Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/704

Rh 672 MECCA subsists and is very dear to tlie Arab heart, has connexions with the pilgrimage which are not yet thoroughly cleared up ; but there is no doubt that under cover of the pilgrim age a great deal of kidnapping and importation of slaves goes on. Since the fall of Ibn Zubeyr the political position of Mecca has always been dependent on the movements of the greater Mohammedan world. In the splendid times of the caliphs immense sums were lavished upon the pilgrimage arid the holy city ; and conversely the decay of the central authority of Islam brought with it a long period of faction, wars, and misery, in which the most notable episode was the sack of Mecca, with circumstances of great barbarity, by the Carmathians at the pilgrimage season of 930 A.D. The victors carried off the &quot; black stone,&quot; which was not restored for twenty-two years, and then only for a great ransom, when it was plain that even the loss of the 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 Hashimite emirs of Mecca, and after them the emirs of the house of Katada (since 1202) attained to great authority and aimed at independence ; but soon after the final fall of the Abbasids the Egyptian overlordship was definitively established by Sultan Bibars (1269 A.D.). The Turkish conquest of Egypt transferred the supremacy to the Ottoman sultans (1517), who treated Mecca with much favour, and during the IGth century executed great works in the sanctuary and temple. The Ottoman power, however, became gradually almost nominal, and that of the emirs or sherifs increased in proportion, culminating under Ghalib, whose accession dates from 1786. Then followed the wars of the Wahhabis (see ARABIA, vol. ii. p. 260) and the restoration of Turkish rule by the troops of Mohammed C AH. By him the dignity of sherif was deprived of much of its weight, and in 1827 a change of dynasty was effected by the appointment of Ibn Auu. Since that time the Turkish authority has again decayed, though Mecca is still nominally the capital of a Turkish province, and has a governor-general and a Turkish garrison, while Mohammedan law is administered by a judge sent from Constantinople. But, except within the larger towns, at which troops are stationed, the Turks are practically powerless, and the real sovereign of Mecca and the Hijaz is the sherif, who, as head of a princely family claiming descent from the Prophet, holds a sort of feudal position in the country. The dignity of sherif (or grand sherif, 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 sherifs), is often conceived as a religious pontificate, and anti-Turkish Arabs contend that if the sultan and the sherif were together in a mosque the latter would lead the prayers as imam ; but it is more correct to regard the sherif as the modern counterpart of the ancient emirs of Mecca already referred to, who were named in the public prayers immediately after the reigning caliph. This dignity long ran in the family of Hasan, son of the caliph All, with which the present sherifs, in spite of changes of dynasty, still count kindred. The influence of the princes of Mecca has varied from time to time accord ing to the strength of the foreign protectorate in the Hijaz or in consequence of feuds among the branches of the house; at present it is for most purposes much greater than that of the Turks. The latter are strong enough to hold the garrisoned towns, and thus the sultan is able within certain limits playing off one against the other the two rival branches of the aristocracy, viz., the kin of Ghalib and the house of Ibn Aim to assert the right of desig nating or removing the sherif, to whom in turn he owes the possibility of maintaining, with the aid of considerable- pensions, the semblance of his much-prized lordship over the holy cities. The grand sherif can muster a consider able force of freedmen and clients, and his kin, holding wells and lands in various places through the Hijaz,. act as his deputies and administer the old Arabic cus tomary law to the Bedouins. To this influence the Hijaz owes what little of law and order it enjoys. After the sherifs the principal family of Mecca is the house of Sheyb, which holds the hereditary custodianship of the Kaba. The Great Mosque and the Kdba. Long before Mohammed the chief sanctuary of Mecca was the Kaba r a rude stone building, so named from its resemblance to a monstrous astragalus or die, of about 40 feet cube, though the shapeless mass is not really an exact cube or even exactly rectangular. 1 The Iva ba has been rebuilt more than once since Mohammed purged it of idols and adopted it as the chief sanctuary of Islam, but the old form has been preserved except in secondary details ; 2 so that the &quot; Ancient House,&quot; as it is titled, is still essentially a heathen temple, adapted to the worship of IslAm 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 Amr ibn Lohay introduced the statue of Hobal from Syria 3 till the victory of Islam. This fiction has involved the superinduction of a new mythology about Abraham, Hagar, and Ishmael over the old heathen ritual, which remains practically unchanged. Thus the chief object of veneration is the ancient fetish of the black stone, which is fixed in the external angle facing Safa. The building is not exactly oriented, but this may for convenience 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 Irak (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 vol canic 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 A.D, (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 1 The following measurements may be cited : Ibn Abd Ribbih (10th century), south side 20 cubits, north 21, east and west 25 each (so Azraki) ; Ibn Jubair (12th century), sides 54 and 48 spans, height 29 cubits at the highest or south wall, with a slight fall to the north side where the mizab or water-spout discharges (Azraki, 27 cubits); Burck- hardt, sides 18 paces by 14, height 35 to 40 feet. Other modern measures vary considerably. The height was raised by Ibn Zubsyr from 18 to 27 cubits. Compare Muh. in Med., p. 426. 2 The Ka ba of Mohammed s time was itself the successor of an older building said to have been destroyed by fire. It was constructed in the still usual rude style of Arabic masonry, with string courses of timber between the stones (like Solomon s temple). The roof rested on six pillars ; the door was raised above the ground and approached by a stair (probably on account of the floods which often swept the valley) ; and worshippers left their shoes under the stair before entering. During the first siege of Mecca (683 A.D.) the building was burned down, and Ibn Zubeyr reconstructed it on an enlarged scale and in better style of solid ashlar work. After his death, his most glaring innovations (the introduction of two doors on a level with the ground, and the extension of the building lengthwise to include the Hijr) were corrected by Hajjaj under orders from the caliph, but the building retained its more solid structure. The roof now rested on three pillars, and the height was raised one-half. The Ka ba was again entirely rebuilt after the flood of 1626 A.D., but since Hajjaj there seem to have been no structural changes. 3 Hobal was set up within the temple over the pit that contained the sacred treasures. His chief function was connected with the sacred lot to which the Meccans were accustomed to betake themselves in all matters of difficulty.