for whom he had been working, was an intelligence mission in the guise of an archaeological survey of the Negev desert. In war even more than in peace, the interconnection between ‘scientific’ inquiry and politically and militarily significant intelligence was self-evident.
Lawrence had a delusional sense of self-importance. Englishmen, he wrote, were always ‘sure of their own absolute excellence’. They had ‘a collective sense of duty towards the state’ and a ‘feeling of individual obligation to push struggling humanity up its road’. He had come to Arabia, he declared, to set things right.17 He became a close friend of the third son of Sharif Hussain, Faisal, who tried to convince his father that the revolt could succeed with British help. Faisal was also president of several secret Arab societies, and reliably informed the sharif that preparations for the revolt throughout the region were at an advanced stage. If the sharif still had any doubts, they were dispelled when he heard that a Turkish expedition was about to march from Medina to Yemen. He realized that it could make a detour to Mecca and depose him. Finally, he made a decision.
On 5 June 1916, Sharif Hussain made a unilateral declaration of independence and entered the war on the side of the Allies. Turkish troops were besieged in their Meccan stronghold and invited to surrender. They refused. The ensuing fight was intense, and focused on the government office where the wali had entrenched himself with a garrison. After three days, the sharif’s army was able to storm the palace and force the garrison to surrender. Other officers holding out in different parts of the city refused to lay down their arms. Fighting even took place in the Sacred Mosque, where shots were fired towards the Kaaba. The total surrender of the Turks was only achieved on 4 July, after heavy guns, brought from Jeddah, came into play. The entire city was cleansed of Turks. It was exactly 400 years since they had assumed sovereignty of the Holy City. While Mecca was still in the grip of battle, on 22 June 1916, Sharif Hussain declared himself king of Arabia, the liberator of Arabs, and the caliph of all Islam. He denounced the tyranny of the Turks, and asked all Muslims to follow his example and fulfil their obligation towards him as the sharif of Mecca and their caliph.
The British and the French were quick to recognize Sharif Hussain as the ‘king of Hijaz’. Faisal, aided and encouraged by Lawrence, managed to unite different tribes, largely through bribes with gold supplied by the British, and lead them against the Turks. In September, British naval vessels were used for the first time to bring ceremonial material for the Hajj. Sharif Hussain thought that his ambitions were being realized.
The news of the revolt caused alarm in Turkey. The Young Turks were shocked to hear that a sharif supported and appointed by them, someone whose failings and shortcomings they had consistently overlooked, had rebelled against the sultan. The news of the revolt was kept from the public for several weeks. Istanbul now turned to the Dhawi Zaid candidate, Ali Haider. He was appointed as the new sharif of Mecca and dispatched to the Hijaz. Haider only managed to get as far as Medina, where he remained for several months, while Faisal and his troops laid siege to the city. The sharif designate repeatedly asked Istanbul for troops and ammunition, but his pleas were never answered. After eighteen months, Haider gave up the struggle to defend Medina and was forced to return to Turkey. Soon afterwards, Sharif Hussain, with the active support of the British, had most of the Hijaz under his control.
The end of the First World War revealed the existence of the secret Sykes-Picot Treaty of 16 May 1916 by which the British and French had agreed on the distribution of territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire. Mandated territories were a polite fiction for colonial rule and the wholesale remaking of lands and their peoples towards the interest of the European powers. Arab independence had been gained from the Ottomans, only to become mortgaged to Britain and France. In such a context Hussain’s claim to be ‘king of Arabia’ was as bizarre as the man himself. Most of the principalities and sheikhdoms in Arabia were now entirely independent. The sheikh of Kuwait, a long-time British client, was recognized as an independent ruler, as was the sultan of Muscat, who had a treaty with France and the US. Bahrain and Yemen too were now independent states. And Najd, the biggest territory in Arabia, was ruled by a totally independent Wahhabi king: Abdul Aziz ibn Saud.
After their attempts to take over Mecca were thwarted by Muhammad Ali, the Wahhabis had concentrated on building a viable state in Najd. In 1902, King Abdul Aziz captured Riyadh from the Rashidi emirs who had established, in 1891, a state in central Arabia stretching from Hali in the north to Qasim in the centre and Riyadh in the south. After Riyadh, the Wahhabis moved to Qasim. The Ottomans came to support the Rashidis with troops and ammunition, while the British backed Abdul Aziz, who succeeded in capturing Qasim in 1906. But despite their support for him, the British regarded King Abdul Aziz as an Ottoman sympathizer. The Ottomans in turn entered into a treaty with him and recognized him as de facto ruler of Najd. Hostilities between him and the Rashidis continued during the war – with Abdul Aziz making expedient alliances with both the Ottomans and the British. After the war, in 1921, Abdul Aziz succeeded in the capture of Hali, with the support of British ammunition and subsidies. His control over Najd almost complete, Abdul Aziz was, unlike Sharif Hussain, a king with real power. And like his Wahhabi forefathers, he was now keenly looking towards the Hijaz.
King Abdul Aziz was quite stunned at Sharif Hussain’s rebellion. The family of Hussain, he declared, had produced nothing but injury and discord by their rebellion. He was further incensed by Hussain’s claim to the Caliphate. Nevertheless, he sent Hussain several invitations to meet him and discuss their differences amicably. Hussain declined. He even refused to attend a conference in Kuwait, planned for 1925, where various leaders were to meet to settle issues of national boundaries. The British tried hard to mediate between the two, but Hussain remained intransigent. A Wahhabi invasion of the Hijaz now looked imminent.
In August 1924, as the Wahhabi forces moved towards the Hijaz, the sharif of Mecca wrote to the British prime minister. He wanted troops and ammunition, and asked that the guarantees given to him during the war – that his rights and privileges would be retained and defended against aggressors – should be fulfilled. By now Hussain had become an object of ridicule at the Foreign Office. He was generally regarded as a demented megalomaniac, and stories about his erratic behaviour, true and fabricated, circulated amongst the civil servants. He received no reply. In September, the Wahhabis invaded Hijaz and captured Taif.
Hussain had little to defend Mecca. His 20,000 Mauser rifles had no cartridges, the artillery had no shells, and his aeroplanes lacked bombs. The inhabitants of the city fled on foot to Jeddah. Shops were closed. The sharif emptied his already depleted treasury, and moved his family and officials to Aqaba. On 13 October 1924 Mecca was once again occupied by the Wahhabis. The long line of sharifs had ended.
The sharif’s son, Ali, returned to Jeddah, hoping one day to recapture Mecca and continue the dynasty. King Abdul Aziz besieged the port as well as Medina for a year, trying to avoid bloodshed and complications with European powers. Both cities surrendered in December 1925. In Aqaba, Hussain made a last-ditch appeal to the Russians to restore him as sharif of Mecca. He died a broken man in exile in Amman on 4 June 1931 – claiming his divine right to rule Mecca to his last breath.
King Abdul Aziz now controlled an area far larger than the sharifs ever ruled, and possessed strength not seen in Arabia since the end of the Abbasid power. He moved fast to consolidate his position by maintaining strict discipline amongst the Bedouins, creating a military police, employing the mutawwa (religious ritual specialists) to impose religious order and improve security for the pilgrims. He was also concerned to assure the Muslim world that shrines and cultural property in Mecca were safe in his hands. He toyed with the idea of installing another sharif in the Holy City. Newspapers in Istanbul, Damascus, Baghdad, Hyderabad and New York even reported that plans were afoot to recall Sharif Ali Haider. Yet, in the end, Abdul Aziz decided that his best option was direct rule of the Holy City; he appointed his son Faysal as the new governor. Sharif Haider was refused permission to perform the Hajj in 1926; he was not even allowed to disembark from his ship, even though a large party of Meccans had gathered to welcome him.
The city waited nervously for the changes the Wahhabis would introduce, but King Abdul Aziz seemed to be in a conciliatory mood. He called a conference of the chief scholars from the different schools of thought and asked them to debate and settle their differences with Wahhabi ulama. Eldon Rutter, who was among the first outsiders to visit the city after the Wahhabi takeover, witnessed the meeting. There was a general consensus at the conference, he reports, that Wahhabi practice was not all that different from other schools of thought. The consensus had a radical effect on how prayers were organized in the Sacred Mosque. Up to now, there were different prayer stations in the Haram for different schools of thought: one each for Imams Shafii, Malik, Hanbal and Abu Hanifah. The followers of each imam prayed behind their own imam at slightly different times. Why was it necessary, the Wahhabi scholars asked, for different schools of thought to occupy different parts of the Sacred Mosque and perform their prayers under different imams, at different times? As the call to prayer is one, these scholars suggested, would it not be better for all worshippers, no matter which school they followed, to perform their prayers together under one imam and at the same time? The argument won the day. By order of the king, the stations of different schools of thought were removed, and prayers were now led by a single Wahhabi imam.
There was one issue on which there was a serious disagreement at the conference. The scholars from the different schools of thought suggested that the Wahhabis hated all Muslims who did not belong to their own community. King Abdul Aziz tried to assure the gathering that this was not the case. The Wahhabi scholars stated they hated only those Muslims they considered were observing practices contrary to Islam. The non-Wahhabis were not convinced. As Rutter puts it:
if one party of men cry ‘God is One’, and they meet another party, different in speech, in dress, and in manners, to themselves, but whose members also cry ‘God is One’, then the two parties . . . may do one of two things. The first of these is that they may disregard the differences of customs, of speech, and of dress, and join fraternally in the united cry of ‘God is One’. That was Muhammad’s way. The second is that each may loathe the other and, if they be strong, shun them; or if they be weak, annihilate them. That is the way of the ignorant Wahhabis, and most of the Wahhabis are ignorant.18
And the ignorant were in power. So difference of religious practices, as well as different schools of Islamic jurisprudence, were rapidly eradicated in Mecca.
Throughout the nineteenth century the possibilities of long-distance travel had been improving with the coming of railways and, especially from the 1850s onwards, of coal-powered steamships. By the 1920s, in the wake of the Great War, the age of mass transportation was dawning. It was easier than ever for Muslims to make their way to Mecca, and the influx of noted Muslim pilgrims increased several-fold. One noted visitor, for example, was the celebrated Muslim scholar Muhammad Asad, who visited the Holy City in 1927. An Austrian Jew (his original name was Leopold Weiss), he converted to Islam and travelled extensively in the Hijaz as a journalist for Frankfurter Zeitung. Asad, who stayed in Arabia for six years and became a friend and confidant of King Abdul Aziz, describes his adventures in The Road to Mecca19 – which, incidentally, contains virtually nothing about the Holy City itself. There were many other visitors who, like Asad, were converts to Islam, and quite a few were English.
There was a good reason for this. During the early decades of the twentieth century, there was a thriving community of white Muslims in Britain. The ports of Britain with their worldwide trading links had long been home to lascars, sailors recruited from the colonies to work on British ships. Many were Muslims who came ashore and founded their own small communities in the cosmopolitan enclaves around the harbours. Yemenis were notable among them, since Aden was a principal coaling station for all the ships plying the Suez Canal route to the East. The British converts were a different class of people. They were led by Lord Headley, the 5th Baron of Headley (1855–1935), who had converted to Islam in 1913. A first-class mathematician as well as a heavyweight and middleweight boxing champion, Lord Headley was an influential man. He led a campaign to establish a central mosque in London’s Regent’s Park. Lord Headley, who performed the Hajj in 1923 and 1927, was also the president of the British Muslim Society. The society had such notable members as Muhammad Marmaduke Pickhall, the celebrated translator of the Qur’an,20 the feisty aristocrat Lady Evelyn Cobbold, who took the name Zainab after conversion, and Mahmoud Mobarek Churchward, an artist and theatre painter. As the establishment looked on Muslim converts with suspicion, many remained secret believers for some time. However, the desire to visit Mecca was immense; and without declaring their conversion to Islam, openly performing the Hajj was not possible. Lady Evelyn Cobbold came out in early 1915. Shortly afterwards, during dinner at Claridge’s, she tried to persuade Pickhall to declare himself a Muslim in public – with two waiters as witnesses. Both Lady Cobbold and Churchward performed the Hajj and wrote notable accounts of their experiences.
However, the fact that they were Muslim did not afford them an easy passage to Mecca. Their European complexion mattered more in a city where reservations about and suspicions of outsiders were as natural as the landscape. Moreover, by now the Meccans had become wise to European non-Muslims who came in Arab garb and later wrote disparaging accounts of their beloved city. Churchward was accused of being a Christian, a spy, and arrested. He had to appear in the court of the wali and was only acquitted when he produced a certificate of conversion signed by the qadi of Egypt. While Churchward arrived in Mecca as a regular pilgrim, Lady Cobbold, a socialite of considerable beauty and elegance, arrived as the member of the landed aristocracy she was. She was already widely travelled, but travelling alone to Mecca presented particular difficulties: even today a woman on her own cannot enter the Holy City without a male escort. That, however, was not too great a problem for someone who enjoyed a reputation as a first-class angler, rifle shot and deerstalker, and was the first British woman to shoot a fourteen-point stag. She had spent her childhood in North Africa, where she made many famous friends who knew her as someone who was naturally sympathetic to Arabs. They would help her get an invitation from none other than King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud himself. She relied heavily on one particular friend: Harry St John Bridger Philby, the father of the famous Soviet double agent Kim Philby, and a close adviser of King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud.
Philby senior, known locally as Sheikh Abdullah, was the most noted foreign resident in Mecca. He was an explorer, a writer, and an intelligence officer in the British Colonial Office. He was amongst the first socialists to join the Indian Civil Service and spoke Urdu and Arabic as fluently as English. He was sent as head of a mission to King Abdul Aziz in November 1917. The two became friends and Philby, contrary to British policy, secretly supported the Wahhabi king and passed on intelligence regarding Sharif Hussain of Mecca to him. He was made chief of the Secret Service for the British Mandate of Palestine in November 1921. But Philby saw the Balfour Declaration, adopted by the British during the First World War and committing them to the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine, as a betrayal of the Arabs. When King Abdul Aziz invited him to become his adviser, Philby converted to Islam and settled in Mecca.
He lived in an opulent house in the Jarwal quarter of the city, next to the king’s palace. The house was a gift from the king on the occasion of his conversion. The king also presented him with a slave girl. While his wife, Dora, lived in Jeddah, Philby spent most of his time in Mecca, tending the garden he had lovingly created, recounting his adventures in The Empty Quarter21 and writing a biography of the Abbasid Caliph Harun Al Rashid.22 He maintained a cordial relationship with his wife but, as a non-Muslim, she was unable to visit Mecca, where Philby was ideally placed as an intermediary between the court of King Abdul Aziz in Riyadh and his son Faisal, the governor of Mecca. This made his other job as a representative of Standard Oil of California that much easier. It also meant that Philby was well placed to get permission for Lady Cobbold to visit Mecca.
Lady Evelyn duly arrived in the Holy City on 26 March 1933. Philby organized suitable accommodation and a car for the woman he described as ‘Gertrude Bell in figure and mannerism, slim, active, rather snobby and full of quite entertaining chatter’.23 She travelled from Jeddah to Mecca by car: a journey that normally took two days by caravan was accomplished in two hours. She became not only the first British woman on record to visit Mecca, but also the first foreigner to make the pilgrimage by car, the first to report on the new pilgrim buses, and the first pilgrim to record the trip by car from Muna to Arafat – a string of spiritual firsts for a woman who was also, as she claimed, the first woman to travel by air to Africa. She arrived in Mecca, according to the frontispiece photograph of the 1934 edition of her book Pilgrimage to Mecca, in her pilgrim clothes: dressed in two pieces of cloth in white, her face covered with a netted veil. It is evident that Philby soon found that a little of Lady Evelyn was quite sufficient. And that seems to have been the attitude of the British establishment as well. Despite her achievements, the book received a chilly reception from the Foreign Office and the Royal Geographical Society. Her friendship with Philby and her sympathetic portrait of the Meccans and the Wahhabis was not appreciated.
The English visitors to Mecca, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, describe the city in similar terms. Wavell found the city had several good cafés – which he frequented – and a main market that was roofed and had very good shops. But it was not as pleasant as Medina, and rather unworldly, too immersed in obscurantist religious practices. Rutter thought Mecca was an ugly old Arab town, with no ornaments or gardens, but fascinating.
The fascination of the city was due largely to the Sacred Mosque and the Hajj. Everyone is awestruck by the sight of teeming humanity, all dressed simply in white, prostrating and performing various rituals en masse. Wavell was overwhelmed by the spectacle of prayers inside the Sacred Mosque:
the Friday prayer in the Haram was really a most imposing sight. Scarcely a square yard of the great space remained unoccupied. The uniform movement of this vast concourse during the prayer, and the strange stillness that pervades, appeal strongly to the imagination. During the sijda, that phase of the prayer when the forehead is placed on the earth, not a sound but the cooing of the pigeons breaks the silence; then, as the hundred thousand or more worshippers rise to their feet, the rustle of garments and clink of weapons sweeps over the space like a sudden gust.24
Lady Cobbold thought she needed a ‘master plan’ to describe the scene at Arafat:
poignant in its intensity of that great concourse of humanity of which I was one small unit, completely lost to their surroundings in a fervour of religious enthusiasm. Many of the pilgrims had tears running down their cheeks; others raised their faces to the starlit sky that had witnessed this drama so often in the past centuries. The shining eyes, the passionate appeals, the pitiful hands outstretched in prayer moved me in a way that nothing had ever done before, and I felt caught up in a strong wave of spiritual exaltation.25
She had a similar experience when she first entered the Sacred Mosque and came face to face with the Kaaba: I was ‘lost to my surroundings and in the wonder of it’.26
Rutter entered the Sacred Mosque early in the morning and stood in front of the Kaaba pondering its significance:
I walked forward to the edge of the cloisters, and looked out across the wide court of the Mosque towards the great black-draped cube – that strange building, in the attempt to reach which tens of thousands, perhaps millions, of human beings have prematurely forfeited their lives; and seeing which, unnumbered millions have felt themselves to be on the very threshold of Paradise. It stood, with the simple massive grandeur of a solitary rock in the midst of the ocean – an expressive symbol of the Unity of God Whose house it is. Aloof and mysterious it seemed, reared up majestically in the centre of the great open quadrangle: while round and round its base the panting Hajjis hurried eagerly, uttering their pitiful supplications – ‘Oh God! grant us in the world, good; and, in the hereafter, good; and save us from the punishment of fire.’27
But outside the Sacred Mosque and the Hajj, Mecca was a different place. The Meccans themselves had few redeeming features. Burton, who arrived in September 1853 just in time for Hajj, thought the inhabitants of the Holy City were somewhat coarse and lymphatic:
The Meccan is a covetous spendthrift. His wealth, lightly won, is lightly prized. Pay, pension, stipends, presents and the Ihram (meaning pilgrims) supply the citizen with the means of idleness. With him everything is on the most expansive scale, his marriage, his religious ceremonies; entertainments are frequent, and the junketings of his women make up a heavy bill at the end of the year. It is a common practice for the citizen to anticipate the pilgrimage season by falling into the hands of the usurer. If he be in luck, he catches and skins one or more of the richest Hajis.28
He found their pride, particularly their sense of superiority at their language and their lineage, most unpleasant and annoying. They see themselves as ‘the cream of the earth’ and resent even the slightest criticism of the Holy City. ‘They plume themselves upon their holy descent, their exclusion of Infidels, their strict fasting, their learned men, and their purity of language. In fact, their pride shows itself at every moment.’29
Rutter agreed. Meccans assume the traits of pride and meanness, prodigality and greed, from childhood, he wrote. They are intrinsically xenophobic, ‘impatient of the intrusion of foreigners in their midst’, and total hypocrites. The most objectionable characteristic of the Meccans, he suggested, was their sense of ‘belonging to a superior race’, which was a product of the fact that they considered themselves to be ‘neighbours of God’30 and teachers to visiting pilgrims. ‘The absorption of all classes in matters of profit and loss, and their lack of precision in discussing any useful matter, not excepting their religion, created an atmosphere of discomfort and hopelessness,’ he wrote.31 ‘Sometimes life in Mecca seemed to take on a strangeness of insanity. Mentally comparing manners of many of my companions with those of the dwellers in more fortunate countries, I found them repulsive. Sometimes I have felt, when they joked together, that laughter like theirs belonged within the walls of a mad-house, and that the counterpart of their grimacing faces and staring eyes could only be seen through the aperture of a padded cell.’32 Wavell echoed these sentiments. He found the citizens of the Holy City to be ‘the demurest of hypocrites’.33
In contrast to these harsh assessments of the Meccans, Muslim Europeans, for whom the city had sublime significance, saw its citizens in a more favourable light. But words such as pride, bigotry, greed, ostentation and hypocrisy occur frequently enough in their descriptions of the Meccans.
Muslim pilgrims were enchanted by Meccan houses. Churchward was more than happy at the guest house where he stayed. It was a seven-floor building, with ‘a square, flagged courtyard surrounded by seven tiers of galleries. Most of these were closed off by mushrabiehs, lace-like screens of twisted wood which enable women to see men but prevent the latter, while standing below, from discovering a single female face’. He had an agreeable time sitting beside the fountain, ‘pleasantly shaded by the tall façades’ of the veranda.34 When Lady Cobbold, who had unprecedented access to women, visited a harem she was totally delighted. It was a beautiful, large house where women lived in splendour, in the company of goats, and everything was provided for:
the rooms are bright with Eastern rugs and divans covered in silk, a small cage holds a bulbul. The largest room opens on to a flat roof which is now a garden of flowers . . . Several ladies are squatting on the divans, the older ones smoking narghilehs. In the women’s quarters there was a bakehouse for baking bread, a great kitchen, the laundry room, and a work room where they sit sewing and gossiping. Everything necessary for running the home is done within the harem and the flat roofs are utilized for airing and drying, while all have their own roof to sleep on in the spring, when the rooms are uncomfortably hot. Nor must we forget the goats who have also their own roof and are plentifully fed with bunches of burseem [clover] brought from Wadi Fatima, an oasis on the hill to the West.35
But the delights of Meccan houses were not enough. Churchward was particularly disturbed by a city where laughter and music were conspicuously absent and women were invisible on the streets, and on those rare occasions when they ventured out were veiled in ‘a wide thickly starched linen covering that stood out several inches around their shapeless persons and touched the ground about their feet’.36 The streets were quite filthy and an alarming number of poisonous reptiles infested the town. The Holy City always smelled a bit foul. Both Churchward and Rutter attribute this to its primitive sewage system – ‘a large and deep hole is dug in the street before the house, and the refuse conduit is led to it’37 – and the existence of innumerable cesspools that are emptied out at dead of night on a definite date each year. Churchward counted himself fortunate to miss the event, but Rutter witnessed it. A group of poor pilgrims, mostly Malays and Indians, were hired to open the sewers, load the effluent on donkeys, and carry and dump it outside the city boundaries. One also had to be careful of what one ate. It wasn’t just the flies, the dirt and the debris that were apparent everywhere – there were hidden dangers too. Churchward was particularly 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.
The few modern amenities in the city were also distinctively backward in nature. Although Meccans showed, as Churchward notes, ‘the utmost broad-mindedness’ in terms of currency, and coins and notes circulated from almost everywhere in the world, there were no banks. Wavell had an exceptionally hard time cashing cheques. The Holy City had one post office, but letters were not delivered. One had to go to the whitewashed building, be interviewed by the postmaster, and wrestle one’s post out of the robed officials’ hands. It took an eternity to buy a stamp, and if one wanted more than one, the stock must be carefully checked before it could be ceremoniously handed over.
When Churchward had had enough of countless prayers and visits to the Sacred Mosque, he ambled through the city on a donkey in search of mirth. He found some, he notes, at the markets, where white-robed merchants sat smoking long hookahs or water pipes. One cried: ‘Good watches, by Allah.’ Another yelled: ‘Pearls, pearls of paradise.’ A third man sold lemons: ‘Lemons for True Believers!’ The half-naked, muscular water-carriers, with sewn goatskins of liquid round their hips, who ran hither and thither delivering water, were also a sight to behold. But eventually Churchward learned that there was some laughter to be had in Mecca. It resided in the cafés on the outskirts of the city where the inhabitants argued over chess, their favourite game, and in listening to storytellers regaling the citizens with tales from The Arabian Nights.
There was also some joy to be had from feeding the pigeons in the Sacred Mosque. Burton, Wavell, Rutter, Lady Cobbold – all were charmed by the pigeons and lavished praise on them. ‘There are as many pigeons here as in the square of St Mark’s at Venice,’ Wavell announced, ‘and they are nearly as tame.’38 But they get so much food that they can seldom be induced to feed off one’s hand. Rutter points out that the pigeons, of ‘a pretty blue-grey colour’, are looked after by an endowment fund that exists only to supply them with grain and look after their needs. ‘Two little stone troughs, sunk in the ground of the open quadrangle, are constantly kept filled with water for their use. One man holds the office of dispenser of the grain to the pigeons, while another holds that of waterer to them.’ The Meccans, Rutter suggests, regard the birds as sacred; and they never perch on or spoil the roof of the Kaaba. To prove the assertion he slept every night for some months on a roof overlooking the Kaaba, and was delighted to report: ‘I have repeatedly searched the roof of the sacred building, and have never seen there either a bird or any other living thing. At times when the roofs . . . and the ground below them, were covered with myriads of pigeons, I have constantly seen the Kaaba’s roof bare and silent.’39 Lady Cobbold too observed that the pigeons are ‘too well behaved ever to sully the Haram’.40
All visitors to the Holy City, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, found two facets of Meccan society particularly disturbing: slavery and ignorance. Slavery prospered in Mecca. It was common for households to have several slaves, and for Meccan men to have African slave girls as concubines. The slave market thrived, and was an essential port of call for all visitors. Wavell made several visits. He believed that the Holy City was:
one of the few places remaining where the trade is carried on thus openly. The slaves, who are kept in special show rooms, sit, as a rule in a row on a long bench placed on a raised platform. They were all women; male slaves or eunuchs may be bought by private treaty, but are not exposed in the market. One is ushered into each room by the proprietor, who expatiates the while on the points of his wares, and the phenomenally low price he is asking for them. One may, if so disposed, prod them in the ribs, examine their teeth or otherwise satisfy oneself that they are sound in wind and limb, which their owner is usually prepared to guarantee if desired. It is not unusual, however, to warrant them free from vice – which would, moreover, merely have the effect of depreciating their value . . . The usual price of a female slave ranges from £20 to £100.41
Burton thought that Meccans were generally much darker than other Arabs of the Hijaz because of ‘the number of female slaves that find their way to the market’ and because ‘most Meccans have black concubines’.42
Many poor students, particularly Indian and Malay, who wanted to settle in Mecca and study Islam ended up marrying slaves. Too poor to buy the freedom of their wives, their children were born in slavery and became the property of the woman’s owner. ‘A master may marry his slave,’ writes Rutter, ‘one to another, at his will. Frequently, the male slave of one owner was married to the female slave of another, and the offspring of the union was considered to belong to the woman’s owner.’43 Rutter discovered many ageing slaves in the city, freed or abandoned by their owners because they were no longer fit to work. ‘Several of these poor creatures, some of them women, were living in the Haram during my stay in Mecca,’ surviving on begging.44
Rutter had studied the Qur’an and was an expert in Islamic law. He could not reconcile the teachings of Islam with the prevalence of slavery in the Holy City. If the injunctions of Islam were ‘rightly practised’, he observed, it would lead to ‘the complete cessation of slavery in the Islamic state . . . again and again, the Koran reiterates the teaching that one of the most acceptable acts in the sight of God is the liberation of a slave. In an ideal Muslim community, therefore, slavery must soon cease to exist.’45 Churchward was given a bath by several black Sudanese slaves immediately after his arrival in the city and was appalled to discover that two-thirds of the resident population of Mecca were in bondage. Having studied at the famous Al-Azhar University in Cairo, he was able to put the Islamic case against slavery quite strongly to his Meccan friends and acquaintances, but his objections were brushed aside: ‘all of them thought it a perfectly natural and harmless institution’.46 Lady Cobbold was equally astonished to see that every household in Mecca had several slaves. While arguing that Islam does not permit slavery, she tried to underplay the tradition by pointing out that the slaves themselves seem ‘perfectly happy’ with their lot. They were mostly treated as part of the family. ‘One jet-black old lady is a great character and rules the roost. I saw her try to box the ear of Abdullah, a youth who is twice her size, so he lifted her off the ground and kissed her, when she ran away laughing and shaking with a withered finger.’47
Stories about the ignorance and prevalence of superstitions in Mecca abound in all accounts. In cases of sickness, Rutter reports, Meccans believe that the most effective treatment is to write a verse from the Qur’an on a piece of paper, soak the paper in water until the ink is washed off, and then drink the inky water. While in Mecca, Rutter witnessed an eclipse of the moon. Most of the city rushed to offer special payers for the eclipse. After the lengthy prayers, he was asked: ‘Which is brighter? Your moon in Damascus, or this our moon?’ ‘The moon is one,’ he replies. ‘This moon which we see here is the same moon which the Syrians see, and the Egyptians, and the Indians, and all the world.’ When his answer was dismissed, Rutter tried to convince the Meccans by providing evidence from the Qur’an. In the Qur’an, he told them, ‘we find Chapter The Moon. Had there been more than one moon, would not this have been called Chapter A Moon or Chapter The Moons?’48 After some discussion, the Qur’anic confirmation was finally accepted.
By a strange coincidence, Churchward arrived in Mecca when Halley’s Comet was visible in the sky – indeed, he could easily see it against the roofline of his guest house. The Meccans thought he was an exceptionally lucky man ‘to have come with such a star’. Churchward suggested that it was purely a coincidence. ‘Men can calculate when a comet becomes due.’ His answer elicited an angry response. He was told to repent. ‘It is a work of God and you must not say that people know when it is coming.’49
Churchward also relates the story of an Indian pilgrim who brought a phonograph to Mecca with the aim of earning some money to pay for his pilgrimage. He placed the instrument in the Bazaar and started to play a few tunes. A crowd gathered, and the Indian pilgrim asked for some donations for the pleasure of listening. But to his shock the crowd turned on him. ‘Evil spirits have entered the City of God,’ they shouted. The phonograph was confiscated; the pilgrim arrested and marched to the qadi. He was asked to provide a demonstration. The pilgrim played a religious song in praise of the Prophet, hoping that it would impress the judge, but the qadi was disturbed, and a little afraid of the musical instrument. ‘It is against the rules of Mecca to possess such devices,’ he thundered. The qadi called for a hammer, and in the presence of a large crowd, the talking machine was smashed to pieces. The pilgrim received a severe sentence.50
But the Meccans could not keep technology at bay. Soon the onslaught of technology would transform their city beyond recognition.