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 has always been dependent on the movements of the greater Mahommedan world. In the splendid times of the caliphs immense sums were lavished upon the pilgrimage and the holy city; and conversely the decay of the central authority of Islām brought with it a long period of faction, wars and misery, in which the most notable episode was the sack of Mecca by the Carmathians at the pilgrimage season of 930. The victors carried off the “black stone,” which was not restored for twenty-two years, and then only for a great ransom, when it was plain that even the loss of its palladium could not destroy the sacred character of the city. Under the Fatimites Egyptian influence began to be strong in Mecca; it was opposed by the sultans of Yemen, while native princes claiming descent from the Prophet—the Hāshimite amīrs of Mecca, and after them the amīrs of the house of Qatāda (since 1202)—attained to great authority and aimed at independence; but soon after the final fall of the Abbasids the Egyptian overlordship was definitely established by sultan Bībars ( 1269). The Turkish conquest of Egypt transferred the supremacy to the Ottoman sultans (1517), who treated Mecca with much favour, and during the 16th century executed great works in the sanctuary and temple. The Ottoman power, however, became gradually almost nominal, and that of the amīrs or sherīfs increased in proportion, culminating under Ghālib, whose accession dates from 1786. Then followed the wars of the Wahhābīs (see and ) and the restoration of Turkish rule by the troops of Mehemet ʽAli. By him the dignity of sherīf was deprived of much of its weight, and in 1827 a change of dynasty was effected by the appointment of Ibn ʽAun. Afterwards Turkish authority again decayed. Mecca is, however, officially the capital of a Turkish province, and has a governor-general and a Turkish garrison, while Mahommedan law is administered by a judge sent from Constantinople. But the real sovereign of Mecca and the Hejāz is the sherīf, who, as head of a princely family claiming descent from the Prophet, holds a sort of feudal position. The dignity of sherīf (or grand sherīf, as Europeans usually say for the sake of distinction, since all the kin of the princely houses reckoning descent from the Prophet are also named sherīfs), although by no means a religious pontificate, is highly respected owing to its traditional descent in the line of Hasan, son of the fourth caliph ʽAli. From a political point of view the sherīf is the modern counterpart of the ancient amīrs of Mecca, who were named in the public prayers immediately after the reigning caliph. When the great Mahommedan sultanates had become too much occupied in internecine wars to maintain order in the distant Hejāz, those branches of the Hassanids which from the beginning of Islam had retained rural property in Arabia usurped power in the holy cities and the adjacent Bedouin territories. About 960 they established a sort of kingdom with Mecca as capital. The influence of the princes of Mecca has varied from time to time, according to the strength of the foreign protectorate in the Hejāz or in consequence of feuds among the branches of the house; until about 1882 it was for most purposes much greater than that of the Turks. The latter were strong enough to hold the garrisoned towns, and thus the sultan was able within certain limits—playing off one against the other the two rival branches of the aristocracy, viz. the kin of Ghālib and the house of IbnʽAun—to assert the right of designating or removing the sherīf, to whom in turn he owed the possibility of maintaining, with the aid of considerable pensions, the semblance of his much-prized lordship over the holy cities. The grand sherīf can muster a considerable force of freedmen and clients, and his kin, holding wells and lands in various places through the Hejāz, act as his deputies and administer the old Arabic customary law to the Bedouin. To this influence the Hejāz owes what little of law and order it enjoys. During the last quarter of the 19th century Turkish influence became preponderant in western Arabia, and the railway from Syria to the Hejāz tended to consolidate the sultan’s supremacy. After the sherīfs, the principal family of Mecca is the house of Shaibah, which holds the hereditary custodianship of the Kaʽba.

The Great Mosque and the Kaʽba.—Long before Mahomet the chief sanctuary of Mecca was the Kaʽba, a rude stone building without windows, and having a door 7 ft. from the ground; and so named from its resemblance to a monstrous astragalus (die) of about 40 ft. cube, though the shapeless structure is not really an exact cube nor even exactly rectangular. The Kaʽba has been rebuilt more than once since Mahomet purged it of idols and adopted it as the chief sanctuary of Islām, but the old form has been preserved, except in secondary details; so that the “Ancient House,” as it is titled, is still essentially a heathen temple, adapted to the worship of Islām by the clumsy fiction that it was built by Abraham and Ishmael by divine revelation as a temple of pure monotheism, and that it was only temporarily perverted to idol worship from the time when ʽAmr ibn Lohai introduced the statue of Hobal from Syria till the victory of Islam. This fiction has involved the superinduction of a new mythology over the old heathen ritual, which remains practically unchanged. Thus the chief object of veneration is the black stone, which is fixed in the external angle facing Safā. The building is not exactly oriented, but it may be called the south-east corner. Its technical name is the black corner, the others being named the Yemen (south-west), Syrian (north-west), and Irāk (north-east) corners, from the lands to which they approximately point. The black stone is a small dark mass a span long, with an aspect suggesting volcanic or meteoric origin, fixed at such a height that it can be conveniently kissed by a person of middle size. It was broken by fire in the siege of 683 (not, as many authors relate, by the Carmathians), and the pieces are kept together by a silver setting. The history of this heavenly stone, given by Gabriel to Abraham, does not conceal the fact that it was originally a fetish, the most venerated of a multitude of idols and sacred stones which stood all round the sanctuary in the time of Mahomet. The Prophet destroyed the idols, but he left the characteristic form of worship—the ṭawāf, or sevenfold circuit of the sanctuary, the worshipper kissing or touching the objects of his veneration—and besides the black stone he recognized the so-called “southern” stone, the same presumably as that which is still touched in the ṭawāf at the Yemen corner (Muh. in Med. pp. 336, 425). The ceremony of the ṭawāf and the worship of stone fetishes was common to Mecca with other ancient Arabian sanctuaries. It was, as it still is, a frequent religious exercise of the Meccans, and the first duty of one who returned to the city or arrived there under a vow of pilgrimage; and thus the outside of the Kaʽba was and is more important than the inside. Islām did away with the worship of idols; what was lost in interest by their suppression