Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022): 640-643 Book Review Prima facie, one may wonder what new information a book on the Kaʿba adds to the current bibliography on the topic. Cubic in shape and covered with a black silk cloth (kiswa), the Kaʿba is perhaps the most famous building of Islam. Most students in Middle Eastern studies or curious readers are generally familiar with the Kaʿba’s minimalist aesthetic. This singular characteristic, however, has generally received little attention in architectural scholarship and has in fact been met with a certain disinterest. Distin- guished scholars such as Richard Etting- hausen and Oleg Grabar concluded in their groundbreaking book on Islamic art and architecture that the Kaʿba “was not too impressive as an architectural creation.”1 In their revised edition from 2001, they 1. Oleg Grabar and Richard Ettinghausen, Islamic Art and Architecture 650–1250 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 18. 2. Oleg Grabar, Richard Ettinghausen and Marilyn Jenkins-Madina, Islamic Art and Architecture 650–1250 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 3. bluntly stated that the Kaʿba “lacked in architecture quality.”2 By shedding new light on the topic and bringing fresh ways of thinking about it, Simon O’Meara reas- sesses Ettinghausen and Grabar’s view of the Kaʿba and more broadly redefines the way to conceptualize the building. The Kaʿba should not be reduced to its architectural aspect. Such is the author’s initial premise. The disinterested aesthetic view of the Kaʿba, in O’Meara’s words, is the outcome of divorcing aesthetic experience from religious experience (p. 159). In other words, the aesthetic value of the Kaʿba depends on what purposes it serves and what symbols it represents. To address these issues, the author pursues an original approach that consists first and foremost in looking at the literature Simon O’Meara. The Kaʿba Orientations: Readings in Islam’s Ancient House (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020). ISBN 978-0748699308. 253 pp. £ 95.00 cloth. Kader Smail University of Maryland, College Park (ksmail@terpmail.umd.edu) © 2022 Kader Smail. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022) 641 • Kader Smail generated by the Kaʿba, as an object of thought, in order to comprehend the m e a n i n g s a n d f u n c t i o n s a s s i g n e d t o the building. This abundant and varied literature, both in Arabic and Persian, constitutes a large chunk of the forty-one pages of O’Meara’s bibliography, which is quite remarkable. Covering a broad range of written and visual sources, the author carefully examines historical and geographical material, as well as mystical and cosmological sources, among others. From this literature, O’Meara lays out six key themes that are the core framework of his book. The six chapters touch on four aspects of the Kaʿba. These include the ritual aspects of the building (chapter one), the symbolic ones (chapters two, three and four), the structure’s interior and its significance (chapter five), and finally the function of the Kaʿba’s covering (chapter six). O’Meara synthetizes the deep classical thought of authors such as al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) and Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240), notably in chapter four, which partly revolves around the notion of circumambulation (al-ṭawāf). Thematically, the author covers artistic, historical, and religious issues and gives all three of them equal weight. This eclecticism certainly enriches the book, but also gives somehow the impression that the reasoning remains incomplete. Indeed, the most compelling findings have more to do with religious aspects than historical ones. Regarding the religious aspects, it may be useful to examine two of the most salient points of the book. In the first chapter, O’Meara deals with the notion of qibla and its implications. The author points out that if mosques are generally aligned with the qibla because of the requirement to pray towards the Kaʿba, there is no justification in the Islamic tradition for urban settlements to be similarly oriented. Several studies on early Islamic urban settlements have nonetheless shown networks of streets built on an orthogonal plan and sometimes even aligned with the qibla (pp. 30–38). While these elements were often viewed as coincidences, O’Meara notes that similar phenomena were observed in later Islamic urban foundations such as al-Rāfiqa (Syria), al-Iṣṭablāt (Iraq), Fatimid Cairo (Egypt), Taza (Morocco), Touba (Senegal), and Khiva (Uzbekistan). Though it is difficult at this stage to assess the spread of this practice, its antiquity obviously implies an early cultic importance of Mecca expressed not only in mosque orientation, but also in the foundation of the first cities of Islam. The second salient point of the book emerges from the third chapter, entitled “The Kaʿba as Substructure,” which is probably the most innovative of the book. The author sheds light on an apparent paradox of the Kaʿba in which episodes of destruction and profanation are recorded in primary sources without appearing to provoke any sort of grief and trauma among the chroniclers who reported them. To that, one must add the few ḥadīths attributed to the Prophet that predict the apocalypse commencing with the Kaʿba’s destruction. How then, the author asks, did such events not provoke similar reactions to those of the Jews to the two destructions of the Temple? O’Meara presents evidence that runs contrary to a common idea, namely that the Kaʿba’s sacrality (ḥurma) is not located in its shape or walls, but rather in its unearthly form, which is said in a couple of ḥadīths to have preceded its earthly form and never to have changed Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022) Simon O’Meara’s The Kaʿba Orientations • 642 (pp. 69–72). Elaborating upon the common heritage of this idea among Muslims, Sufi scholars developed a conceptual framework in which the material Kaʿba in Mecca is primarily perceived as the physical manifestation of the immaterial Kaʿba in human hearts, both of which are viewed as receptacles of God’s presence. This dichotomy between the material and immaterial is merely the reformulation of the duality ẓāhir-bāṭin (apparent-hidden), which is particularly important in Shiʿism. Turning now to the history of the Kaʿba, the author explores in the introduction whether early Islamic sources are reliable or not when it comes to describing the origins of Islam in general and the Kaʿba in particular. This raises a few problems. Without explicitly taking a stand on these debates, O’Meara argues that the Persian traveler Nāṣir-i Khusraw (d. ca. 481/1088) c o m p o s e d t h e f i r s t i n c o n t e s t a b l y eyewitness account of the Kaʿba (pp. 8–11). The author is quite right to remind readers of the problem of sources for the study of early Islam. Many chroniclers who wrote on the first centuries of Islam lived well outside of Arabia, mostly in Iraq, which raises questions about their firsthand knowledge of the Kaʿba. Nonetheless, a reasonable number of accounts on the Kaʿba before the fifth/eleventh century provide a relatively good picture of the building. Indeed, while the author seems familiar with the Meccan chronic ler Abū al-Walīd Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh 3. Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, al-Iṣāba fī tamyīz al-ṣaḥāba, ed. ʿĀdil Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Mawjūd & ʿAlī Muḥammad Muʿawwaḍ (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1995), 1:199, no. 80 (al-Azraq b. ʿ Uqba). See also in the same volume, the notice of al-Azraq’s master: ibid., 687–88, no. 1480 (al-Ḥārith b. Kalada). 4. The measurements listed by al-Azraqī are the followings (Length x Width x Height): Abraham (30x22x9 cubits), Quraysh (24x22x18), ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Zubayr (30x22x27 cubits), ʿAbd al-Malik b. Marwān (24x22x27 cubits). See Abū al-Walīd Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Azraqī, Akhbār Makka, ed. ʿAbd al-Malik b. Duhaysh (Mecca: Maktabat al-Asadī, 2012), 1:403. al-Azraqī (d. 250/864), it is surprising that he does not rely upon him for the history of the building. Al-Azraqī belonged to a long-time Meccan family whose ancestors had secured marriage alliances with the Umayyads since the conversion of their eponymous ancestor, al-Azraq b. ʿUqba, at the battle of Ṭāʾif in the year 8/630.3 In addition to relying upon earlier Meccan sources such as his grand-father Aḥmad (d. 223/837), al-Azraqī actually acts as a firsthand witness of what he recounts. Consider two examples to illustrate this point. In a chapter entitled “Report on what the interior and exterior measures of the Kaʿba were [before] they became what they are today (mā huwā ʿalayhi l-yawm),” a l - A z r a q ī r e c o r d s t h e c h a n g e s t h a t occurred inside and outside the building. T h e M e c c a n c h r o n i c l e r p r o v i d e s t h e dimensions of the Kaʿba during the eras of Abraham, the Quraysh shortly before Islam, ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Zubayr (r. 64–73/683– 692), and ʿAbd al-Malik b. Marwān (r. 66–86/685–705).4 When al-Azraqī wrote his chronicle, the building size had supposedly not changed since ʿAbd al-Malik b. Marwān rebuilt the Kaʿba. These measurements are given in detail as well as descriptions of the exterior and interior decorations. Although there are legitimate grounds for questioning the value of historical information dating back to a century or more before al-Azraqī lived, one can hardly dismiss out of hand his testimony on the measurements of the Kaʿba during Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022) 643 • Kader Smail his lifetime. Therefore, one can reasonably look at al-Azraqī’s description of the Kaʿba in the third century of Islam as reliable. In the same vein, the Meccan chronicler also reports that the first caliph who adorned the building was al-Walīd b. ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 86–96/705–715). A century later, the gold on the two doors of the Kaʿba plated by al-Walīd got thin and cracked (raqqā wa-tafarraqa). During the short reign of Muḥammad b. Hārūn, nicknamed al-Amīn (r. 193–198/809–813), the Abbasid caliph undertook a full renovation of the doors and sent 18,000 dīnārs to Sālim b. al-Jarrāḥ, the one in charge of Meccan ṣawāfī, or crown land, to add to the plated gold already on the doors. Again, it would be problematic to endorse al-Azraqī’s claim about al-Walīd b. ʿAbd al-Malik without additional research. However, al-Azraqī was a contemporary of the caliph al-Amīn and thus of the renovation he describes. His observation that the two doors were 5. Ibid., 307. still in the same condition (wa-humā ʿalā ḥālihima) was presumably accurate when he wrote his chronicle.5 To conclude, Simon O’Meara’s book i s i n n o v a t i v e i n i t s a p p r o a c h . T h e artistic value of the Kaʿba lies in its f u n c t i o n , w h i c h i s t o b e u n d e r s t o o d i n t h e i n t e l l e c t u a l o u t p u t g e n e r a t e d throughout the centuries. In this regard, the work undertaken by the author is to be welcomed. By contrast, the historical survey of the building produces a mixed bag of results, which tend to reinforce the idea that it is impossible to write a history of the Kaʿba in the first centuries of Islam. However, our knowledge of the Kaʿba is certainly strengthened and developed by the present study, particularly in terms of the religious meanings of the building. Lying at the intersection of several fields, O’Meara’s book will also enrich further discussions on the relationship between art, history, and religion.