The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (16 page)

When a visitor arrives in Mecca, whether or not he intends to undertake the
hajj
, he must as his very first act perform the
tawaf
, the circumambulation. He walks around the Ka’ba seven times counterclockwise, stepping quickly the first three times, then walking more slowly, all the while reciting prayers special to the occasion. Each time he passes the eastern corner he strives to kiss or touch the Black Stone, not because some wondrous power is invested in it but because the Prophet kissed it. During the less congested months of the year, the pious visitor may perform the
tawaf
and kiss the stone at his leisure several times a day. But in the
hajj
season the mosque becomes a revolving mass of humanity, giving the illusion that the very floor of the courtyard is turning round the Ka’ba.

Facing the northeast façade of the shrine is a small structure (today in the shape of a little cage surmounted with a golden dome) called the
Maqam Ibrahim. Inside lies the stone said to bear the footprints of the Patriarch, who used the rock as a platform when he constructed the upper portions of the House. When the pilgrim has completed his
tawaf
, he goes to the Maqam where he prays a prayer of two prostrations. Near the Maqam is the blessed well of Zamzam. Here the Angel Gabriel (according to one tradition) miraculously brought forth a spring to quench the thirst of Hagar and her little son Isma’il after her husband Abraham had gone off into the desert. From the Maqam the pilgrim moves to the well to drink, which in Ibn Battuta’s time was enclosed in a building of beautiful marble. The sacred water is sold in the cloisters of the mosque and in the streets of the city. During their sojourn the pilgrims perform their ritual ablutions with it and some, despite the heavily saline taste, drink profuse amounts for its reputed healing qualities.

When the pilgrim has drunk from the well, he may leave the mosque by the southeastern gate and proceed several yards to a little elevation, called al-Safa, which lies at one end of a Meccan street. From the steps of al-Safa he walks or jogs about a quarter of a mile along the street to another small eminence called al-Marwa. He repeats this promenade seven times, reciting prayers along the way, to commemorate Hagar’s frantic search for water along the ground lying between the two hills. This rite is called the
sa’y
, that is, the Running. With the performing of it the pilgrim has completed the preliminary rites of the
hajj
and may at last find his lodgings and begin to introduce himself to the city.

The Syrian caravan of the year 1326 (726 A.H.) arrived at the western gate of Mecca sometime before dawn. Though probably exhausted from a night’s march, Ibn Battuta and his companions made their way at once to the center of the city and entered the Haram by the gate called al-Salam. Praising God who “hath rejoiced our eyes by the vision of the illustrious Ka’ba,” they performed the
tawaf
of arrival:

We kissed the holy Stone; we performed a prayer of two bowings at the Maqam Ibrahim and clung to the curtains of the Ka’ba at the Multazam between the door and the black Stone, where prayer is answered; we drank of the water of Zamzam . . .; then, having run between al-Safa and al-Marwa, we took up our lodging there in a house near the Gate of Ibrahim.

The “house” Ibn Battuta repaired to was in fact a Sufi hospice (he uses the term
ribat
) called al-Muwaffaq, located near the southwestern side of the mosque. In his usual fashion he quickly struck up acquaintances with the pious residents of the lodge, some of them Maghribis. We may suppose that he put to good advantage the three weeks he had to himself before the start of the
hajj
festival, exploring the secondary shrines and historic sites of the Prophet’s birthplace, rummaging through the wares in the market street, and perhaps climbing to the top of one of the holy mountains whose barren slopes roughed out the contours of the town. He also formed an opinion of the local citizenry, judging them generous, kindly, and proper.

The Meccans are elegant and clean in their dress, and as they mostly wear white their garments always appear spotless and snowy. They use perfume freely, paint their eyes with kuhl, and are constantly picking their teeth with slips of green arak-wood. The Meccan women are of rare and surpassing beauty, pious and chaste.

The use of perfumes, oils, and makeup would of course have been out of fashion for everyone during the days preceding the
hajj
, when personal frippery was forbidden. Ibn Battuta himself, keeping to his ritual declaration of intention to complete the rites of the pilgrimage in a state of consecration, continued to wear his white
ihram
garb from the time he assumed it on the road from Medina until his
hajj
was fulfilled a month later. He also, we may presume, obeyed with precision the special taboos that attended the state of
ihram
. In all certainty he did not get into arguments or fights, kill plants or animals, engage in sexual relations, cut his hair or nails, wear sewn garments, or adorn himself with jewelry.
¹⁴

We can also be sure that during these three weeks he spent the better part of his days and probably some of his nights in the Haram, where he performed additional
tawafs
(always meritorious in the sight of God), drank from the well, and made conversation with new acquaintances. The great mosque was indeed the center of all public life in Mecca. The streets of the town, winding through the canyons and down the slopes of the encircling hills, all converged on the Haram, whose court formed the very bottom of the alluvial depression. The mosque was in the shape of an irregular parallelogram, the roofed-over portion of the structure
between the outer walls and the court being suported by a forest of marble columns (471 of them by Ibn Jubayr’s count). Nineteen gates on all four sides gave access to the colonnades and court, and five minarets surmounted the mosque, four of them at the corners.
¹⁵

The Haram was not only the place of the pilgrim stations but also the center for daily prayers, Qur’anic reading, and education. In the shade of the cloisters, or in the court when the sun was low, sat rings of learners and listeners, while copyists, Qur’an readers, and even tailors occupied benches set up beneath the arches of the colonnades.
¹⁶
When prayers were not in session or the crush of pilgrims not too great, Meccan children played in the court, and the people of the city streamed back and forth through the gates, routinely using the sacred precinct as a short cut between one part of town and another. For poorer pilgrims the mosque was home. “Here,” wrote John Burckhardt, another nineteenth-century Christian who penetrated the Haram incognito, “many poor Indians, or negroes, spread their mats, and passed the whole period of their residence at Mecca. Here they both eat and sleep; but cooking is not allowed.”
¹⁷
There was not a single moment day or night throughout the year, so says the tradition, when at least a few of the faithful were not circling the Ka’ba. In the evening the square was lighted with dozens of torches and candles, bathing the worshippers and the great cube in a flickering orange glow.

When a pilgrim reached Mecca and circuited the Ka’ba, he still had, in an important religious sense, twelve miles to go before he would terminate his sacred journey. No Muslim was privileged to claim the title “al-Hajj” until he had traveled through the desert ravines east of the city to the plain of ’Arafat and, on the ninth day of Dhu l-Hijja, stood before the Mount of Mercy, the place where Adam prayed and where in 632 Muhammad preached his farewell sermon to his pristine congregation of believers. This annual retreat into the Meccan wilderness embraces the complex of ceremonies that makes up the
hajj
proper, or Greater Pilgrimage, which Muslims regard as separate from (though also including) the rituals of the
tawaf
and the
sa’y
. The Meccan rites, performed alone and at any time of the year, are called the ’
umra
, that is, the Visit or Lesser Pilgrimage.

Before Islam, Mecca was the center for a yearly pilgrimage of Arabian tribes that was purely pagan. The Prophet retained some of those rites but utterly transformed their purpose into a
celebration of Abraham’s unyielding monotheism. The ceremonies rested on the authority of the Qur’an and on the traditionally accepted practices of the Prophet. Although minor details of the procedures vary according to the different juridical schools (such as that male Shafi’is have their heads shaved at a different point in the sequence of rites than do members of the other
madhhabs
), the
hajj
is the supreme expression of the unity of all believers. Indeed, when on the tenth of Dhu l-Hijja each pilgrim kills a goat or sheep in remembrance of God’s last-minute instruction to Abraham to sacrifice a ram rather than his own son, Muslims the world over do the same, thus uniting themselves symbolically with their brothers and sisters in the Arabian desert.

Today, more than two million Muslims commonly arrive in Mecca each year and set out for ’Arafat in a white-robed horde on the eighth and ninth days of the sacred month. Many walk, but others travel in buses and cars along the multilane highway which winds out from the city. Saudi government helicopters circle overhead and crowd control experts monitor the proceedings from closed circuit television centers. First aid stations line the route, cropdusters spray the plain against disease, and an army of vendors greets the tired pilgrims at their destination with soft drinks and barbecued chicken. In Ibn Battuta’s time the journey was of course far less agreeable, even dangerous if the local bedouin took the occasion to plunder the procession. Those who could afford the price rode in enclosed camel-litters. But most of the pilgrims walked the hot stony trail; the pious did it barefoot.

By tradition the pilgrims spend the night of the eighth day at Mina, a settlement in a narrow valley four miles east of the city. On the following morning they go on to the ’Arafat plain and range themselves in a great circle around the jagged little hill called the Mount of Mercy. A city of tents and prayer mats is quickly unfurled. At noon begins the Standing, the central and absolutely essential event of the
hajj
. Throughout the afternoon and until the sun sets the pilgrims keep vigil round the Mount, or on its slopes if they can find room, reciting the prayer of obeisance to God (“What is Thy Command? I am Here!”) and hearing sermons preached from the summit.

Precisely at sunset the Standing formally concludes and the throng immediately packs up and starts back in the direction of Mecca. By tradition the pilgrim must not perform his sunset prayer at ’Arafat but at Muzdalifah, a point three miles back along the
road to Mina. And equally by tradition everyone who is physically able races to get there as fast as he can. In Ibn Battuta’s time the “rushing” to Muzdalifah might have brought to mind the millennial charge of some gigantic army of white-clad dervishes. Today it has more the character of a titanic California commuter rush, meticulously orchestrated by the Saudi authorities to prevent hopeless traffic jams. Once arrived at Muzdalifah most of the pilgrims bed down for the night, though women, children, and the infirm may continue immediately on to Mina ahead of the crowd.

On the morning of the tenth the pilgrims assemble at Mina for the start of the Feast of the Sacrifice (’Id al-Adha), four days of celebration and desacralizing rites that bring the
hajj
to conclusion. Mina’s sacred landmarks are three modest stone pillars, which stand at intervals from the eastern to the western end of the valley. As his first act the pilgrim must take a handful of pebbles (which he usually picks up along the road from ’Arafat) and cast seven of them at the western pillar. Just as the faithful Abraham threw stones at the devil to repulse his mesmeric suggestions that the little Isma’il need not after all be sacrificed, so the pilgrim must take aim at the devil-pillar as witness to his personal war against evil in general. When he has completed the lapidation, he buys a sheep or goat (or even a camel if he is rich) from any of the vendors who have collected thousands of animals for the occasion. He sets the face of the creature in the direction of the Ka’ba and kills it by cutting its throat as Abraham did after God mercifully reprieved his son. This act brings to an end the period of
ihram
. The pilgrim must find a barber (dozens are on hand) and have his head shaved, or at least some locks cut, and then he is free to exchange his ritual garb for his everyday clothing. As soon as the rites of Mina are accomplished he returns to Mecca to perform the
tawaf
once again, now released from all prohibitions save for sexual intercourse.

From the tenth to the thirteenth the solemnities of the Standing give way to jubilation and fellowship. The pilgrims return to Mina for two or sometimes three nights. They throw pebbles at all three of the devil-pillars each day, sacrifice additional animals, and socialize with countrymen and new-found friends. On the twelfth the first groups of
hajjis
begin leaving for home, taking care to perform the
tawaf
of farewell as their final ritual act.

From the fourteenth century to today the fundamental ceremonies of the
hajj
have been altered only in the merest details. Ibn
Battuta’s own brief and matter-of-fact recounting of these events in the
Rihla
might be startlingly familiar to some young civil servant of Tangier, making the sacred journey by Royal Air Maroc.

The great majority of pilgrims who streamed out through the Meccan gullies in mid November 1326 were heading back to the prosaic lives they had temporarily abandoned to make the holy journey. Some of them would take many months to reach home, working their way along, getting stranded here or there, or taking time to see the great mosque and college cities of the Middle East. Ibn Battuta does not tell us in the
Rihla
just when he decided that he would not, for the time being, return to Morocco. When he left Tangier his only purpose had been to reach the Holy House. Once there, did the Meccan bazaar, the exotic faces, the stories of strange sights and customs set his mind to some master plan for exploring the hemisphere? Was it there that he made his impossible vow to roam the world without ever retracing his steps? Had he begun to realize the possibilities of traveling thousands of miles in every direction from Mecca without ever going beyond the limits of the familiar society of men who shared his values, his habits, and his language? Whatever soul-stirring effects his first
hajj
may have had on him, he was certainly no longer the boy who stood forlornly in the center of Tunis with nowhere to go and no one to talk to. After a year and a half away from home, he had already seen more of the world than most people ever would, he was cultivating a circle of learned and internationally minded friends, and he had won the title of “al-Hajj,” itself an entrée to respect among influential and well-traveled people. When he set off for Baghdad with the Iraqi pilgrims on 20 Dhu l-Hijja, one fact was apparent. He was no longer traveling to fulfill a religious mission or even to reach a particular destination. He was going to Iraq simply for the adventure of it. It is at this point that his globetrotting career really began.