Muslims on the Internet: the Good, the Bad...the Ugly
by Huma Ahmad
The era of the technological age is upon us. We communicate in seconds with e-mails and fax's. Information of every type is accessible to anyone with a modem from what was originally intended to be a government network for research projects, now called the Internet. The average person is able to create, advertise and publish easily for an audience of millions on the World Wide Web. Thoughts and ideas are exchanged, discussed and argued across thousands of chat channels, muds and newsgroups for every possible topic ever imagined. Businesses, educators and fortune hunters all stumble over each other to see who can best exploit the new opportunities. The global electronic village is open for business and the garish neon 24 hour sign seems to keep blinking an urgent message: "New Frontier: Danger Ahead."
The philosophy of the Internet comes from its originators; laid back computer programmers, information and technology addicts. They wanted to create something special. Something no one business, government or group could control. A true democracy circumventing normal channels and reaching to the deepest grass roots. A frontier where anyone could go out and make it, where those with common interests could connect with each other and ignore the normal barriers of race, nationality, and tradition. An ideology of community, working together exchanging ideas, and making the world a better place was their vision.
Noble beginnings, and this too was in the minds of the Muslims when we first joined the rush. Many were even part of the original builders, software engineers, and programmers, due to many Muslims themselves being in the Computer Science Information fields. We began mailing lists, newsgroups, chat lines, and web pages about Islam. Here was one place where we could actually get the true message of Islam to the outside world. Through the net, we could influence those who never would have encountered Islam or only received their information from the media, orientalists or anti-Islam propagandists. We could reach others and share and discuss ideas to help bring the Ummah closer. Muslims separated and spread out all over could feel the intimacy of being an e-mail or modem's dial away from each other. It would open new heights in our ability to organize and plan events, to share knowledge, articles, experiences.
What we forgot though, was to read the sign.
Excellent Islamic homepages sprung up, but so too did the Ahmadiyya, Nation of Islam, and every other deviant sect's. To the point where doing a search on Islam, may indeed give you 72 links to different views, along with a host of anti-Islam sites giving blatantly false information and arguments by missionaries.
Newsgroups to discuss Islam are inundated with non-Muslims who's jobs seem to be to attack and divide Muslims at every turn, instead of discussing Islam. Bitter fights among the Muslims involving everything from Aqeedah to prayer to censorship have continued for years. Control of the newsgroup soc.religion.islam is a prime example. At one point, during the election of moderators, accusations of voting fraud and hacking were reported to school and police authorities. The job of co-moderating, effectively controlling all content and discussion in the newsgroup was then given to a non-Muslim regular.
MSA-net and other mailing lists too have had their share of contending with special interests threatening to destroy it. Faced with lawsuits against the university that hosted the listserv, by a Sufi group complaining about the Shurah council banning them due to their violation of the rules, the list was then moved to an all Muslim owned site. Groups, not individuals dominate the e-mail list much of the time. Sufis, Hizb-ut-tahrir, Salafees, Shia, Islamic organizations, etc. all post their own agendas.
Muslim chat rooms and muds such as Isnet are especially the hang outs for high school and college age Muslims. They are places for them to talk to other Muslims like themselves from all over the United States and elsewhere. For many, it may have the benefit of being an alternative to other non-Islamic activities, but it is also highly addictive and highly unregulated. Flirting and private on-line relationships are pervasive. Also, among some of the Internet chat channels such as channel islam is a very anti-Kuffar sentiment, with scripts such as "Muslim pulls out a baseball bat, Muslim smashes Jew over the head, Muslim wipes off the blood." The few who control the islam channel kick and ban arbritrarily whoever disagrees with their opinion or definition of Islam. Where the potential for Dawah is at its greatest, the reputation of being narrow-minded and hypocritical has increased clashes and hacking between even the different Muslim channels, such as islam versus pakistan versus bangladesh.
No scholars or Sheikhs are present on any of these mediums. There are no authorities or any kind of collaborative effort on the part of Muslims. Advice and Fatwas to non-Muslims and Muslims are given out by basically anyone and dangerously lacking in references or scholarly wisdom and knowledge.
Despite everything, there are many positives to Muslims being on the Internet. In fact it has influenced many in good ways, from just increasing their Iman and knowledge to eventually leading people to Shahadah. This new technology has been a breakthrough in communication among Muslims. Conferences and events are well publicized and organizational logistics have been enhanced significantly and economically. Muslim activism is spread on- line. News is obtained directly from Muslim sources and not western media. Even the announcements of Ramadan and Eid are quickly distributed and followed.
Students, sisters, those who live in far flung communities or even places where there are very few Muslims or any who might not otherwise be Islamically active, can get the information they need and try to stay in touch with their Islam. Hundreds of articles and books are available, from the Quran on-line in Indonesian to Ibn Taymeeyah's Essay on the Jinn to How to make Istakhara prayer.
So, while on the surface it may seem like a glittering tool, the reality of today makes one question the direction of Muslims on the net and highlights and points out the cracks in our Ummah dramatically.
Half due to ignorance, half due to avoidance, Islamic organizations and scholars refuse to get involved or try to create a presence or authority on the net. Muslim programmers and computer professionals do not use their knowledge to improve the content or build amazing Islamic programs like they could be. Muslims are not using it to its full Dawah potential and are not looking beyond their egos to work with one another in Shurah to make it a place of not just fun, but of benefit for themselves and others.
Facing all these positives and negatives, Muslims in cyberspace are at a turning point. The net and modern technology have created situations that are unlike any we have had to face in the past. As a microcosm and extension of our Muslim society, understanding and helping solve our problems on the net can be a first step in understanding the Muslims as a whole, our differences and how to resolve them.
If we find unity on the Internet, there is hope for our Ummah yet.
Tuesday, 29 March 2011
Al Taif
Driving along the winding roads to escape the steamy heat of Jeddah or entering from the east away from the dry desert clime of the Najd, visitors to Taif are greeted by a fresh, cool breeze as they ascend to the city. Set in a hollow between granite hills rising from the eastern slope of the Hejaz in the southwest region of the Kingdom, this city is a magnet that draws visitors from across Saudi Arabia.
The name Taif means ‘‘encompassing” in Arabic, and for centuries visitors to this mountain city 5,600 feet above sea level have enjoyed the captivating views from wind-sculpted rocks, a pleasant climate and the verdant setting of its surroundings, as well as the abundance of fruits which grow in its fertile valley. Fragrant roses, lush parks, sunny skies and exotic birds and wildlife have for generations drawn families to this resort town each summer. Not only is Taif popular among vacationers, but it has become the official summer seat of the Saudi government.
Numerous ruins and antiquities confirm Taif’s colorful history which dates back to pre-Islamic times. Some historians believe the valley was settled over 5,000 years ago. The Banu Mihlahil, a vanished tribe, once inhabited this area, as did the Amalekites and the Thamud, also now disappeared. Other tribes, such as the Banu Thaqif, have survived. This largely settled tribe of farmers inhabited the walled city and resisted invasion by other tribes. They were wise traders, profiting from the caravans that passed through the region, selling them their produce and making protection and other services available to these travelers.
In pre-Islamic times, Taif was home to the most famous of annual fairs anywhere on the Arabian peninsula. The Suq Okaz took place on what is now a rolling desert plain north of Taif. This fair occurred during the first 20 days of Dhu Al-Qadah, the eleventh month of the year. During Dhu Al-Qadah, Dhu Al-Hajjah and Muharram — respectively the eleventh, twelfth and first months of the year — as well as Rajab, the seventh month of the year — all warfare and raiding was banned. This allowed the residents and merchants of the region the necessary security to travel. Traders brought goods via camel and donkey to the Suq Okaz. Bedouin crafts such as rugs, camel-hair tents, sheepskins, pottery, tools, jewelry, perfumes, produce and spices were sold. Included in this colorful spectacle of the souq were poets and singers who came to participate in contests of their talents. According to Saudi archaeologists who have studied the area, it is believed that the Suq Okaz lasted until sometime around 760 AD.
In 631 AD, the residents of Taif accepted Islam and became part of the emerging Islamic state. A mere 55 miles from Makkah, Taif was strongly influenced by Islam early on, losing many of its residents who migrated in order to propagate the faith throughout the Peninsula. The Holy Qur’an, (Sura 63, 31) refers to Makkah and Taif as “al-Qariyyatain” — the two cities — an expression that clearly implies a close relationship between them. Taif, one of the Kingdom’s main agricultural producers, supplied the residents and pilgrims in Makkah with fresh produce from its fertile fields. Strategically located, Taif was also a gateway to Makkah for pilgrims coming from the east across the peninsula, as well as being the summer residence of the wealthy merchant families of Makkah.
The Prophet Muhammad also spent time in Taif. In the early years of his mission, he realized that life was becoming difficult for his small community of Muslims in Makkah who met with opposition from the Prophet’s own tribe, the Quraish. This tribe accumulated its wealth from the many pilgrims who came to Makkah to worship pagan gods. They were opposed to Muhammad’s teaching of one God, because they feared this would ruin their business of selling idols. Thus, in 619 AD, Muhammad went to Taif with the hope of converting the Banu Thaqif tribe to Islam and winning their support for his followers in Makkah. On this visit, Muhammad was unsuccessful. However, seeing him in distress, a slave named Addas kindly offered the Prophet a plate of grapes. After a brief conversation, Addas, a native of Nineveh, adopted Islam. He was the first person in Taif to embrace the faith. A small mosque in the area bears his name and still stands today.
The second and last time the Prophet was in Taif was in 630 AD. During this time, a skirmish took place between Muslim and local tribes. The battle lasted 20 days and twelve Muslims were killed before their warriors withdrew. Nevertheless, the Prophet prayed to God to grant His blessings to the inhabitants of Taif and to guide them to the right path. One year later, a six-member delegation of the Thaqif tribe came to Muhammad and announced their tribe’s adoption of Islam.
Evidence of its long devotion to Islam are the many mosques, both old and new, in the city. The Abdullah Ibn Al-Abbas Mosque in Al-Mathnaah is the oldest of those built during the first century of Islam. The mosque has been rebuilt several times, the last of which was during the Ottoman empire. Its ruins are now an archaeological site. A graveyard near the mosque contains the remains of the twelve martyrs of the Prophet’s campaign in 630 AD.
Taif’s importance dimmed during the 18th and 19th centuries. Several fortresses were built there, but the city lost its stature as a seat of government and became more of a provincial outpost. The remains of several forts still stand among the mountain tops of Taif overlooking the villages. These forts, built mostly from rock, stored supplies in their basements and had observation posts on the higher levels.
Agriculture has been the economic mainstay of Taif since its earliest days. Even in pre-Islamic times, the farmers of Taif employed very advanced irrigation methods, bringing water drawn from dams barring a large number of wadis and terraced fields on the mountain slopes. Historically, the tribes of Taif grew wheat and barley and fruits including limes, apricots, oranges, olives, figs, peaches, pomegranates, watermelons, quince, grapes, almonds and dates. Daily caravans took this produce down the steep, winding mountain road to Makkah, fostering a trade on which the citizens of Taif thrived.
In addition to producing high quality fruits and vegetables, Taif’s gardens are renowned throughout the Kingdom for their exquisite roses. Blooming in springtime, these delicate flowers color the landscape. Among them is a particularly sweet perfumed red rose that has for centuries been used to produce a valuable essence know as “attar” which can be used alone or as one of the ingredients in other perfumes.
In the old days, when the flowers bloomed, rose farmers would gather the petals and send them by camel caravan to Makkah, where they were pressed into attar. Famous throughout the Islamic world, pilgrims still like to buy at least one vial of this essence to take home as a souvenir of the Hajj.
The roses and other fragrant flowers of Taif attract many bees, making the region a major producer of honey. Taif’s honey has a light-golden color, does not set hard and has an extremely pleasing flavor and aroma, and is thus in great demand.
The industrious tribes of Taif also sold firewood, charcoal and timber from the forests of their region to the residents of Makkah. The Thaqif were also imaginative artisans, perfecting the art of curing sheepskins and cowhides to use for binding books and making other leather goods.
Taif began to reemerge on the national scene during the first part of this century. In his drive to unify the tribes and form the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, King Abdul Aziz extended his protection to Taif in 1924. Thus the city entered a new era of stability and prosperity.
King Abdul Aziz enjoyed the natural setting of Taif and after the unification of the Kingdom in 1932, he was a frequent summer resident. Staying at the Shubra Palace, and then later on preferring to reside in an elaborate tent city lower down the mountain, King Abdul Aziz and his family enjoyed the refreshing mountain environment. One of the King’s favorite pastimes was to visit nearby valleys and plains, where gazelles and other wildlife were in abundance. It was surrounded by the beauty of Taif that, on November 9, 1953, King Abdul Aziz peacefully passed away.
Beginning in the 1950s, Taif began to grow both in physical size and population. The city’s limits spread to encompass several smaller hamlets. Today more than 330,000 people make Taif their permanent home and thousands more visit over the summer months. Agriculture continues to be a major
component of the local economy. The tourism industry also provides thousands of jobs to local residents. They work to maintain the city’s more than 400 public gardens and parks, as well as in hotels and other facilities that cater to visitors.
Taif’s largest and most famous public garden is the King Fahd Park. Among its amenities are a lake, playgrounds, gazebos, walking paths and a mosque. In a suburb of Taif called Al-Radf, there is a zoo with a large variety of animals from around the world, in j6 addition to exotic local varieties.
While the Suq Okaz has not been held for centuries, shoppers in Taif can find delightful handicrafts, trinkets and other goods in the old souq. Located in the heart of the city, it is characterized by its traditional architecture, and its buildings house shops full of souvenirs, gold, silver, spices and perfumes.
Shubra Palace, the former summer residence of King Abdul Aziz, is today maintained by the Ministry of Defense and Aviation. The large white structure is the most distinguished and famous historical building in the city. It has a lush garden, originally fed by a water channel from a nearby spring. The ornate windows and doors are carved with intricate motifs.
During the early 1970s, Taif became the official summer seat of the Saudi government. Buildings were constructed to house the King’s Office, the Council of Ministers and the various Ministries. These buildings overlook the Great Mosque, a sprawling structure on King Faisal Street.
The city’s infrastructure has been expanded and modernized over the decades in order to keep up with growth and to support the blooming tourist industry. Paved roads and highways make access to Taif easy from all directions. Three main roads from Makkah, Riyadh and Abha facilitate both transport of Taif’s produce to the Kingdom’s markets and the easy access of visitors to this resort town.
Due to its mountainous location, Taif is rich in underground water reserves. Numerous wells scattered throughout the city and its surrounding area tap extensive aquifers. Taif is also supplied with additional water from a pipeline from the Al-Shuaiba desalination plant on the Red Sea. This plant produces some 40 million gallons of potable water each day, of which Taif’s share is 15 million gallons.
Taif boasts an integrated network of services covering the fields of communications, agriculture, health, youth welfare, water, social assistance and education. The children of Taif have access to quality educational facilities. There are more than 125 primary, intermediate and secondary schools for Taif’s boys and girls. Umm Al-Qura University has a branch campus in Taif. The city’s residents also have access to excellent medical care at the city’s numerous hospitals and clinics.
Taif is also home to one of three centers established by the National Commission for Wildlife Conservation and Development (NCWCD) dedicated to the study of endangered animals and plants, and to their breeding in controlled conditions. The Taif Research Center is credited with the successful breeding of the Arabian oryx and the Houbara bustard. Both animals, whose numbers were nearing extinction in the 1980s, have now been reintroduced in large numbers in various wildlife reserves throughout the Kingdom. Other endangered species the Taif facility has successfully bred and reintroduced into the wild include the Arabian helmeted guinea fowl, the ostrich and the Arabian bustard, one of the world’s largest flying birds.
As part of its effort to propagate plant species in danger of extinction, the center has established nurseries to produce seedlings that are planted in reserves throughout the country. The facility also maintains a seed bank that ensures the survival of threatened species by maintaining the genetic diversity of plants indigenous to Saudi Arabia. Adding ne pages to its rich history, Taif in recent years has been the site of several meetings brokering peace in the region. In 1989, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Fahd Ibn Abdul Aziz hosted a conference in Taif, inviting the leaders
of Lebanon’s warring factions to try to resolve their differences. The resulting Taif Accord effectively ended Lebanon’s 15-year civil war and ushered in an era of peace and reconstruction. Taif was also chosen as the site of the 1981 Islamic Summit Conference which brought together leaders from Islamic nations to discuss issues concerning them. Further, the city was the site of Kuwait’s government in exile while that country was occupied by Iraq during the Arabian Gulf War of 1990-91.
It is this combination of rich history, beautiful setting and extensive modern amenities that attracts thousands of people from across Saudi Arabia to Taif each year.
The name Taif means ‘‘encompassing” in Arabic, and for centuries visitors to this mountain city 5,600 feet above sea level have enjoyed the captivating views from wind-sculpted rocks, a pleasant climate and the verdant setting of its surroundings, as well as the abundance of fruits which grow in its fertile valley. Fragrant roses, lush parks, sunny skies and exotic birds and wildlife have for generations drawn families to this resort town each summer. Not only is Taif popular among vacationers, but it has become the official summer seat of the Saudi government.
Numerous ruins and antiquities confirm Taif’s colorful history which dates back to pre-Islamic times. Some historians believe the valley was settled over 5,000 years ago. The Banu Mihlahil, a vanished tribe, once inhabited this area, as did the Amalekites and the Thamud, also now disappeared. Other tribes, such as the Banu Thaqif, have survived. This largely settled tribe of farmers inhabited the walled city and resisted invasion by other tribes. They were wise traders, profiting from the caravans that passed through the region, selling them their produce and making protection and other services available to these travelers.
In pre-Islamic times, Taif was home to the most famous of annual fairs anywhere on the Arabian peninsula. The Suq Okaz took place on what is now a rolling desert plain north of Taif. This fair occurred during the first 20 days of Dhu Al-Qadah, the eleventh month of the year. During Dhu Al-Qadah, Dhu Al-Hajjah and Muharram — respectively the eleventh, twelfth and first months of the year — as well as Rajab, the seventh month of the year — all warfare and raiding was banned. This allowed the residents and merchants of the region the necessary security to travel. Traders brought goods via camel and donkey to the Suq Okaz. Bedouin crafts such as rugs, camel-hair tents, sheepskins, pottery, tools, jewelry, perfumes, produce and spices were sold. Included in this colorful spectacle of the souq were poets and singers who came to participate in contests of their talents. According to Saudi archaeologists who have studied the area, it is believed that the Suq Okaz lasted until sometime around 760 AD.
In 631 AD, the residents of Taif accepted Islam and became part of the emerging Islamic state. A mere 55 miles from Makkah, Taif was strongly influenced by Islam early on, losing many of its residents who migrated in order to propagate the faith throughout the Peninsula. The Holy Qur’an, (Sura 63, 31) refers to Makkah and Taif as “al-Qariyyatain” — the two cities — an expression that clearly implies a close relationship between them. Taif, one of the Kingdom’s main agricultural producers, supplied the residents and pilgrims in Makkah with fresh produce from its fertile fields. Strategically located, Taif was also a gateway to Makkah for pilgrims coming from the east across the peninsula, as well as being the summer residence of the wealthy merchant families of Makkah.
The Prophet Muhammad also spent time in Taif. In the early years of his mission, he realized that life was becoming difficult for his small community of Muslims in Makkah who met with opposition from the Prophet’s own tribe, the Quraish. This tribe accumulated its wealth from the many pilgrims who came to Makkah to worship pagan gods. They were opposed to Muhammad’s teaching of one God, because they feared this would ruin their business of selling idols. Thus, in 619 AD, Muhammad went to Taif with the hope of converting the Banu Thaqif tribe to Islam and winning their support for his followers in Makkah. On this visit, Muhammad was unsuccessful. However, seeing him in distress, a slave named Addas kindly offered the Prophet a plate of grapes. After a brief conversation, Addas, a native of Nineveh, adopted Islam. He was the first person in Taif to embrace the faith. A small mosque in the area bears his name and still stands today.
The second and last time the Prophet was in Taif was in 630 AD. During this time, a skirmish took place between Muslim and local tribes. The battle lasted 20 days and twelve Muslims were killed before their warriors withdrew. Nevertheless, the Prophet prayed to God to grant His blessings to the inhabitants of Taif and to guide them to the right path. One year later, a six-member delegation of the Thaqif tribe came to Muhammad and announced their tribe’s adoption of Islam.
Evidence of its long devotion to Islam are the many mosques, both old and new, in the city. The Abdullah Ibn Al-Abbas Mosque in Al-Mathnaah is the oldest of those built during the first century of Islam. The mosque has been rebuilt several times, the last of which was during the Ottoman empire. Its ruins are now an archaeological site. A graveyard near the mosque contains the remains of the twelve martyrs of the Prophet’s campaign in 630 AD.
Taif’s importance dimmed during the 18th and 19th centuries. Several fortresses were built there, but the city lost its stature as a seat of government and became more of a provincial outpost. The remains of several forts still stand among the mountain tops of Taif overlooking the villages. These forts, built mostly from rock, stored supplies in their basements and had observation posts on the higher levels.
Agriculture has been the economic mainstay of Taif since its earliest days. Even in pre-Islamic times, the farmers of Taif employed very advanced irrigation methods, bringing water drawn from dams barring a large number of wadis and terraced fields on the mountain slopes. Historically, the tribes of Taif grew wheat and barley and fruits including limes, apricots, oranges, olives, figs, peaches, pomegranates, watermelons, quince, grapes, almonds and dates. Daily caravans took this produce down the steep, winding mountain road to Makkah, fostering a trade on which the citizens of Taif thrived.
In addition to producing high quality fruits and vegetables, Taif’s gardens are renowned throughout the Kingdom for their exquisite roses. Blooming in springtime, these delicate flowers color the landscape. Among them is a particularly sweet perfumed red rose that has for centuries been used to produce a valuable essence know as “attar” which can be used alone or as one of the ingredients in other perfumes.
In the old days, when the flowers bloomed, rose farmers would gather the petals and send them by camel caravan to Makkah, where they were pressed into attar. Famous throughout the Islamic world, pilgrims still like to buy at least one vial of this essence to take home as a souvenir of the Hajj.
The roses and other fragrant flowers of Taif attract many bees, making the region a major producer of honey. Taif’s honey has a light-golden color, does not set hard and has an extremely pleasing flavor and aroma, and is thus in great demand.
The industrious tribes of Taif also sold firewood, charcoal and timber from the forests of their region to the residents of Makkah. The Thaqif were also imaginative artisans, perfecting the art of curing sheepskins and cowhides to use for binding books and making other leather goods.
Taif began to reemerge on the national scene during the first part of this century. In his drive to unify the tribes and form the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, King Abdul Aziz extended his protection to Taif in 1924. Thus the city entered a new era of stability and prosperity.
King Abdul Aziz enjoyed the natural setting of Taif and after the unification of the Kingdom in 1932, he was a frequent summer resident. Staying at the Shubra Palace, and then later on preferring to reside in an elaborate tent city lower down the mountain, King Abdul Aziz and his family enjoyed the refreshing mountain environment. One of the King’s favorite pastimes was to visit nearby valleys and plains, where gazelles and other wildlife were in abundance. It was surrounded by the beauty of Taif that, on November 9, 1953, King Abdul Aziz peacefully passed away.
Beginning in the 1950s, Taif began to grow both in physical size and population. The city’s limits spread to encompass several smaller hamlets. Today more than 330,000 people make Taif their permanent home and thousands more visit over the summer months. Agriculture continues to be a major
component of the local economy. The tourism industry also provides thousands of jobs to local residents. They work to maintain the city’s more than 400 public gardens and parks, as well as in hotels and other facilities that cater to visitors.
Taif’s largest and most famous public garden is the King Fahd Park. Among its amenities are a lake, playgrounds, gazebos, walking paths and a mosque. In a suburb of Taif called Al-Radf, there is a zoo with a large variety of animals from around the world, in j6 addition to exotic local varieties.
While the Suq Okaz has not been held for centuries, shoppers in Taif can find delightful handicrafts, trinkets and other goods in the old souq. Located in the heart of the city, it is characterized by its traditional architecture, and its buildings house shops full of souvenirs, gold, silver, spices and perfumes.
Shubra Palace, the former summer residence of King Abdul Aziz, is today maintained by the Ministry of Defense and Aviation. The large white structure is the most distinguished and famous historical building in the city. It has a lush garden, originally fed by a water channel from a nearby spring. The ornate windows and doors are carved with intricate motifs.
During the early 1970s, Taif became the official summer seat of the Saudi government. Buildings were constructed to house the King’s Office, the Council of Ministers and the various Ministries. These buildings overlook the Great Mosque, a sprawling structure on King Faisal Street.
The city’s infrastructure has been expanded and modernized over the decades in order to keep up with growth and to support the blooming tourist industry. Paved roads and highways make access to Taif easy from all directions. Three main roads from Makkah, Riyadh and Abha facilitate both transport of Taif’s produce to the Kingdom’s markets and the easy access of visitors to this resort town.
Due to its mountainous location, Taif is rich in underground water reserves. Numerous wells scattered throughout the city and its surrounding area tap extensive aquifers. Taif is also supplied with additional water from a pipeline from the Al-Shuaiba desalination plant on the Red Sea. This plant produces some 40 million gallons of potable water each day, of which Taif’s share is 15 million gallons.
Taif boasts an integrated network of services covering the fields of communications, agriculture, health, youth welfare, water, social assistance and education. The children of Taif have access to quality educational facilities. There are more than 125 primary, intermediate and secondary schools for Taif’s boys and girls. Umm Al-Qura University has a branch campus in Taif. The city’s residents also have access to excellent medical care at the city’s numerous hospitals and clinics.
Taif is also home to one of three centers established by the National Commission for Wildlife Conservation and Development (NCWCD) dedicated to the study of endangered animals and plants, and to their breeding in controlled conditions. The Taif Research Center is credited with the successful breeding of the Arabian oryx and the Houbara bustard. Both animals, whose numbers were nearing extinction in the 1980s, have now been reintroduced in large numbers in various wildlife reserves throughout the Kingdom. Other endangered species the Taif facility has successfully bred and reintroduced into the wild include the Arabian helmeted guinea fowl, the ostrich and the Arabian bustard, one of the world’s largest flying birds.
As part of its effort to propagate plant species in danger of extinction, the center has established nurseries to produce seedlings that are planted in reserves throughout the country. The facility also maintains a seed bank that ensures the survival of threatened species by maintaining the genetic diversity of plants indigenous to Saudi Arabia. Adding ne pages to its rich history, Taif in recent years has been the site of several meetings brokering peace in the region. In 1989, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Fahd Ibn Abdul Aziz hosted a conference in Taif, inviting the leaders
of Lebanon’s warring factions to try to resolve their differences. The resulting Taif Accord effectively ended Lebanon’s 15-year civil war and ushered in an era of peace and reconstruction. Taif was also chosen as the site of the 1981 Islamic Summit Conference which brought together leaders from Islamic nations to discuss issues concerning them. Further, the city was the site of Kuwait’s government in exile while that country was occupied by Iraq during the Arabian Gulf War of 1990-91.
It is this combination of rich history, beautiful setting and extensive modern amenities that attracts thousands of people from across Saudi Arabia to Taif each year.
Makkah the Blessed
Makkah spreads beyond the narrow valley in which it was originally confined. The Holy Mosque, the minarets of which are visible in the distance, is the holiest site in Islam.
Makkah Al-Mukarramah. Makkah the Blessed. To Muslims, who comprise one of every five people in the world today, these words have a special place close to their hearts. Recognizing the spiritual significance of the city and aware of its responsibilities and duties towards the guests of God at Islam's holiest sites that Saudi Arabia is blessed to have on its soil, the government of the Kingdom has undertaken extensive projects so that larger numbers of the faithful can visit Makkah than ever before and perform their religious rituals in complete safety and comfort.
No other spiritual center in the world plays as important a role in the daily lives of people as does Makkah for the more than one billion Muslims living in the vast Islamic world that stretches from Indonesia to Morocco or in countries in which they are minorities.
It was here that the first verses of the Holy Qur'an were revealed to the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), and it is towards the Ka'abah, the cubical stone structure which now stands in the center of the Holy Mosque, that Muslims face to pray five times a day and circumambulate as part of the Hajj, the pilgrimage to the holy sites in and near the city.
To the millions of Muslims who visit the city from distant parts of the world each year, entering Makkah is the spiritual high point of their lives, an experience that remains indelibly etched in their memories forever. Having arrived in the Kingdom by way of a seaport, airport or road, the visitor approaches with a sense of expectation. Their spiritual quest begins as their vehicle passes under an archway topped by a sculpture of an open Holy Qur'an which marks the limit of the haram, the holy area surrounding Makkah.
A heightened sense of spiritual awareness pervades the entire haram. Inside the city, the life of everyone, whether resident or visitor, is attuned to devotion. At prayer time all stop whatever they are doing and stream from every direction into the vast complex to face the House of God and pray. Visitors are struck by the casual manner in which shop owners close their stores without shuttering them, vendors cover their stalls without securing them and people leave their homes without locking the doors. After prayer, they return to resume their lives. In their absence, their stores and homes remain as they left them, for here, as in all of Saudi Arabia, a person's safety and the security of his property are inviolable.
With completion of the most recent expansion project, the Holy Mosque can now accommodate more than one million people at a time.
The absence of such petty, earthly concerns helps make the visit to Makkah all the more profound for pilgrims, particularly those from countries where crime and insecurity are inescapable facts of daily life. It allows visitors to commit themselves completely to their religious devotions and contemplation of God.
Makkah itself is an ancient city long regarded as a spiritual center and mentioned in the classical writings of historians and geographers, such as the second century Greek, Ptolemy. Originally called Bakkah or narrow, a reference to the valley in which the city is located, Makkah was a pilgrimage site for centuries before the advent of Islam. The Holy Qur'an says: "The first House (of worship) appointed for men was that at Bakkah, full of blessing and of guidance for all the worlds." The House referred to is the Ka'abah, a structure originally built by Prophet Abraham and his son Ismail. When it was completed, Abraham was commanded by God to call mankind to make the pilgrimage to it.
Makkah was also an important trading center, located on the main caravan routes connecting the southern parts of the peninsula with the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. The people of Makkah therefore prospered as merchants. The main commodities fueling this trade were frankincense and myrrh, incenses that were in great demand in the ancient world. Both produced in southern Arabia from the resin of trees, they were carried north to Makkah and beyond by caravans.
A century ago fewer than 40,000 people could worship simultaneously.
The city was famous for several annual fairs. At Okaz, Arab poets would gather to read their compositions. Another fair, the suq al-Arab (Arab market), was held at Mina outside Makkah. The trade caravans, the pilgrimage and the fairs combined to make Makkah the preeminent city in the peninsula. However, the growing affluence of Makkah's inhabitants and its fame were accompanied by corruption of the principles embodied in the Ka'abah. By the sixth century AD, the House dedicated to God by Abraham had been transformed into a shrine for the worship of idols. As many as 365 idols are said to have been placed in the structure at one time. Moreover, the House of God was used for non-religious purposes. As an example, outstanding poetry at the Okaz fair each year was often written on cloth in gold letters and hung in the Ka'abah. Such poems were known as mu'allaqats (hung ones).
There are numerous passages in the Holy Qur'an, including these (above), which refer to Makkah and the Holy Mosque (below).
It was against this backdrop that the Prophet Muhammad was born in Makkah in the late sixth century. Growing up among the people of Makkah, who were largely engaged in idolatry, Muhammad nevertheless practiced the monotheism that was a legacy of Abraham. At the age of 40, in the year 610, while in retreat in a mountain-top cave called Hira, Muhammad received the first verses of the Holy Qur'an.
With the call to the inhabitants of Makkah to abandon idolatry and embrace Islam, the Prophet's following grew. However, resistance from the wealthy tribes in Makkah, who saw Islam's monotheism and condemnation of idolatry as a threat to the prosperity that was partly due to the presence of idols in the Ka'abah and the many who came to Makkah to worship them, forced the Prophet to leave the city for Madinah in 622. This journey, the Hijrah (migration), was later designated as the first year of the Islamic era and its lunar calendar.
In the remaining ten years of his life, the Prophet's message spread across Arabia and was embraced by its inhabitants. In the year 630, he personally returned to Makkah and purified the Ka'abah of the idols that had corrupted it and rededicated the House of God. In 632, shortly before passing away, the Prophet led a large caravan of pilgrims from Madinah to Makkah to perform the Hajj.
From this time on, Makkah became the spiritual center of the Islamic world. The Ka'abah, standing at the center of the Holy Mosque, remains the heart of Islam. At the southeast corner of the plain cubical structure is the Hajar Al-Aswad (Black Stone), the only piece of Abraham's original shrine that is left. Neither the Ka'abah nor the Black Stone are objects of worship to Muslims, but represent a sanctuary consecrated to God.
The rituals performed by the Prophet Muhammad during his last visit to Makkah in 632 form the basis of the pilgrimage that has been conducted every year since by Muslims in Dhu Al-Hijjah, the twelfth month of the Islamic lunar calendar.
The people of Makkah serve the millions of visitors who come to the city throughout the year by providing services ranging from guiding the guests of God to meeting their everyday needs.
The hardships and risks associated with performing the pilgrimage were gradually eliminated when King Abdul Aziz Bin Abdul Rahman Al-Saud brought the Hijaz, the portion of the Arabian Peninsula in which Makkah and Madinah are situated, under his protection and later founded the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932. In the preceding decades, the pilgrimage had become an expensive undertaking due to the many taxes levied on pilgrims by the rulers. It was also one which involved great risk to health and life because of the presence of robbers in the desert marches to Makkah and the absence of sanitation and medical facilities in the city.
At the time of the founding of Saudi Arabia, the Holy Mosque could accommodate only 48,000 worshippers at a time, and fewer than that number of pilgrims visited Makkah from abroad every year. In 1955, a project was launched to expand the Holy Mosque in Makkah. Its courtyard was raised and covered with white marble and a second level was added to accommodate more worshippers. The area surrounding the complex also underwent expansion and renovation, including the construction of a network of tunnels and pipes to protect the site from flash floods that had historically threatened the city, located as it is in a narrow valley.
The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Fahd Bin Abdul Aziz launched the latest expansion of the Holy Mosque in 1985. Dedicated, as was his father before him, to the service of Islam and Muslims, especially the pilgrims to the Holy Mosque, King Fahd launched a seven-year project to renovate and expand the Holy Mosque and the Prophet's Mosque in Madinah and their facilities. When the project was completed in 1992 at a cost of more than 70 billion Saudi riyals (18.66 billion U.S. dollars), the size of the Holy Mosque in Makkah had more than doubled to accommodate up to one million worshippers. The size of the Prophet's Mosque, which most pilgrims visit at the conclusion of the rituals in Makkah, was also more than doubled to handle 700,000 worshippers.
This year, the Hajj took place in mid-April, and more than two million Muslims gathered in Makkah to perform the pilgrimage to the Holy Mosque. Contingents came from more than 130 countries, including the United States. The size of each national contingent has been determined by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) as 1,000 pilgrims for every one million population.
Accommodating such a large concentration of people in a limited area requires massive planning, preparation and organization. Although some pilgrims still come by sea and land as they have done for centuries, modern ports and roads now make their travel easier and more comfortable. Modern highways now connect Makkah with major cities in Saudi Arabia, and through them to other countries.
The majority of pilgrims arrive by commercial jets at a special Hajj Terminal built at King Abdul Aziz International Airport in Jeddah. A vast fleet of buses moves the pilgrims from the airport to Makkah, where a city of air-conditioned tents has been established to house them. Sanitation facilities, medical centers and other services have been established at the tent cities and the pilgrimage sites to meet every need of the pilgrims.
A vast tent city houses the more than two million pilgrims that gather in Makkah for the Hajj every year.
Huge quantities of food and water are distributed throughout the tent complexes and along the route of the pilgrims from the Holy Mosque to the nearby holy sites in Arafat, Muzadalifah and Mina, and back to Makkah. A network of pedestrian walkways, tunnels, escalators and bridges has been built to allow for the easy and safe movement of this mass of humanity throughout the pilgrimage circuit.
The city's 12 large hospitals and 63 health care centers are complemented by a large number of temporary clinics established at the pilgrimage sites to meet the needs of inhabitants and pilgrims alike.
Controllers monitor the flow of vehicular and pedestrian traffic at one of the many centers throughout the pilgrimage route.
Located in an arid part of the country with little rainfall, Makkah in the past was reliant on a limited supply of subterranean water accessed through wells. To meet the growing city's needs, a pipeline was built to transport water from desalination plants at Shuaybah on the Red Sea.
The lives of the people of Makkah are almost exclusively dedicated to the service of the Holy Mosque and the millions of people who visit it each year. Serving as guides, interpreters and hosts, they provide a range of vital services. They provide accommodations, food and water. They ensure that those in need of medical care receive it promptly, and pilgrims who get lost in the mass of humanity are reunited with their groups. Fire-fighting and other emergency services are manned by trained personnel around the clock.
The greatest concentration of pilgrims, particularly from abroad, at any one time in Makkah occurs during the Hajj. Preparations for the Hajj begin months before the actual pilgrimage and keep the people of Makkah busy for most of the year. After the Hajj is over, the work continues for months. The city and the pilgrimage sites need to be cleaned and prepared, provisions replenished and machinery and equipment checked and maintained. Tens of thousands of sheep sacrificed at the conclusion of the pilgrimage are processed at factories and over the coming months are distributed worldwide among the needy, including victims of famine and natural disasters.
While the Hajj is the focal point of life in Makkah, the city's inhabitants are kept busy serving a steady stream of worshippers throughout the year. Millions of Muslims annually conduct Umrah, the minor pilgrimage to Makkah which can be performed at any time of the year outside the Hajj season. Coming from around the world, these pilgrims need the same services as those who visit the city to perform Hajj.
Helping the vast crowd of pilgrims move through the pilgrimage sites, such as the Mount of Mercy (above), requires extensive preparation, planning and organization, as well as some one-on-one guidance (below).
Additionally, during the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims dedicate their lives to fasting and prayer, large numbers of worshippers gather at the Holy Mosque. On the night of Laylat Al-Qadr, which fell on February 5 this year, more than two million worshippers gathered in the Holy Mosque to pray. Laylat Al-Qadr marks the night on which the Holy Qur'an was first revealed to the Prophet Muhammad and is considered especially holy to Muslims.
Thus the people of Makkah spend the whole year in the service of "the guests of God." The vast expansion of the city and the efficient services provided to the pilgrims reflect Saudi Arabia's dedication to the service of Islam and the pilgrims to the Holy Mosques. King Fahd emphasized that commitment earlier this year when he stated: "The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, its government and its people, honored to serve the Two Holy Mosques and the pilgrims to them, and ever mindful of enabling the guests of God to perform their rituals in line with the teachings of the Holy Qur'an and the Sunnah (teachings and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad), will spare no effort in the service of Islam and Muslims throughout the world."
Makkah Al-Mukarramah. Makkah the Blessed. To Muslims, who comprise one of every five people in the world today, these words have a special place close to their hearts. Recognizing the spiritual significance of the city and aware of its responsibilities and duties towards the guests of God at Islam's holiest sites that Saudi Arabia is blessed to have on its soil, the government of the Kingdom has undertaken extensive projects so that larger numbers of the faithful can visit Makkah than ever before and perform their religious rituals in complete safety and comfort.
No other spiritual center in the world plays as important a role in the daily lives of people as does Makkah for the more than one billion Muslims living in the vast Islamic world that stretches from Indonesia to Morocco or in countries in which they are minorities.
It was here that the first verses of the Holy Qur'an were revealed to the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), and it is towards the Ka'abah, the cubical stone structure which now stands in the center of the Holy Mosque, that Muslims face to pray five times a day and circumambulate as part of the Hajj, the pilgrimage to the holy sites in and near the city.
To the millions of Muslims who visit the city from distant parts of the world each year, entering Makkah is the spiritual high point of their lives, an experience that remains indelibly etched in their memories forever. Having arrived in the Kingdom by way of a seaport, airport or road, the visitor approaches with a sense of expectation. Their spiritual quest begins as their vehicle passes under an archway topped by a sculpture of an open Holy Qur'an which marks the limit of the haram, the holy area surrounding Makkah.
A heightened sense of spiritual awareness pervades the entire haram. Inside the city, the life of everyone, whether resident or visitor, is attuned to devotion. At prayer time all stop whatever they are doing and stream from every direction into the vast complex to face the House of God and pray. Visitors are struck by the casual manner in which shop owners close their stores without shuttering them, vendors cover their stalls without securing them and people leave their homes without locking the doors. After prayer, they return to resume their lives. In their absence, their stores and homes remain as they left them, for here, as in all of Saudi Arabia, a person's safety and the security of his property are inviolable.
With completion of the most recent expansion project, the Holy Mosque can now accommodate more than one million people at a time.
The absence of such petty, earthly concerns helps make the visit to Makkah all the more profound for pilgrims, particularly those from countries where crime and insecurity are inescapable facts of daily life. It allows visitors to commit themselves completely to their religious devotions and contemplation of God.
Makkah itself is an ancient city long regarded as a spiritual center and mentioned in the classical writings of historians and geographers, such as the second century Greek, Ptolemy. Originally called Bakkah or narrow, a reference to the valley in which the city is located, Makkah was a pilgrimage site for centuries before the advent of Islam. The Holy Qur'an says: "The first House (of worship) appointed for men was that at Bakkah, full of blessing and of guidance for all the worlds." The House referred to is the Ka'abah, a structure originally built by Prophet Abraham and his son Ismail. When it was completed, Abraham was commanded by God to call mankind to make the pilgrimage to it.
Makkah was also an important trading center, located on the main caravan routes connecting the southern parts of the peninsula with the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. The people of Makkah therefore prospered as merchants. The main commodities fueling this trade were frankincense and myrrh, incenses that were in great demand in the ancient world. Both produced in southern Arabia from the resin of trees, they were carried north to Makkah and beyond by caravans.
A century ago fewer than 40,000 people could worship simultaneously.
The city was famous for several annual fairs. At Okaz, Arab poets would gather to read their compositions. Another fair, the suq al-Arab (Arab market), was held at Mina outside Makkah. The trade caravans, the pilgrimage and the fairs combined to make Makkah the preeminent city in the peninsula. However, the growing affluence of Makkah's inhabitants and its fame were accompanied by corruption of the principles embodied in the Ka'abah. By the sixth century AD, the House dedicated to God by Abraham had been transformed into a shrine for the worship of idols. As many as 365 idols are said to have been placed in the structure at one time. Moreover, the House of God was used for non-religious purposes. As an example, outstanding poetry at the Okaz fair each year was often written on cloth in gold letters and hung in the Ka'abah. Such poems were known as mu'allaqats (hung ones).
There are numerous passages in the Holy Qur'an, including these (above), which refer to Makkah and the Holy Mosque (below).
It was against this backdrop that the Prophet Muhammad was born in Makkah in the late sixth century. Growing up among the people of Makkah, who were largely engaged in idolatry, Muhammad nevertheless practiced the monotheism that was a legacy of Abraham. At the age of 40, in the year 610, while in retreat in a mountain-top cave called Hira, Muhammad received the first verses of the Holy Qur'an.
With the call to the inhabitants of Makkah to abandon idolatry and embrace Islam, the Prophet's following grew. However, resistance from the wealthy tribes in Makkah, who saw Islam's monotheism and condemnation of idolatry as a threat to the prosperity that was partly due to the presence of idols in the Ka'abah and the many who came to Makkah to worship them, forced the Prophet to leave the city for Madinah in 622. This journey, the Hijrah (migration), was later designated as the first year of the Islamic era and its lunar calendar.
In the remaining ten years of his life, the Prophet's message spread across Arabia and was embraced by its inhabitants. In the year 630, he personally returned to Makkah and purified the Ka'abah of the idols that had corrupted it and rededicated the House of God. In 632, shortly before passing away, the Prophet led a large caravan of pilgrims from Madinah to Makkah to perform the Hajj.
From this time on, Makkah became the spiritual center of the Islamic world. The Ka'abah, standing at the center of the Holy Mosque, remains the heart of Islam. At the southeast corner of the plain cubical structure is the Hajar Al-Aswad (Black Stone), the only piece of Abraham's original shrine that is left. Neither the Ka'abah nor the Black Stone are objects of worship to Muslims, but represent a sanctuary consecrated to God.
The rituals performed by the Prophet Muhammad during his last visit to Makkah in 632 form the basis of the pilgrimage that has been conducted every year since by Muslims in Dhu Al-Hijjah, the twelfth month of the Islamic lunar calendar.
The people of Makkah serve the millions of visitors who come to the city throughout the year by providing services ranging from guiding the guests of God to meeting their everyday needs.
The hardships and risks associated with performing the pilgrimage were gradually eliminated when King Abdul Aziz Bin Abdul Rahman Al-Saud brought the Hijaz, the portion of the Arabian Peninsula in which Makkah and Madinah are situated, under his protection and later founded the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932. In the preceding decades, the pilgrimage had become an expensive undertaking due to the many taxes levied on pilgrims by the rulers. It was also one which involved great risk to health and life because of the presence of robbers in the desert marches to Makkah and the absence of sanitation and medical facilities in the city.
At the time of the founding of Saudi Arabia, the Holy Mosque could accommodate only 48,000 worshippers at a time, and fewer than that number of pilgrims visited Makkah from abroad every year. In 1955, a project was launched to expand the Holy Mosque in Makkah. Its courtyard was raised and covered with white marble and a second level was added to accommodate more worshippers. The area surrounding the complex also underwent expansion and renovation, including the construction of a network of tunnels and pipes to protect the site from flash floods that had historically threatened the city, located as it is in a narrow valley.
The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Fahd Bin Abdul Aziz launched the latest expansion of the Holy Mosque in 1985. Dedicated, as was his father before him, to the service of Islam and Muslims, especially the pilgrims to the Holy Mosque, King Fahd launched a seven-year project to renovate and expand the Holy Mosque and the Prophet's Mosque in Madinah and their facilities. When the project was completed in 1992 at a cost of more than 70 billion Saudi riyals (18.66 billion U.S. dollars), the size of the Holy Mosque in Makkah had more than doubled to accommodate up to one million worshippers. The size of the Prophet's Mosque, which most pilgrims visit at the conclusion of the rituals in Makkah, was also more than doubled to handle 700,000 worshippers.
This year, the Hajj took place in mid-April, and more than two million Muslims gathered in Makkah to perform the pilgrimage to the Holy Mosque. Contingents came from more than 130 countries, including the United States. The size of each national contingent has been determined by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) as 1,000 pilgrims for every one million population.
Accommodating such a large concentration of people in a limited area requires massive planning, preparation and organization. Although some pilgrims still come by sea and land as they have done for centuries, modern ports and roads now make their travel easier and more comfortable. Modern highways now connect Makkah with major cities in Saudi Arabia, and through them to other countries.
The majority of pilgrims arrive by commercial jets at a special Hajj Terminal built at King Abdul Aziz International Airport in Jeddah. A vast fleet of buses moves the pilgrims from the airport to Makkah, where a city of air-conditioned tents has been established to house them. Sanitation facilities, medical centers and other services have been established at the tent cities and the pilgrimage sites to meet every need of the pilgrims.
A vast tent city houses the more than two million pilgrims that gather in Makkah for the Hajj every year.
Huge quantities of food and water are distributed throughout the tent complexes and along the route of the pilgrims from the Holy Mosque to the nearby holy sites in Arafat, Muzadalifah and Mina, and back to Makkah. A network of pedestrian walkways, tunnels, escalators and bridges has been built to allow for the easy and safe movement of this mass of humanity throughout the pilgrimage circuit.
The city's 12 large hospitals and 63 health care centers are complemented by a large number of temporary clinics established at the pilgrimage sites to meet the needs of inhabitants and pilgrims alike.
Controllers monitor the flow of vehicular and pedestrian traffic at one of the many centers throughout the pilgrimage route.
Located in an arid part of the country with little rainfall, Makkah in the past was reliant on a limited supply of subterranean water accessed through wells. To meet the growing city's needs, a pipeline was built to transport water from desalination plants at Shuaybah on the Red Sea.
The lives of the people of Makkah are almost exclusively dedicated to the service of the Holy Mosque and the millions of people who visit it each year. Serving as guides, interpreters and hosts, they provide a range of vital services. They provide accommodations, food and water. They ensure that those in need of medical care receive it promptly, and pilgrims who get lost in the mass of humanity are reunited with their groups. Fire-fighting and other emergency services are manned by trained personnel around the clock.
The greatest concentration of pilgrims, particularly from abroad, at any one time in Makkah occurs during the Hajj. Preparations for the Hajj begin months before the actual pilgrimage and keep the people of Makkah busy for most of the year. After the Hajj is over, the work continues for months. The city and the pilgrimage sites need to be cleaned and prepared, provisions replenished and machinery and equipment checked and maintained. Tens of thousands of sheep sacrificed at the conclusion of the pilgrimage are processed at factories and over the coming months are distributed worldwide among the needy, including victims of famine and natural disasters.
While the Hajj is the focal point of life in Makkah, the city's inhabitants are kept busy serving a steady stream of worshippers throughout the year. Millions of Muslims annually conduct Umrah, the minor pilgrimage to Makkah which can be performed at any time of the year outside the Hajj season. Coming from around the world, these pilgrims need the same services as those who visit the city to perform Hajj.
Helping the vast crowd of pilgrims move through the pilgrimage sites, such as the Mount of Mercy (above), requires extensive preparation, planning and organization, as well as some one-on-one guidance (below).
Additionally, during the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims dedicate their lives to fasting and prayer, large numbers of worshippers gather at the Holy Mosque. On the night of Laylat Al-Qadr, which fell on February 5 this year, more than two million worshippers gathered in the Holy Mosque to pray. Laylat Al-Qadr marks the night on which the Holy Qur'an was first revealed to the Prophet Muhammad and is considered especially holy to Muslims.
Thus the people of Makkah spend the whole year in the service of "the guests of God." The vast expansion of the city and the efficient services provided to the pilgrims reflect Saudi Arabia's dedication to the service of Islam and the pilgrims to the Holy Mosques. King Fahd emphasized that commitment earlier this year when he stated: "The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, its government and its people, honored to serve the Two Holy Mosques and the pilgrims to them, and ever mindful of enabling the guests of God to perform their rituals in line with the teachings of the Holy Qur'an and the Sunnah (teachings and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad), will spare no effort in the service of Islam and Muslims throughout the world."
Al-Madinah Al Munawwarah
This year, as they have for more than fourteen centuries, Muslims from across the world performed the Hajj, the pilgrimage to the Holy Mosque in Makkah. The standing at Arafat, the most important day of the Hajj, fell on April 6. Although the rituals of the Hajj are exclusively performed in and around Makkah, most of the more than two million Muslims who complete them also undertake a pilgrimage to Madinah.
The Prophet's Mosque dominates the Madinah skyline. King Fahd, who oversaw the latest expansion of the mosque, wrote an inscription on the base of the last of the 23-foot brass crescents that top its six new minarets
For the world's more than one billion Muslims, the Hajj is one of the five pillars of Islam. It is the spiritual high point of a Muslim's life to visit the Ka'abah, the House of God, in the Holy Mosque, towards which Muslims around the globe face to pray five times a day. On the other hand, Muslims are drawn to Madinah, not as a religious duty as in the case of Makkah, but out of love and respect for God's last Prophet. For it is in this city that the Prophet Muhammad established the first Islamic community, spent the last years of his life, and where he and many of his companions are buried.
Known by more than 90 names that generally denote respect and devotion, the city is most commonly called Madinah (city), short for Madinah Al-Nabi (City of the Prophet) or Al-Madinah Al-Munawwarah (the Radiant or Enlightened City), a reference to its association with the Prophet.
Although Madinah came to prominence with the introduction of Islam, its roots date back hundreds of years into the pre-Islamic era when it was known as Yathrib. Situated on a plain with aquifers fed by runoff from the surrounding hills, the city had abundant water supplies that fed vast date palms and vegetable gardens. The availability of food and water made Madinah an important reprovisioning point for caravans that plied the commercial routes from the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula along the Red Sea to Syria and Egypt. Its inhabitants sold food to these passing caravans and, over time, became involved in trade.
Yathrib may have languished in relative anonymity were it not for events that took place in Makkah, more than 200 miles to the south, at the turn of the seventh century AD. What was taking place in Makkah would not only transform Yathrib, but also much of the known world.
Unlike Yathrib and other oasis settlements that relied on agriculture, Makkah's primary significance was as a pilgrimage site. Large numbers of people visited the Ka'abah, the House of God built by the Prophet Abraham. However, at this time monotheism had been swept aside, and the Ka'abah housed numerous idols belonging to the inhabitants of Makkah and nearby tribes.
It was against this backdrop that the Prophet Muhammad was born in 570 AD in Makkah and received the first verses of the Holy Qur'an in the year 610. Based on the worship of God, the absolute and single Creator, Islam rejected the idolatry that was prevalent in Makkah at the time. As such, Islam was viewed as a threat to the livelihood and power base of the ruling tribe of Makkah, and its growing number of followers were harassed, persecuted and threatened.
During this period, leaders of Yathrib, familiar with the Prophet Muhammad's reputation for honesty and sincerity, had sent envoys asking that he mediate a dispute between two powerful tribes. Impressed by the Prophet's character and teachings, these envoys soon accepted Islam and were followed by other converts. Observing the growing threat to their fellow Muslims in Makkah, the people of Yathrib offered a safe haven to them, and beginning in 620 AD, the Prophet Muhammad started sending groups of Muslims to live in Yathrib.
Having learned of a plot to murder him, the Prophet Muhammad himself left Makkah for Yathrib, arriving in the city in September 622. This event is known as the Hijrah (emigration). The Prophet's arrival in Yathrib was a turning point in world history. It marked the establishment of the first Islamic state and the rapid growth of the new faith. From then on, the city became Madinah Al-Nabi, and the date of the Prophet's arrival there marked the first year of the Islamic calendar.
The second-holiest site in Islam, the Prophet's Mosque in Madinah contains the chamber in which the Prophet Muhammad is buried.
With the emigration, Madinah became a center of activity. Upon his approach to the oasis in 622, the Prophet established the first mosque in Islam at Quba, a village on the outskirts of Madinah. Called Masjid Al-Taqwa (Mosque of Piety), the mosque still stands, albeit modernized and enlarged.
Once settled in Madinah, the Prophet built another mosque adjacent to his house. Called Masjid Al-Nabawi (the Prophet's Mosque), the first structure on today's site was a simple one supported by the trunks of standing palm trees, and was built by the Prophet himself. It was this mosque at which the Prophet and his companions prayed, and which soon became the social and economic center of the city and the Islamic state. With the growth of Islam, more mosques were established throughout the city and its environs.
The first eight years of the Hijrah were spent strengthening the ummah (Islamic community) in Madinah and in warding off the aggression of the armies sent from Makkah. In the eighth year of the Hijrah, 630 AD, the Prophet and his followers entered Makkah without bloodshed. He ordered the removal of all idols from the Ka'abah, and within weeks all inhabitants of Makkah had accepted Islam. He returned to Makkah in 632 for his final pilgrimage, the rituals of which are followed by all Muslims who have since performed the Hajj.
While the Holy Mosque in Makkah was the spiritual center of Islam, Madinah became the administrative hub of the new Islamic state during the Prophet Muhammad's lifetime. It was from here that the successful campaign to convince the tribes to abandon idolatry was waged.
It was also in Madinah that the Prophet's companions compiled the verses of the Holy Qur'an and collected the Hadith (teachings and sayings of the Prophet) that would serve as the basis of Shari'ah (Islamic law).
And it was also in Madinah that the Prophet died on June 8, 632, and where he was buried in his house adjoining the mosque he had helped build with his own hands.
The Quba Mosque (left) and the Qiblatain Mosque (right) are two of the oldest in the world.
After his death, the first three caliphs, Abu Bakr Al-Siddiq, Omar Ibn Al-Khattab and Othman Ibn Affan, continued to administer from Madinah the expanding Islamic nation, which had by now spread to Persia and Syria. In time, Abu Bakr and Omar were buried in a separate chamber next to the Prophet. Othman and several members of the Prophet's immediate family were buried at the nearby Baqi' Cemetery.
The administrative and political demands of a growing empire, one that over the next hundred years would reach from Spain and Morocco in the west through the Middle East, to the Indian Subcontinent and beyond in the east, forced subsequent Islamic leaders to move their capital away from Madinah.
Although its political and commercial fortunes declined in the following centuries, the City of the Prophet continued to hold a special place in the hearts of Muslims. The small mosque the Prophet had established next to his house was enlarged by various Muslim rulers over time and continued to draw pilgrims from around the world as Islam's second holiest site.
Yet the instability and turmoil that had gripped the Arabian Peninsula in recent centuries made the pilgrimage to Makkah and Madinah a demanding and often dangerous undertaking, with the result that the number of Muslims visiting the holy sites each year seldom exceeded 40,000, even into the early part of this century.
In 1926 a defining event took place that made the City of the Prophet more accessible to Muslims and also changed the fortunes of its inhabitants. In that year, King Abdul Aziz Ibn Abdul Rahman Al-Saud extended his protection to Makkah and Madinah in his effort to unify the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula. In 1932 he accomplished his goal and founded the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
King Abdul Aziz's rule brought an immediate end to the turmoil and instability that prevailed in the peninsula. For the first time in 13 centuries, pilgrims and merchants could travel safely to the holy cities and, indeed, anywhere else in the Kingdom, without concern for their lives and property.
As the Kingdom entered a new era of development, which began after the end of World War II, it started building roads, ports and airports throughout the country, further facilitating travel to Makkah and Madinah.
With the attention lavished by King Abdul Aziz and his successors on the holy cities, Madinah blossomed, undergoing a veritable transformation. Whereas once only the adventurous dared undertake a journey to the city, the trip became safe and secure, and could now be completed with little anxiety. With the arrival of more pilgrims from across Saudi Arabia and the globe King Abdul Aziz realized that the Prophet's Mosque was in dire need of expansion.
The original mosque, built with mud bricks and tree trunks in 622, covered an area of 8,661 square feet. The caliphs Omar and Othman expanded the mosque in 638 and 650, respectively. Further expansions were undertaken in the early and late parts of the eighth century AD. By this time, the rooms in which the Prophet and his companions Abu Bakr and Omar were buried were incorporated into the mosque and a dome had been built over the rooms.
For eleven centuries no major additional improvements were made to the mosque, although various Muslim rulers funded renovation work and endowments for the mosque's operations and upkeep. The last expansion before the modern era was completed in 1849 by Sultan Abdul Majid the Second, bringing the mosque's total area to a little more than 120,000 square feet.
In 1950, Saudi Arabia undertook the largest expansion project the mosque had ever witnessed. It more than doubled the size of the complex to accommodate the ever-increasing number of Muslims visiting the site, which grew steadily year by year, reaching more than 100,000 in 1955.
The establishment of a modern infrastructure and improved accommodations for visitors saw the number of pilgrims to Makkah and Madinah increase rapidly beginning in the 1960s. By 1970, the number of pilgrims had reached one million. In 1973, King Faisal Ibn Abdul Aziz ordered that the west side of the mosque be shaded from the sun. Although this project increased the area in which visitors to the mosque could pray, it was only a temporary solution.
A more permanent arrangement for the mosque was needed. A panel of experts headed by the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Fahd Ibn Abdul Aziz launched a three-year study to formulate plans for a major expansion of the mosque. Once the plans were approved and preparations completed, construction began in earnest in 1985.
The project would take seven years of continuous work. Once completed in 1992, it expanded the mosque's area approximately 15-fold to 1.78 million square feet, allowing more than 700,000 visitors to pray simultaneously.
A similar expansion project for the Holy Mosque in Makkah, undertaken concurrently with that for the Prophet's Mosque, more than doubled its size, allowing more than one million worshippers. The implementation of these two projects would cost more than 70 billion Saudi riyals (18.66 billion U.S. dollars).
The expansion project for the Prophet's Mosque involved new buildings on three sides of the existing structure, and a vast courtyard surrounding it paved with marble and inlaid with geometric Islamic designs. The new buildings provide extensive roofed prayer areas. Within the new structure there are also 27 courtyards open to the sky. In inclement weather concrete domes slide into place to cover these courtyards. Two larger, open courtyards each have six mechanized, retractable umbrellas that are opened or closed depending on the weather.
Retractable umbrellas (top) and domes (above) in the Prophet's Mosque are opened or closed electronically depending on the weather.
The retractable domes and umbrellas, as well as the other electrical and mechanical systems in the complex, are monitored and controlled from the computerized automation center in the basement. This center also controls the air conditioning system, one of the largest and most innovative of its kind. Located at a plant 4.3 miles away, the system pumps 17,000 gallons of chilled water per minute through pipes into the basement of the mosque, where it is used to cool air circulating throughout the complex.
The expansion project added six new minarets to the mosque's four existing ones. Each of the new minarets is 360 feet high, topped by a 23-foot brass crescent weighing close to five tons.
Several kinds of marble and granite were used to build the vast, open courtyard plaza that surrounds the new structure. Lights mounted on marble and brass pillars illuminate the entire area at night.
With the completion of the expansion project, the Prophet's Mosque can easily accommodate the more than two million worshippers that congregate around the Hajj season and visit throughout the year.
As the mosque has expanded in recent decades, so has the city that surrounds it. The City of the Prophet is no longer the small town enclosed by walls that it was at the turn of the century. Today, it is a vibrant city of half a million people where the old and the new blend in harmony, complementing each other. The religious and historic sites in and around the city have been preserved and renovated to allow visitors to appreciate their role in the history of the Kingdom and Islam.
At the same time, new amenities and services have been established to facilitate the city's social and physical growth. As Madinah slowly expanded in every direction, the provision of adequate water supplies was a primary concern. The Kingdom addressed this issue not only by tapping the aquifers that have traditionally supplied the city with water, but also by laying massive pipes to bring in water from desalination plants along the Red Sea. These projects have met all the city's water requirements. Furthermore, water recycling has allowed the city to establish more than 60 major parks and playgrounds where residents and their families can relax and take refuge from the heat.
An employee (top) of the King Fahd Holy Qur'an Printing Complex checks a page from the Holy Book prior to publishing. Over the past half century Madinah (above) has been transformed into a modern urban center.
Once only accessible by caravan trails, the city is now an integral part of the network of modern highways and roads that connect all major urban centers in the Kingdom. An airport established seven miles northeast of the city connects the City of the Prophet to other cities in the Kingdom as well as the world.
For the past 14 centuries, Madinah has been a center of learning, attracting Islamic scholars and students from around the world. Today, a vast, modern educational structure consisting of hundreds of elementary, intermediate and secondary schools enrolls the city's young. Moreover, the Islamic University, established in 1966, draws thousands of students from Madinah, other parts of the Kingdom and more than 100 countries around the world.
In 1985, King Fahd inaugurated a unique complex near Madinah. The King Fahd Holy Qur'an Printing Complex was built on over 37 acres of land to produce high-quality copies of the Holy Book in large numbers. Employing some 1,500 scholars, artists and technicians, the facility now produces more than 14 million copies of the Holy Qur'an in Arabic and six other major languages, as well as 200,000 sets of audio cassettes of the Holy Book each year. These are distributed free to visitors to the two holy mosques and are donated to mosques, religious institutions, schools and universities in the Kingdom. Millions of copies of the Holy Qur'an are also donated each year to mosques and Islamic centers throughout the world.
Madinah also boasts a modern health care network of nine major hospitals and 76 health care centers, which provide services to residents as well as religious pilgrims. During the Hajj season, numerous temporary health centers are set up to ensure that permanent facilities are not over- burdened and quality care is available to all in need.
A state-of-the-art telecommunications system that supports both land and mobile telephones, computers and facsimile and telex machines is maintained by the Ministry of Posts, Telegraphs and Telephones for residents and visitors.
An ancient oasis, Madinah continues to cultivate extensive gardens and farms that produce a variety of dates and vegetables.
Like the city itself, Madinah's traditional date farms and vegetable gardens have also prospered. Of the 500 varieties of dates produced in the Kingdom, some 120 are cultivated here. Indeed, some of the most popular varieties, including the Ajwa, are grown primarily in the date groves surrounding the city.
While the lives of the people of Madinah continue to revolve around the Prophet's Mosque, and in the service of its visitors, the city's inhabitants now support a dynamic business and commercial sector. Thousands of new stores and shops have been established in recent decades to cater to the needs of visitors and inhabitants alike.
In the latter part of the twentieth century, Madinah has evolved into a modern urban center while retaining its strong religious and cultural values.
The Prophet's Mosque dominates the Madinah skyline. King Fahd, who oversaw the latest expansion of the mosque, wrote an inscription on the base of the last of the 23-foot brass crescents that top its six new minarets
For the world's more than one billion Muslims, the Hajj is one of the five pillars of Islam. It is the spiritual high point of a Muslim's life to visit the Ka'abah, the House of God, in the Holy Mosque, towards which Muslims around the globe face to pray five times a day. On the other hand, Muslims are drawn to Madinah, not as a religious duty as in the case of Makkah, but out of love and respect for God's last Prophet. For it is in this city that the Prophet Muhammad established the first Islamic community, spent the last years of his life, and where he and many of his companions are buried.
Known by more than 90 names that generally denote respect and devotion, the city is most commonly called Madinah (city), short for Madinah Al-Nabi (City of the Prophet) or Al-Madinah Al-Munawwarah (the Radiant or Enlightened City), a reference to its association with the Prophet.
Although Madinah came to prominence with the introduction of Islam, its roots date back hundreds of years into the pre-Islamic era when it was known as Yathrib. Situated on a plain with aquifers fed by runoff from the surrounding hills, the city had abundant water supplies that fed vast date palms and vegetable gardens. The availability of food and water made Madinah an important reprovisioning point for caravans that plied the commercial routes from the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula along the Red Sea to Syria and Egypt. Its inhabitants sold food to these passing caravans and, over time, became involved in trade.
Yathrib may have languished in relative anonymity were it not for events that took place in Makkah, more than 200 miles to the south, at the turn of the seventh century AD. What was taking place in Makkah would not only transform Yathrib, but also much of the known world.
Unlike Yathrib and other oasis settlements that relied on agriculture, Makkah's primary significance was as a pilgrimage site. Large numbers of people visited the Ka'abah, the House of God built by the Prophet Abraham. However, at this time monotheism had been swept aside, and the Ka'abah housed numerous idols belonging to the inhabitants of Makkah and nearby tribes.
It was against this backdrop that the Prophet Muhammad was born in 570 AD in Makkah and received the first verses of the Holy Qur'an in the year 610. Based on the worship of God, the absolute and single Creator, Islam rejected the idolatry that was prevalent in Makkah at the time. As such, Islam was viewed as a threat to the livelihood and power base of the ruling tribe of Makkah, and its growing number of followers were harassed, persecuted and threatened.
During this period, leaders of Yathrib, familiar with the Prophet Muhammad's reputation for honesty and sincerity, had sent envoys asking that he mediate a dispute between two powerful tribes. Impressed by the Prophet's character and teachings, these envoys soon accepted Islam and were followed by other converts. Observing the growing threat to their fellow Muslims in Makkah, the people of Yathrib offered a safe haven to them, and beginning in 620 AD, the Prophet Muhammad started sending groups of Muslims to live in Yathrib.
Having learned of a plot to murder him, the Prophet Muhammad himself left Makkah for Yathrib, arriving in the city in September 622. This event is known as the Hijrah (emigration). The Prophet's arrival in Yathrib was a turning point in world history. It marked the establishment of the first Islamic state and the rapid growth of the new faith. From then on, the city became Madinah Al-Nabi, and the date of the Prophet's arrival there marked the first year of the Islamic calendar.
The second-holiest site in Islam, the Prophet's Mosque in Madinah contains the chamber in which the Prophet Muhammad is buried.
With the emigration, Madinah became a center of activity. Upon his approach to the oasis in 622, the Prophet established the first mosque in Islam at Quba, a village on the outskirts of Madinah. Called Masjid Al-Taqwa (Mosque of Piety), the mosque still stands, albeit modernized and enlarged.
Once settled in Madinah, the Prophet built another mosque adjacent to his house. Called Masjid Al-Nabawi (the Prophet's Mosque), the first structure on today's site was a simple one supported by the trunks of standing palm trees, and was built by the Prophet himself. It was this mosque at which the Prophet and his companions prayed, and which soon became the social and economic center of the city and the Islamic state. With the growth of Islam, more mosques were established throughout the city and its environs.
The first eight years of the Hijrah were spent strengthening the ummah (Islamic community) in Madinah and in warding off the aggression of the armies sent from Makkah. In the eighth year of the Hijrah, 630 AD, the Prophet and his followers entered Makkah without bloodshed. He ordered the removal of all idols from the Ka'abah, and within weeks all inhabitants of Makkah had accepted Islam. He returned to Makkah in 632 for his final pilgrimage, the rituals of which are followed by all Muslims who have since performed the Hajj.
While the Holy Mosque in Makkah was the spiritual center of Islam, Madinah became the administrative hub of the new Islamic state during the Prophet Muhammad's lifetime. It was from here that the successful campaign to convince the tribes to abandon idolatry was waged.
It was also in Madinah that the Prophet's companions compiled the verses of the Holy Qur'an and collected the Hadith (teachings and sayings of the Prophet) that would serve as the basis of Shari'ah (Islamic law).
And it was also in Madinah that the Prophet died on June 8, 632, and where he was buried in his house adjoining the mosque he had helped build with his own hands.
The Quba Mosque (left) and the Qiblatain Mosque (right) are two of the oldest in the world.
After his death, the first three caliphs, Abu Bakr Al-Siddiq, Omar Ibn Al-Khattab and Othman Ibn Affan, continued to administer from Madinah the expanding Islamic nation, which had by now spread to Persia and Syria. In time, Abu Bakr and Omar were buried in a separate chamber next to the Prophet. Othman and several members of the Prophet's immediate family were buried at the nearby Baqi' Cemetery.
The administrative and political demands of a growing empire, one that over the next hundred years would reach from Spain and Morocco in the west through the Middle East, to the Indian Subcontinent and beyond in the east, forced subsequent Islamic leaders to move their capital away from Madinah.
Although its political and commercial fortunes declined in the following centuries, the City of the Prophet continued to hold a special place in the hearts of Muslims. The small mosque the Prophet had established next to his house was enlarged by various Muslim rulers over time and continued to draw pilgrims from around the world as Islam's second holiest site.
Yet the instability and turmoil that had gripped the Arabian Peninsula in recent centuries made the pilgrimage to Makkah and Madinah a demanding and often dangerous undertaking, with the result that the number of Muslims visiting the holy sites each year seldom exceeded 40,000, even into the early part of this century.
In 1926 a defining event took place that made the City of the Prophet more accessible to Muslims and also changed the fortunes of its inhabitants. In that year, King Abdul Aziz Ibn Abdul Rahman Al-Saud extended his protection to Makkah and Madinah in his effort to unify the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula. In 1932 he accomplished his goal and founded the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
King Abdul Aziz's rule brought an immediate end to the turmoil and instability that prevailed in the peninsula. For the first time in 13 centuries, pilgrims and merchants could travel safely to the holy cities and, indeed, anywhere else in the Kingdom, without concern for their lives and property.
As the Kingdom entered a new era of development, which began after the end of World War II, it started building roads, ports and airports throughout the country, further facilitating travel to Makkah and Madinah.
With the attention lavished by King Abdul Aziz and his successors on the holy cities, Madinah blossomed, undergoing a veritable transformation. Whereas once only the adventurous dared undertake a journey to the city, the trip became safe and secure, and could now be completed with little anxiety. With the arrival of more pilgrims from across Saudi Arabia and the globe King Abdul Aziz realized that the Prophet's Mosque was in dire need of expansion.
The original mosque, built with mud bricks and tree trunks in 622, covered an area of 8,661 square feet. The caliphs Omar and Othman expanded the mosque in 638 and 650, respectively. Further expansions were undertaken in the early and late parts of the eighth century AD. By this time, the rooms in which the Prophet and his companions Abu Bakr and Omar were buried were incorporated into the mosque and a dome had been built over the rooms.
For eleven centuries no major additional improvements were made to the mosque, although various Muslim rulers funded renovation work and endowments for the mosque's operations and upkeep. The last expansion before the modern era was completed in 1849 by Sultan Abdul Majid the Second, bringing the mosque's total area to a little more than 120,000 square feet.
In 1950, Saudi Arabia undertook the largest expansion project the mosque had ever witnessed. It more than doubled the size of the complex to accommodate the ever-increasing number of Muslims visiting the site, which grew steadily year by year, reaching more than 100,000 in 1955.
The establishment of a modern infrastructure and improved accommodations for visitors saw the number of pilgrims to Makkah and Madinah increase rapidly beginning in the 1960s. By 1970, the number of pilgrims had reached one million. In 1973, King Faisal Ibn Abdul Aziz ordered that the west side of the mosque be shaded from the sun. Although this project increased the area in which visitors to the mosque could pray, it was only a temporary solution.
A more permanent arrangement for the mosque was needed. A panel of experts headed by the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Fahd Ibn Abdul Aziz launched a three-year study to formulate plans for a major expansion of the mosque. Once the plans were approved and preparations completed, construction began in earnest in 1985.
The project would take seven years of continuous work. Once completed in 1992, it expanded the mosque's area approximately 15-fold to 1.78 million square feet, allowing more than 700,000 visitors to pray simultaneously.
A similar expansion project for the Holy Mosque in Makkah, undertaken concurrently with that for the Prophet's Mosque, more than doubled its size, allowing more than one million worshippers. The implementation of these two projects would cost more than 70 billion Saudi riyals (18.66 billion U.S. dollars).
The expansion project for the Prophet's Mosque involved new buildings on three sides of the existing structure, and a vast courtyard surrounding it paved with marble and inlaid with geometric Islamic designs. The new buildings provide extensive roofed prayer areas. Within the new structure there are also 27 courtyards open to the sky. In inclement weather concrete domes slide into place to cover these courtyards. Two larger, open courtyards each have six mechanized, retractable umbrellas that are opened or closed depending on the weather.
Retractable umbrellas (top) and domes (above) in the Prophet's Mosque are opened or closed electronically depending on the weather.
The retractable domes and umbrellas, as well as the other electrical and mechanical systems in the complex, are monitored and controlled from the computerized automation center in the basement. This center also controls the air conditioning system, one of the largest and most innovative of its kind. Located at a plant 4.3 miles away, the system pumps 17,000 gallons of chilled water per minute through pipes into the basement of the mosque, where it is used to cool air circulating throughout the complex.
The expansion project added six new minarets to the mosque's four existing ones. Each of the new minarets is 360 feet high, topped by a 23-foot brass crescent weighing close to five tons.
Several kinds of marble and granite were used to build the vast, open courtyard plaza that surrounds the new structure. Lights mounted on marble and brass pillars illuminate the entire area at night.
With the completion of the expansion project, the Prophet's Mosque can easily accommodate the more than two million worshippers that congregate around the Hajj season and visit throughout the year.
As the mosque has expanded in recent decades, so has the city that surrounds it. The City of the Prophet is no longer the small town enclosed by walls that it was at the turn of the century. Today, it is a vibrant city of half a million people where the old and the new blend in harmony, complementing each other. The religious and historic sites in and around the city have been preserved and renovated to allow visitors to appreciate their role in the history of the Kingdom and Islam.
At the same time, new amenities and services have been established to facilitate the city's social and physical growth. As Madinah slowly expanded in every direction, the provision of adequate water supplies was a primary concern. The Kingdom addressed this issue not only by tapping the aquifers that have traditionally supplied the city with water, but also by laying massive pipes to bring in water from desalination plants along the Red Sea. These projects have met all the city's water requirements. Furthermore, water recycling has allowed the city to establish more than 60 major parks and playgrounds where residents and their families can relax and take refuge from the heat.
An employee (top) of the King Fahd Holy Qur'an Printing Complex checks a page from the Holy Book prior to publishing. Over the past half century Madinah (above) has been transformed into a modern urban center.
Once only accessible by caravan trails, the city is now an integral part of the network of modern highways and roads that connect all major urban centers in the Kingdom. An airport established seven miles northeast of the city connects the City of the Prophet to other cities in the Kingdom as well as the world.
For the past 14 centuries, Madinah has been a center of learning, attracting Islamic scholars and students from around the world. Today, a vast, modern educational structure consisting of hundreds of elementary, intermediate and secondary schools enrolls the city's young. Moreover, the Islamic University, established in 1966, draws thousands of students from Madinah, other parts of the Kingdom and more than 100 countries around the world.
In 1985, King Fahd inaugurated a unique complex near Madinah. The King Fahd Holy Qur'an Printing Complex was built on over 37 acres of land to produce high-quality copies of the Holy Book in large numbers. Employing some 1,500 scholars, artists and technicians, the facility now produces more than 14 million copies of the Holy Qur'an in Arabic and six other major languages, as well as 200,000 sets of audio cassettes of the Holy Book each year. These are distributed free to visitors to the two holy mosques and are donated to mosques, religious institutions, schools and universities in the Kingdom. Millions of copies of the Holy Qur'an are also donated each year to mosques and Islamic centers throughout the world.
Madinah also boasts a modern health care network of nine major hospitals and 76 health care centers, which provide services to residents as well as religious pilgrims. During the Hajj season, numerous temporary health centers are set up to ensure that permanent facilities are not over- burdened and quality care is available to all in need.
A state-of-the-art telecommunications system that supports both land and mobile telephones, computers and facsimile and telex machines is maintained by the Ministry of Posts, Telegraphs and Telephones for residents and visitors.
An ancient oasis, Madinah continues to cultivate extensive gardens and farms that produce a variety of dates and vegetables.
Like the city itself, Madinah's traditional date farms and vegetable gardens have also prospered. Of the 500 varieties of dates produced in the Kingdom, some 120 are cultivated here. Indeed, some of the most popular varieties, including the Ajwa, are grown primarily in the date groves surrounding the city.
While the lives of the people of Madinah continue to revolve around the Prophet's Mosque, and in the service of its visitors, the city's inhabitants now support a dynamic business and commercial sector. Thousands of new stores and shops have been established in recent decades to cater to the needs of visitors and inhabitants alike.
In the latter part of the twentieth century, Madinah has evolved into a modern urban center while retaining its strong religious and cultural values.
Idris Bakri
From: Idris Bakri bakrii@mustard.ee.byu.edu
In The Name of Allah, the Most Beneficient, the Most Merciful
Glorified be He Who took His servant (Muhammad) for a journey by night
from Al-Masjid Al Haram (at Mecca) to the Al-Aqsa Mosque (in
Jerusalem), the neighborhood whereof We have blessed, in order that We
might show him some of Our signs. Verily, He is the All-Hearer, the
All-Seer. The Qur'an 17:1.
With these eternal verses, Allah (God), stated in the heart of
the Muslim scripture, the Qur'an, the never diminishing significance
of Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem to Islam and Muslims. Al-Aqsa, right in
the heart of the Muslim world, is to where our prophet Muhammad (peace
and blessings be unto him) journeyed at night in a miraculous manner
from the city of Mecca, where his call to Islam (submission to God)
was still in its earliest stages. At Al-Aqsa Mosque, he led all of the
prophets of Allah that came before him in prayer and then ascended to
heaven to receive Allah's command to the Muslims to pray five times a
day.
Eversince, Al-Aqsa Mosque and the city of Jerusalem have been very
special to Muslims all over the world. They pray for it and long to
pray in it. And today, with Al-Aqsa being under the Israeli occupation
for thirty years, all Muslims pray for its liberation and for the
freedom of their Palestinian brothers, who have become the soldiers at
the front line of the battle to redeem Al-Aqsa.
Occupation, burning, successive agression, closure and martyr after
martyr have become Al-Aqsa'a story in the last thirty years. Al-Aqsa
is really a deep wound right in the heart of the Muslim world. In
today's unfair reality and materialistic world, Al-Aqsa has become a
symbol of the undesired existence of the trouble-making Palestinians,
Arabs and Muslims (so they say!).
No wonder then, that when the dream of a historical parasite of
opening a tunnel to undermine the foundation of Al-Aqsa Mosque finds
its way to reality, Palestinians of all ages and all beliefs spring to
the rescue. They are Muslim Palestinians defending their very basic
right of existence. Some are Christian Palestinians, also, fighting
for the Muslim shrine. Al-Aqsa is more than a building with historical
and religious significance, it is an idea, a creed even, that we all
have to stand up for what is right and true.
Muslims love Al-Aqsa, pray for it, fight for it and die for it
because, as they see it, they are fighting for the promise of a new
and higher reality. A reality of peace, justice and mutual
respect. This promised reality is not an imaginary one. It did exist
when the Muslims liberated Al-Aqsa from the European Crusaders,
allowing them to evacuate Jerusalem peacefully with their belongings
and families. This was the Muslims' response to the brutality of the
Crusaders when they massacred the Arab inhabitants of Jerusalem,
Muslims and Christians alike.
It is in this spirit of a higher reality, that we can understand why
Palestinian soldiers were carrying a wounded Israeli soldier, and were
trying to get him to the closest medical team. This was their response
to the brutality of the Israeli military machine, which did not
hesitate to deploy helicopters against unarmed civilians, trying to
kill them and to kill their dream, of freeing Al-Aqsa Mosque.
We will continue to believe in Islam's message and its symbol,
Al-Aqsa. We can see our promised reality of peace and justice to all,
in the eyes of the innocent Palestinian children, as they die for
Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Idris El Bakri
Jerusalem, Palestine
Muslim Student Association
Brigham Young University
In The Name of Allah, the Most Beneficient, the Most Merciful
Glorified be He Who took His servant (Muhammad) for a journey by night
from Al-Masjid Al Haram (at Mecca) to the Al-Aqsa Mosque (in
Jerusalem), the neighborhood whereof We have blessed, in order that We
might show him some of Our signs. Verily, He is the All-Hearer, the
All-Seer. The Qur'an 17:1.
With these eternal verses, Allah (God), stated in the heart of
the Muslim scripture, the Qur'an, the never diminishing significance
of Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem to Islam and Muslims. Al-Aqsa, right in
the heart of the Muslim world, is to where our prophet Muhammad (peace
and blessings be unto him) journeyed at night in a miraculous manner
from the city of Mecca, where his call to Islam (submission to God)
was still in its earliest stages. At Al-Aqsa Mosque, he led all of the
prophets of Allah that came before him in prayer and then ascended to
heaven to receive Allah's command to the Muslims to pray five times a
day.
Eversince, Al-Aqsa Mosque and the city of Jerusalem have been very
special to Muslims all over the world. They pray for it and long to
pray in it. And today, with Al-Aqsa being under the Israeli occupation
for thirty years, all Muslims pray for its liberation and for the
freedom of their Palestinian brothers, who have become the soldiers at
the front line of the battle to redeem Al-Aqsa.
Occupation, burning, successive agression, closure and martyr after
martyr have become Al-Aqsa'a story in the last thirty years. Al-Aqsa
is really a deep wound right in the heart of the Muslim world. In
today's unfair reality and materialistic world, Al-Aqsa has become a
symbol of the undesired existence of the trouble-making Palestinians,
Arabs and Muslims (so they say!).
No wonder then, that when the dream of a historical parasite of
opening a tunnel to undermine the foundation of Al-Aqsa Mosque finds
its way to reality, Palestinians of all ages and all beliefs spring to
the rescue. They are Muslim Palestinians defending their very basic
right of existence. Some are Christian Palestinians, also, fighting
for the Muslim shrine. Al-Aqsa is more than a building with historical
and religious significance, it is an idea, a creed even, that we all
have to stand up for what is right and true.
Muslims love Al-Aqsa, pray for it, fight for it and die for it
because, as they see it, they are fighting for the promise of a new
and higher reality. A reality of peace, justice and mutual
respect. This promised reality is not an imaginary one. It did exist
when the Muslims liberated Al-Aqsa from the European Crusaders,
allowing them to evacuate Jerusalem peacefully with their belongings
and families. This was the Muslims' response to the brutality of the
Crusaders when they massacred the Arab inhabitants of Jerusalem,
Muslims and Christians alike.
It is in this spirit of a higher reality, that we can understand why
Palestinian soldiers were carrying a wounded Israeli soldier, and were
trying to get him to the closest medical team. This was their response
to the brutality of the Israeli military machine, which did not
hesitate to deploy helicopters against unarmed civilians, trying to
kill them and to kill their dream, of freeing Al-Aqsa Mosque.
We will continue to believe in Islam's message and its symbol,
Al-Aqsa. We can see our promised reality of peace and justice to all,
in the eyes of the innocent Palestinian children, as they die for
Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Idris El Bakri
Jerusalem, Palestine
Muslim Student Association
Brigham Young University
The Myth of the Muslim Conquest of Spain
Dr. Abdellatif Charafi
This article is intended to be a trip in time to a very special period in world history: from the ninth to the thirteenth century in Andalusia, and more specifically in Córdoba, where a million people lived in Europe's largest city, the cultural center of that period. There existed no separation between rigorous scientific study, wisdom and faith. Nor was East separated from West; nor was the Muslim from the Jew or the Christian. It was there that the European Renaissance actually began, and from where it grew.
By examining the trajectory of Islam in Andalusia, the objective is not to praise an illustrious dead, but to reintroduce in our life the affirmation of absolute and universal values of Islam without which our society will inevitably disintegrate.
The Myth of the Muslim Conquest of Spain
More than five hundreds years have elapsed since Islam was irradicated from Spain. The event was celebrated in grandeur at Expo '92 in Seville, during which the organizers tried to make us believe that Spain was formed by over seven centuries of continuous struggle against Islam. But was the defeat of the Muslims on 2 January 1492 a liberation for the Spaniards? Was the reign of the Muslims a colonization of the Iberian Peninsula?
When looking at the Muslim expansion in Spain one is struck by its speed, its generally peaceful aspect and civilizational component. It took the Muslims less than three years (from 711 to 714) and one battle (at Guadalete, near Cadiz) to spread throughout the whole of Spain. In contrast to this, it took the Prophet Muhammad twenty-two years (from 610 to 632) and nineteen expeditions to get Arabia to accept Islam. This difference in both time and effort, to gain Arabia and Spain to Islam, is due to theological affinities as well as socio-cultural and politico-economical reasons which appealed to the Spaniards.
Pre-Islamic Arabia was predominantly polytheist, with small Jewish and Christian communities. There, Islam had to fight against a 'world without law' (Jahiliyya) to make monotheism prevail. Pre-Islamic Spain was Christian with important Jewish communities. This difference, according to Roger Garaudy, not only explains the speed of the expansion, but also its type.
W. Montgomery Watt in A History of Islamic Spain states:
It is a common misapprehension that the holy war meant that the Muslims gave their opponents a choice "between Islam and the sword". This was sometimes the case, but only when the opponents were polytheist and idol-worshippers. For Jews, Christians and other "People of the Book", that is, monotheists with written scriptures - a phrase that was very liberally interpreted - there was a third possibility, they might become a "protected group", paying a tax or tribute to the Muslims but enjoying internal autonomy
The case of Spain is therefore not exceptional and that is due to the very essence of Islam.
The Prophet Muhammad never pretended to create a new religion:
'Say: I am no bringer of a new-fangled doctrine among the Messenger' (45:9); and 'Nothing is said to thee that was not said to the messengers before thee' (41:43).
He came to remind the people of the Primordial Religion:
'Say ye: We believe in God, and the revelation given to us, and to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, and the tribes, and that given to Moses and Jesus, and that given to all the Prophets from their Lord: we make no difference between one and another of them: and we bow to God (in Islam).'
(2:136). Islam came to confirm the previous messages, to purify them from historical alterations to which they were subjected and to complete them. The Qur'an says:
'If thou wert in doubt as to what We have revealed unto thee, then ask those who have been reading the Book from before thee.' (10:94).
The Muslim community was then opened, without distinction to all those who believe in the unity and transcendence of God.
Besides, in the Iberian Peninsula there raged a civil war between Trinitarian Christians, who accepted the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, and Arian Christians, who saw Jesus not as God but as a Prophet inspired by God. The Council of Nicea in 325, invoked by the emperor Constantine in order to unify ideologically his empire, imposed the dogma of Trinity and condemned the teachings of Anus of Alexandria who refused these dogmas. The conflict erupted, when in 709, the Trinitarian Christians declared Roderick as king. The archbishop of Seville opposed him and the inhabitants of present Andalusia (Bétique) revolted against his rule. When Roderick invaded Andalusia, the inhabitant of the latter looked south help. The able Berber General Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed to Algeciras and a battle in Guadalete, near Cadiz took place. The Bishop of Seville as well as that of Toledo rallied to the Muslim army.
The peasants had a very difficult time, were ill-treated and reduced to the status of slaves. Poverty, corruption, ignorance and instability were the order of the day. Even the free men felt themselves to be underprivileged. There was much discontent, and many ordinary people looked on the Muslims as liberators and gave them all the assistance they could. The Jews who have been persecuted for a long time under the Visigoth rule (e.g. a special decree in 694 enslaved all those who did not accept baptism), opened the gates of many cities. So deep and widespread was the satisfaction given to all classes that during the whole of the eight century there was not a single revolt of the subjects.
It is difficult to understand how a small army could cross the whole of Spain in less than three years if one imagines a military invasion. The historian Dozy, in Histoire des Musulmans d'Espagne, describes the event as 'a good thing for Spain' which produced an important social revolution, setting the country free from the chains it was groaning under for centuries. Taxes were much less compared to those imposed by previous governments. The Muslims introduced land reforms by taking land from the rich and distributing it equally among serf-peasants and slaves. The new owners worked it with zeal. Commerce was liberated from the limitations and high taxes that caused its demise. Slaves could set themselves free in return for a fair compensation, something which threw in new energies. All these measures, says Dozy, created a state of well-being which was the reason behind the welcoming of the Muslims.
The great Spanish writer Blasco Ibanez in Dans l'ombrc de la cathédrale talks about a 'civilizational expedition' coming from the south rather than a conquest. To Ibanez, it was not an invasion imposing itself by arms, it was a new society whose vigorous roots were sprouting from everywhere. Describing the conquering Muslims, he says: 'The principle of freedom of conscience, cornerstone of the greatness of nations, was dear to them. In the cities they ruled, they accepted the church of the Christian and the synagogue of the Jew.'
History, therefore makes it clear that the legend of fanatical Muslims sweeping through Spain and forcing Islam at the point of the sword is an absurd myth. The expansion of Islam in Spain was not a military conquest, but a liberation
The Meaning of Life in Andalusia
The meaning of life and its goal in Andalusia at the time of its Islamic apogy, directed each act of day to day life, as well as scientific and technical research. The spiritual giants like the Muslims Ibn Rushd (i (1126-1198) known in the West as Averroës and Ibn Arabi (1165-1240), or the Jewish philosopher Maimonides (11351204), are some of the men who put across most brilliantly the message of Andalusia. This spirit lay behind all the scientific and technical progress of those golden centuries.
Science was not set apart from wisdom and faith, and nothing can express this fact better than Ibn Rushd when he writes:
Our philosophy would serve for nothing if it were not able to link these three things which I have tried to join in my 'Harmony of science and religion':
A Science, founded on experience and logic, to discover reasons.
A Wisdom, which reflects on the purpose of every scientific research so that it serves to make our life more beautiful.
A Revelation, that of our Qur'an, as it is only through revelation that we know the final purposes of our life and our history.
The unity of the Abrahamic tradition and the critical approach to philosophy are expressed with the same force, in the work of the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who was a contemporary of Ibn Rushd. At the synagogue before the Torah, he said:
If for Ibn Rushd the Holy Book is not our Torah but the Qur'an, we both agree about the contributions of reason and of revelation. These are two manifestations of one same divine truth. There is only a contradiction when one is faithful to a literal reading of the scriptures, forgetting about their eternal meaning.
In Andalusia, Islam takes a new dimension with Ibn 'Arabi, nicknamed Muhyi al-Din (the one who gives life to faith). What interested Ibn Arabi was not what a man said about his faith, but rather what this faith makes of that man. He states:
God is unity. The unity of love, of the lover and the beloved. Every love is a wish for union. Every love consciously or unconsciously is a love for God.
Bear witness to this presence of God within yourself, of God's creation, which never ceases. The act is the exterior manifestation of faith. Islam recognizes all the Prophets as messengers of the same God. Learn to discover in each man the seed of a desire for God, even if his belief is still dim and sometime idolatrous. Help to lead him towards the fullest Light.
Ibn Rushd endeavours to bring to light the universal message of Islam overshadowed by regional traditions, when he defines the best society as, 'That where every woman, every child and every man is given the means of developing the possibilities God has given to each of them.' The power to establish it 'will not be a theocracy, like that of the Christians of Europe, a power of religious accomplices or tyrants: God says in the Qur'an, "He has breathed into man His spirit". Let us make Him live in every man!' When asked about the conditions ofsuch a society, he answers: 'A society will be free and pleasing to God, when none acts either out of fear of the Prince or of Hell, nor the wish of a reward from a Courtesan or of Paradise, and when no-one says: This is mine.'
Islam in Andalusia gave birth to a number of spiritual giants who have shown that humanity has no future without the warmth and the spiritual values that emanate from the belief in the transcendence and oneness of God. Men such as Ibn Massara of Córdoba (883-931), for whom man was responsible of his own history; Ibn Hazm of Córdoba (994-1064) who was a pioneer of the comparative history of religions; Ibn Gabirol of Malaga (1020-1070) whose fundamental work was the synthesis of the Jewish faith and the philosophy of Ibn Massara; Ibn Bajja (1090-1139) with whom the Islamic philosophy xvas presented in a systematic way with its own direction; Ibn Tufayl from Cádiz (1100-1185) whose central theme was the relation between reason and faith.
All these men of knowledge, wisdom and faith stand as memories to a glorious past when true Islam was preached and practised; a time when the beautiful example of the Muslims won them fame and respect; a time when these peace-loving people would rise simply because injustice was being practised and would fight in the name of God with a strength that led handfuls of believers to victory over armies of non-believers.
The Style of Life in Andalusia
Andalusia was unique in terms of its tangible accomplishments in all spheres of life. Learning was emphasized, marked by a fascination with science, the Arabic literature and the philosophical discourse on reason and faith. In the world created in the land of Andalusia, there was commercial wealth, wealth in terms of consumption, and wealth of productivity and exchange. There was also a wealth of information, thanks to the libraries of Córdoba and a wealth of thinking about the meaning of life, God, and material things. And there were even poets who sang to all the ways of wealth.
We will restrict ourselves to a brief description of the scientific and technical achievement, and a more detailed account of the Mosque of Córdoba as it is one of the first monumental expressions of Muslim rule, and arguably the building that most fully embodied an image of the Muslim hegemony in Andalusia.
Scientific and Technical Achievement
When discussing the scientific development in Andalusia, one cannot separate it either from the contributions of the other great civilizations, nor from the wisdom and faith that inspired the efforts of all researchers in Andalusia: science is One because the world is One, the world is One because God is One. This principle of tawhid commanded all aspects of scientific research in Andalusia as well as in other parts of the Islamic world, at its period of apogy. The following are some of the achievements of such a philosophy of life.
The first attempt to fly was in Córdoba by Abu Abbas al-Fernass. Al-Zahrawi, born near Córdoba in 936, was one of the greatest surgeon of all times. His encyclopedia of surgery was used as a standard reference work in the subject in all universities of Europe for over five hundred years. Al-Zarqalli, who was born in Córdoba, devised the astrolabe: an instrument which is used to measure the distance of the stars above the horizon. The astrolabe made it possible to determine one s position in space and the hours of the day, to navigate and to call the faithful to prayer at the given time.
Al-Idrisi, who was born in Ceuta in 1099 and studied at Córdoba, drew maps for the King Roger II of Sicily in which he used methods of projection to pass from the spherical shape of the earth to the planisphere that were very similar to those used by Mercator four centuries later.
The agricultural and irrigation methods of the Muslims of Spain were revealed by the great Italian engineer Juanello Turriano, who came to Andalusia to study the hydraulic and agricultural techniques of eleventh century Muslim Spain to solve his problems of the sixteenth century in Italy.
The Great Mosque of Córdoba
Córdoba deserves its titles of the 'bride of the cities' and the 'jewel of the tenth century'. A city of factories and workshops, which attracted many scholars and produced her own. It was the first city with street lights in Europe. It rose to eminence as the torch of learning and civilization at a time when the Normans had savaged Paris and England had been ransacked by the Danes and Vikings. Its showpiece was its magnificent mosque, which is the most famous building of Spain after the Alhambra palace in Granada.
The foundations of the mosque were laid by Abd al-Rahman I in 785 on the site of an old Christian church. Since the time of the conquest in 711, the church had been used by both Muslims and Christians. The Muslims bought the church because of the growth of the population at that time, and not because of religious intolerance. It had been enlarged between 832-848, then in 912, and mainly in 961, by al-Hakam II, with its splendid mihrab. Al-Mansur, in 987, doubled the prayer hall which then contained 600 columns. It had already been perturbated in 1236, when Córdoba fell to Ferdinard III of Castille and chapels were inserted, and further in 1523 when a cathedral was built in the heart of the mosque. King Charles V is recorded to have remarked upon seeing the new cathedral: 'Had I known what this was, I would not have given permission to touch the old, because you are making what exists in many other places and you have unmade what was unique in the world.' As we can see it today, despite the opposition of the Spanish government to a UNESCO project to move the cathedral as it is without omitting the least detail (as the temple of Abu Simbal in Egypt was moved), the Mosque of Córdoba still reflects the image of the Muslim art at its best.
The practical problem faced by the architect of the Córdoba Mosque for the construction of a huge room for a big community, was to raise the roof of the oratory to a height proportionate to the extent of the building, so that a feeling of depression-like the one we feel when we get into an underground parking can be dispelled. The antique columns, or the building-spoils which were available, were insufficient. It was therefore necessary to supplement them, and the example of Damascus suggested arcades on two levels. But the model of Córdoba has a very surprising feature: the lower and upper arcades are no longer part of a wall, but are reduced to their pillars and arches without any intermediate masonry. The upper arches which support the roof, rest on the same pillars as the lower arches. Such a concept, without precedent in the history of architecture and unique to the Córdoba Mosque, is a real defiance to the weight and inertia of stones.
Let us say, to give a better picture of the image evoked by this architecture, that the curves of both series of arches soar like palm- fronds from the same trunk, which rests upon a relatively slender column, without the feeling of being too heavy for it. The arches with their many-coloured and fan-shaped wedge-stones have such expansive strength that they dispel any suggestion of weight. This expression in static terms of a reality which goes beyond the material plane, is due to the outline of the arches. The lower ones are drawn out beyond the shape of a pure semicircle, whereas the upper ones are more open and purely semicircular.
Many archaeologists have suggested that the composition of the arcs used by the architect of Córdoba was inspired by the Roman aqueduct in Merida. However, there is a fundamental difference between the two compositions. The Roman architect had respected the logic of the gravity, a building's support must be proportionate to the weight, thus the upper arcs must be lighter than the supporting elements. For the Córdovan architect-and more generally for all Islamic architecture-this rule does not work. Why?
To answer this question we have to move from the technical considerations, to the symbolic expression of space in the Muslim prayer, which was the most important factor preoccupying the 'Master' of Córdoba. The purpose was not to achieve an architectural exploit, but rather to create a new type of space-one that seems to be breathing and expanding outwards from an omnipresent centre. The limits of space play no role at all; the walls of the prayer hall disappear beyond a forest of arcades. Their sheer repetition (there were 900 of them in the original mosque) giving an impression of endless extension. Space is qualified here not by its boundaries but by the movement of the arcades, if one may describe it as movement. This expansion which is both powerful yet in reality immobile. Titus Burckhardt describes this as being 'a logical art, objectively static but never anthropomorphic.'
It is to al-Hakam II that we owe the marvellous mihrab, the master piece of Córdovan art, as well as the various copulas which stand before it, including their substructures, of interlacing arcades. The niche of this mihrab, which is very deep, is surrounded in its upper part by an arch, that is like an apparition and a source of light, of which the very curve seems to dilate, like a chest breathing in the air of infinity. According to the highest Muslim spirituality, beauty is one of the 'signs' which evokes the Divine Presence. The inscription above the symphony of colours, in severe Kufi script, proclaims the Oneness of God.
The Mosque of Córdoba is the embodiment of the universal message of Islam. Muhammad Iqbal in his poem A Ia mosquée de Cordoue wrote:
Oh! Holy Mosque of Córdoba
Shrine for all lovers of art
Pearl of the one true faith
Sanctifying Andalusia's soil
Like Holy Mecca itself
Such a glorious beauty
Will be found on earth
Only in a true Muslim's heart
Who Killed Islam in Andalusia
The scientific and philosophical learning of the Andalusians was channelled off beyond the Pyrenees, to irrigate the dry pastures of European intellectual life. Students from Western Europe flocked to the libraries and universities set up by the Muslims in Spain. This decisively changed the European mind, and it is no exaggeration to say that Western civilization owes its regeneration to the intellectual energy released by the dynamo that was Islam. The period of regeneration, which started in Florence in sixteenth century Italy, is referred to by the West as the Renaissance. It was a direct result of another European Renaissance which began at the university of Córdoba in ninth century Spain. This profound truth of our common history becomes clear when we know how to listen to the music of the stones of Córdoba. There is, however, a fundamental difference between the two 'renaissances': the one which started in Córdoba was based on faith and was conscious of the universality of the divine; the one which began in Florence was made against God with its essential project of secularising all aspects of life.
The reasons leading to the death of the Córdovan-type renaissance generated by Islam, can be understood best by reference to the causes of its success. Islam owed its spectacular success entirely to the teachings of the Qur'an and the example (Sunna) of the Prophet Muhammad (s). The active vigour of the system was neutralized as soon as the Muslims relegated the Qur'an to the status of a treatise on dogmas, and the Sunna became a mere system of laws and a hollow shell without any living meaning. In his Muqaddima, Ibn Khaldun condemns the methods of education practised by some of the fuqaha' of Andalusia when, he says that, instead of helping the student to 'understand the content of the book on which he is working', they force him 'to learn it by heart'.
The Maliki school of thought (madhhab) was so dominant in Andalusia to the point that no other madhahib were taught, and knowing by heart the Muwatta' of Imam Malik and its commentaries was enough to make a faqih a renowned scholar. This closure of the door of ijtihad (independent judgement), which would have been condemned by Imam Malik himself were he to witness it, was encouraged by most of the rulers of Andalusia for it implies an unconditional obedience to the established power. It led to an intellectual degeneration, the treatment to those spiritual giants mentioned before illustrates this best. Ibn Massara was forced to exile; Ibn Hazm was evicted from Majorca; al-Ghazali's books were burned; the universal library of al-Hakam II was thrown into the river; Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Rushd were expelled; and Ibn Arabi evicted. All these acts were not performed by Christians, but by fellow Muslims! These were but signs that this grand structure represented by Islam which had weathered many a storm, had reached a stage when its inner vitality had been slowly sapped away and one powerful blast might well uproot it from the soil on which it has been thriving for centuries.
The early Muslim conquerors in Spain had a mission which made it impossible for them to be selfish, cruel or intolerant. The moment this was lost on their successors, their clannish spirit replaced their unity of purpose. At one time there were as many as twelve Muslim dynasties. That was a signal for collapse. The Muslim society came to represent a decadent social order incapable of dynamic growth and with no capacity for effective resistance. Under such circumstances, it is difficult for any society to survive a serious external threat. The Muslim rule over the Iberian Peninsula started to shrink on account of the treachery of the different Muslim Princes until Granada fell to the hands of the Crusades on 2 January 1492.
When Abu Abdullah the last king of Granada, looked at the Alhambra for the last time, tears came into his eyes. At this, his aged mother Aisha said: 'Abu Abdullah Cry like a women for a kingdom you could not defend as a man.' But our history should play a more inspiring and guiding function than to reminisce about the past. When one sees all these marvels, and all these palaces left in Andalusia-one wonders: Surely, there must have been injustice, there must have been oppression. As Abu Dharr said to Mu'awiya: '0 Mu'awiya! If you are building this palace with your own money, it is extravagance and if with the money of the people, it is treason'. We should not glorify our past and our ancestors regardless of their mistakes. Our study of the history of Islam should be more objective, and not a mere justification of all acts by our predecessors.
Conclusion
We must aim to ensure that the tragedy of Andalusia is not repeated. To do that we must not address our children: Once upon a time in Palestine... Once upon a time in Bosnia... We need a true Islamic Renaissance that will lead us to the eternal and universal Islam. An Islam that is the constant appeal for resisting all oppression because it excludes any submission other than to the will of God and holds man responsible for the accomplishment of the divine order on earth. An Islam, in the words of Roger Garaudy, whose principles are:
in the economical field: God alone possesses,
in the political field: God alone commands,
in the cultural field: God alone knows.
It is for us to respond to this eternally living call: without imitating the West and without imitating the Past.
References
*The Holy Qur'an, Translated and Commented by Abdullah Yusuf Ali.
*Ibn Rushd, On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy, trans. by George F. Hourani, 1960.
*Roger Garaudy, 'For an Islam of the XXth Century', Report presented at the 1st International Conference of Muslims of Europe, Seville, 18-21 July, 1985.
*Roger Garaudy, L' Islam, en Occident, Editions l'Harmattan, 1987.
*Khola Hassan, The Crumbling Minaret of Spain, Ta- Ha Publishers, London, 1988.
*Pamphlet about the Calahora Tower in Cordoba, 1988.
*Ali Shariati, And Once Again Abu Dharr, trans. by Laleh Bakhtiar and Hussain Salih, The Abu Dharr Foundation, Tehran, I 985.
*Titus Burckhardt, Art of Islam, World of Islam
Festival Trust, London, 1976.
*J. D. Dodds (ed), Al-Andalus, The Art of Islamic Spain, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1992.
*W. Montgomery Watt, A History of Islamic Spain, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1967.
-----------------------------
[Currently, the author is a Research Associate at the School of Mathematical Studies, University of Portsmouth. He obtained his PhD in Computational Mathematics from Wessex Institute of Technology, Southampton, and a BSc in Pure Mathematics from the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Rabat, Morocco.]
This article is intended to be a trip in time to a very special period in world history: from the ninth to the thirteenth century in Andalusia, and more specifically in Córdoba, where a million people lived in Europe's largest city, the cultural center of that period. There existed no separation between rigorous scientific study, wisdom and faith. Nor was East separated from West; nor was the Muslim from the Jew or the Christian. It was there that the European Renaissance actually began, and from where it grew.
By examining the trajectory of Islam in Andalusia, the objective is not to praise an illustrious dead, but to reintroduce in our life the affirmation of absolute and universal values of Islam without which our society will inevitably disintegrate.
The Myth of the Muslim Conquest of Spain
More than five hundreds years have elapsed since Islam was irradicated from Spain. The event was celebrated in grandeur at Expo '92 in Seville, during which the organizers tried to make us believe that Spain was formed by over seven centuries of continuous struggle against Islam. But was the defeat of the Muslims on 2 January 1492 a liberation for the Spaniards? Was the reign of the Muslims a colonization of the Iberian Peninsula?
When looking at the Muslim expansion in Spain one is struck by its speed, its generally peaceful aspect and civilizational component. It took the Muslims less than three years (from 711 to 714) and one battle (at Guadalete, near Cadiz) to spread throughout the whole of Spain. In contrast to this, it took the Prophet Muhammad twenty-two years (from 610 to 632) and nineteen expeditions to get Arabia to accept Islam. This difference in both time and effort, to gain Arabia and Spain to Islam, is due to theological affinities as well as socio-cultural and politico-economical reasons which appealed to the Spaniards.
Pre-Islamic Arabia was predominantly polytheist, with small Jewish and Christian communities. There, Islam had to fight against a 'world without law' (Jahiliyya) to make monotheism prevail. Pre-Islamic Spain was Christian with important Jewish communities. This difference, according to Roger Garaudy, not only explains the speed of the expansion, but also its type.
W. Montgomery Watt in A History of Islamic Spain states:
It is a common misapprehension that the holy war meant that the Muslims gave their opponents a choice "between Islam and the sword". This was sometimes the case, but only when the opponents were polytheist and idol-worshippers. For Jews, Christians and other "People of the Book", that is, monotheists with written scriptures - a phrase that was very liberally interpreted - there was a third possibility, they might become a "protected group", paying a tax or tribute to the Muslims but enjoying internal autonomy
The case of Spain is therefore not exceptional and that is due to the very essence of Islam.
The Prophet Muhammad never pretended to create a new religion:
'Say: I am no bringer of a new-fangled doctrine among the Messenger' (45:9); and 'Nothing is said to thee that was not said to the messengers before thee' (41:43).
He came to remind the people of the Primordial Religion:
'Say ye: We believe in God, and the revelation given to us, and to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, and the tribes, and that given to Moses and Jesus, and that given to all the Prophets from their Lord: we make no difference between one and another of them: and we bow to God (in Islam).'
(2:136). Islam came to confirm the previous messages, to purify them from historical alterations to which they were subjected and to complete them. The Qur'an says:
'If thou wert in doubt as to what We have revealed unto thee, then ask those who have been reading the Book from before thee.' (10:94).
The Muslim community was then opened, without distinction to all those who believe in the unity and transcendence of God.
Besides, in the Iberian Peninsula there raged a civil war between Trinitarian Christians, who accepted the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, and Arian Christians, who saw Jesus not as God but as a Prophet inspired by God. The Council of Nicea in 325, invoked by the emperor Constantine in order to unify ideologically his empire, imposed the dogma of Trinity and condemned the teachings of Anus of Alexandria who refused these dogmas. The conflict erupted, when in 709, the Trinitarian Christians declared Roderick as king. The archbishop of Seville opposed him and the inhabitants of present Andalusia (Bétique) revolted against his rule. When Roderick invaded Andalusia, the inhabitant of the latter looked south help. The able Berber General Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed to Algeciras and a battle in Guadalete, near Cadiz took place. The Bishop of Seville as well as that of Toledo rallied to the Muslim army.
The peasants had a very difficult time, were ill-treated and reduced to the status of slaves. Poverty, corruption, ignorance and instability were the order of the day. Even the free men felt themselves to be underprivileged. There was much discontent, and many ordinary people looked on the Muslims as liberators and gave them all the assistance they could. The Jews who have been persecuted for a long time under the Visigoth rule (e.g. a special decree in 694 enslaved all those who did not accept baptism), opened the gates of many cities. So deep and widespread was the satisfaction given to all classes that during the whole of the eight century there was not a single revolt of the subjects.
It is difficult to understand how a small army could cross the whole of Spain in less than three years if one imagines a military invasion. The historian Dozy, in Histoire des Musulmans d'Espagne, describes the event as 'a good thing for Spain' which produced an important social revolution, setting the country free from the chains it was groaning under for centuries. Taxes were much less compared to those imposed by previous governments. The Muslims introduced land reforms by taking land from the rich and distributing it equally among serf-peasants and slaves. The new owners worked it with zeal. Commerce was liberated from the limitations and high taxes that caused its demise. Slaves could set themselves free in return for a fair compensation, something which threw in new energies. All these measures, says Dozy, created a state of well-being which was the reason behind the welcoming of the Muslims.
The great Spanish writer Blasco Ibanez in Dans l'ombrc de la cathédrale talks about a 'civilizational expedition' coming from the south rather than a conquest. To Ibanez, it was not an invasion imposing itself by arms, it was a new society whose vigorous roots were sprouting from everywhere. Describing the conquering Muslims, he says: 'The principle of freedom of conscience, cornerstone of the greatness of nations, was dear to them. In the cities they ruled, they accepted the church of the Christian and the synagogue of the Jew.'
History, therefore makes it clear that the legend of fanatical Muslims sweeping through Spain and forcing Islam at the point of the sword is an absurd myth. The expansion of Islam in Spain was not a military conquest, but a liberation
The Meaning of Life in Andalusia
The meaning of life and its goal in Andalusia at the time of its Islamic apogy, directed each act of day to day life, as well as scientific and technical research. The spiritual giants like the Muslims Ibn Rushd (i (1126-1198) known in the West as Averroës and Ibn Arabi (1165-1240), or the Jewish philosopher Maimonides (11351204), are some of the men who put across most brilliantly the message of Andalusia. This spirit lay behind all the scientific and technical progress of those golden centuries.
Science was not set apart from wisdom and faith, and nothing can express this fact better than Ibn Rushd when he writes:
Our philosophy would serve for nothing if it were not able to link these three things which I have tried to join in my 'Harmony of science and religion':
A Science, founded on experience and logic, to discover reasons.
A Wisdom, which reflects on the purpose of every scientific research so that it serves to make our life more beautiful.
A Revelation, that of our Qur'an, as it is only through revelation that we know the final purposes of our life and our history.
The unity of the Abrahamic tradition and the critical approach to philosophy are expressed with the same force, in the work of the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who was a contemporary of Ibn Rushd. At the synagogue before the Torah, he said:
If for Ibn Rushd the Holy Book is not our Torah but the Qur'an, we both agree about the contributions of reason and of revelation. These are two manifestations of one same divine truth. There is only a contradiction when one is faithful to a literal reading of the scriptures, forgetting about their eternal meaning.
In Andalusia, Islam takes a new dimension with Ibn 'Arabi, nicknamed Muhyi al-Din (the one who gives life to faith). What interested Ibn Arabi was not what a man said about his faith, but rather what this faith makes of that man. He states:
God is unity. The unity of love, of the lover and the beloved. Every love is a wish for union. Every love consciously or unconsciously is a love for God.
Bear witness to this presence of God within yourself, of God's creation, which never ceases. The act is the exterior manifestation of faith. Islam recognizes all the Prophets as messengers of the same God. Learn to discover in each man the seed of a desire for God, even if his belief is still dim and sometime idolatrous. Help to lead him towards the fullest Light.
Ibn Rushd endeavours to bring to light the universal message of Islam overshadowed by regional traditions, when he defines the best society as, 'That where every woman, every child and every man is given the means of developing the possibilities God has given to each of them.' The power to establish it 'will not be a theocracy, like that of the Christians of Europe, a power of religious accomplices or tyrants: God says in the Qur'an, "He has breathed into man His spirit". Let us make Him live in every man!' When asked about the conditions ofsuch a society, he answers: 'A society will be free and pleasing to God, when none acts either out of fear of the Prince or of Hell, nor the wish of a reward from a Courtesan or of Paradise, and when no-one says: This is mine.'
Islam in Andalusia gave birth to a number of spiritual giants who have shown that humanity has no future without the warmth and the spiritual values that emanate from the belief in the transcendence and oneness of God. Men such as Ibn Massara of Córdoba (883-931), for whom man was responsible of his own history; Ibn Hazm of Córdoba (994-1064) who was a pioneer of the comparative history of religions; Ibn Gabirol of Malaga (1020-1070) whose fundamental work was the synthesis of the Jewish faith and the philosophy of Ibn Massara; Ibn Bajja (1090-1139) with whom the Islamic philosophy xvas presented in a systematic way with its own direction; Ibn Tufayl from Cádiz (1100-1185) whose central theme was the relation between reason and faith.
All these men of knowledge, wisdom and faith stand as memories to a glorious past when true Islam was preached and practised; a time when the beautiful example of the Muslims won them fame and respect; a time when these peace-loving people would rise simply because injustice was being practised and would fight in the name of God with a strength that led handfuls of believers to victory over armies of non-believers.
The Style of Life in Andalusia
Andalusia was unique in terms of its tangible accomplishments in all spheres of life. Learning was emphasized, marked by a fascination with science, the Arabic literature and the philosophical discourse on reason and faith. In the world created in the land of Andalusia, there was commercial wealth, wealth in terms of consumption, and wealth of productivity and exchange. There was also a wealth of information, thanks to the libraries of Córdoba and a wealth of thinking about the meaning of life, God, and material things. And there were even poets who sang to all the ways of wealth.
We will restrict ourselves to a brief description of the scientific and technical achievement, and a more detailed account of the Mosque of Córdoba as it is one of the first monumental expressions of Muslim rule, and arguably the building that most fully embodied an image of the Muslim hegemony in Andalusia.
Scientific and Technical Achievement
When discussing the scientific development in Andalusia, one cannot separate it either from the contributions of the other great civilizations, nor from the wisdom and faith that inspired the efforts of all researchers in Andalusia: science is One because the world is One, the world is One because God is One. This principle of tawhid commanded all aspects of scientific research in Andalusia as well as in other parts of the Islamic world, at its period of apogy. The following are some of the achievements of such a philosophy of life.
The first attempt to fly was in Córdoba by Abu Abbas al-Fernass. Al-Zahrawi, born near Córdoba in 936, was one of the greatest surgeon of all times. His encyclopedia of surgery was used as a standard reference work in the subject in all universities of Europe for over five hundred years. Al-Zarqalli, who was born in Córdoba, devised the astrolabe: an instrument which is used to measure the distance of the stars above the horizon. The astrolabe made it possible to determine one s position in space and the hours of the day, to navigate and to call the faithful to prayer at the given time.
Al-Idrisi, who was born in Ceuta in 1099 and studied at Córdoba, drew maps for the King Roger II of Sicily in which he used methods of projection to pass from the spherical shape of the earth to the planisphere that were very similar to those used by Mercator four centuries later.
The agricultural and irrigation methods of the Muslims of Spain were revealed by the great Italian engineer Juanello Turriano, who came to Andalusia to study the hydraulic and agricultural techniques of eleventh century Muslim Spain to solve his problems of the sixteenth century in Italy.
The Great Mosque of Córdoba
Córdoba deserves its titles of the 'bride of the cities' and the 'jewel of the tenth century'. A city of factories and workshops, which attracted many scholars and produced her own. It was the first city with street lights in Europe. It rose to eminence as the torch of learning and civilization at a time when the Normans had savaged Paris and England had been ransacked by the Danes and Vikings. Its showpiece was its magnificent mosque, which is the most famous building of Spain after the Alhambra palace in Granada.
The foundations of the mosque were laid by Abd al-Rahman I in 785 on the site of an old Christian church. Since the time of the conquest in 711, the church had been used by both Muslims and Christians. The Muslims bought the church because of the growth of the population at that time, and not because of religious intolerance. It had been enlarged between 832-848, then in 912, and mainly in 961, by al-Hakam II, with its splendid mihrab. Al-Mansur, in 987, doubled the prayer hall which then contained 600 columns. It had already been perturbated in 1236, when Córdoba fell to Ferdinard III of Castille and chapels were inserted, and further in 1523 when a cathedral was built in the heart of the mosque. King Charles V is recorded to have remarked upon seeing the new cathedral: 'Had I known what this was, I would not have given permission to touch the old, because you are making what exists in many other places and you have unmade what was unique in the world.' As we can see it today, despite the opposition of the Spanish government to a UNESCO project to move the cathedral as it is without omitting the least detail (as the temple of Abu Simbal in Egypt was moved), the Mosque of Córdoba still reflects the image of the Muslim art at its best.
The practical problem faced by the architect of the Córdoba Mosque for the construction of a huge room for a big community, was to raise the roof of the oratory to a height proportionate to the extent of the building, so that a feeling of depression-like the one we feel when we get into an underground parking can be dispelled. The antique columns, or the building-spoils which were available, were insufficient. It was therefore necessary to supplement them, and the example of Damascus suggested arcades on two levels. But the model of Córdoba has a very surprising feature: the lower and upper arcades are no longer part of a wall, but are reduced to their pillars and arches without any intermediate masonry. The upper arches which support the roof, rest on the same pillars as the lower arches. Such a concept, without precedent in the history of architecture and unique to the Córdoba Mosque, is a real defiance to the weight and inertia of stones.
Let us say, to give a better picture of the image evoked by this architecture, that the curves of both series of arches soar like palm- fronds from the same trunk, which rests upon a relatively slender column, without the feeling of being too heavy for it. The arches with their many-coloured and fan-shaped wedge-stones have such expansive strength that they dispel any suggestion of weight. This expression in static terms of a reality which goes beyond the material plane, is due to the outline of the arches. The lower ones are drawn out beyond the shape of a pure semicircle, whereas the upper ones are more open and purely semicircular.
Many archaeologists have suggested that the composition of the arcs used by the architect of Córdoba was inspired by the Roman aqueduct in Merida. However, there is a fundamental difference between the two compositions. The Roman architect had respected the logic of the gravity, a building's support must be proportionate to the weight, thus the upper arcs must be lighter than the supporting elements. For the Córdovan architect-and more generally for all Islamic architecture-this rule does not work. Why?
To answer this question we have to move from the technical considerations, to the symbolic expression of space in the Muslim prayer, which was the most important factor preoccupying the 'Master' of Córdoba. The purpose was not to achieve an architectural exploit, but rather to create a new type of space-one that seems to be breathing and expanding outwards from an omnipresent centre. The limits of space play no role at all; the walls of the prayer hall disappear beyond a forest of arcades. Their sheer repetition (there were 900 of them in the original mosque) giving an impression of endless extension. Space is qualified here not by its boundaries but by the movement of the arcades, if one may describe it as movement. This expansion which is both powerful yet in reality immobile. Titus Burckhardt describes this as being 'a logical art, objectively static but never anthropomorphic.'
It is to al-Hakam II that we owe the marvellous mihrab, the master piece of Córdovan art, as well as the various copulas which stand before it, including their substructures, of interlacing arcades. The niche of this mihrab, which is very deep, is surrounded in its upper part by an arch, that is like an apparition and a source of light, of which the very curve seems to dilate, like a chest breathing in the air of infinity. According to the highest Muslim spirituality, beauty is one of the 'signs' which evokes the Divine Presence. The inscription above the symphony of colours, in severe Kufi script, proclaims the Oneness of God.
The Mosque of Córdoba is the embodiment of the universal message of Islam. Muhammad Iqbal in his poem A Ia mosquée de Cordoue wrote:
Oh! Holy Mosque of Córdoba
Shrine for all lovers of art
Pearl of the one true faith
Sanctifying Andalusia's soil
Like Holy Mecca itself
Such a glorious beauty
Will be found on earth
Only in a true Muslim's heart
Who Killed Islam in Andalusia
The scientific and philosophical learning of the Andalusians was channelled off beyond the Pyrenees, to irrigate the dry pastures of European intellectual life. Students from Western Europe flocked to the libraries and universities set up by the Muslims in Spain. This decisively changed the European mind, and it is no exaggeration to say that Western civilization owes its regeneration to the intellectual energy released by the dynamo that was Islam. The period of regeneration, which started in Florence in sixteenth century Italy, is referred to by the West as the Renaissance. It was a direct result of another European Renaissance which began at the university of Córdoba in ninth century Spain. This profound truth of our common history becomes clear when we know how to listen to the music of the stones of Córdoba. There is, however, a fundamental difference between the two 'renaissances': the one which started in Córdoba was based on faith and was conscious of the universality of the divine; the one which began in Florence was made against God with its essential project of secularising all aspects of life.
The reasons leading to the death of the Córdovan-type renaissance generated by Islam, can be understood best by reference to the causes of its success. Islam owed its spectacular success entirely to the teachings of the Qur'an and the example (Sunna) of the Prophet Muhammad (s). The active vigour of the system was neutralized as soon as the Muslims relegated the Qur'an to the status of a treatise on dogmas, and the Sunna became a mere system of laws and a hollow shell without any living meaning. In his Muqaddima, Ibn Khaldun condemns the methods of education practised by some of the fuqaha' of Andalusia when, he says that, instead of helping the student to 'understand the content of the book on which he is working', they force him 'to learn it by heart'.
The Maliki school of thought (madhhab) was so dominant in Andalusia to the point that no other madhahib were taught, and knowing by heart the Muwatta' of Imam Malik and its commentaries was enough to make a faqih a renowned scholar. This closure of the door of ijtihad (independent judgement), which would have been condemned by Imam Malik himself were he to witness it, was encouraged by most of the rulers of Andalusia for it implies an unconditional obedience to the established power. It led to an intellectual degeneration, the treatment to those spiritual giants mentioned before illustrates this best. Ibn Massara was forced to exile; Ibn Hazm was evicted from Majorca; al-Ghazali's books were burned; the universal library of al-Hakam II was thrown into the river; Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Rushd were expelled; and Ibn Arabi evicted. All these acts were not performed by Christians, but by fellow Muslims! These were but signs that this grand structure represented by Islam which had weathered many a storm, had reached a stage when its inner vitality had been slowly sapped away and one powerful blast might well uproot it from the soil on which it has been thriving for centuries.
The early Muslim conquerors in Spain had a mission which made it impossible for them to be selfish, cruel or intolerant. The moment this was lost on their successors, their clannish spirit replaced their unity of purpose. At one time there were as many as twelve Muslim dynasties. That was a signal for collapse. The Muslim society came to represent a decadent social order incapable of dynamic growth and with no capacity for effective resistance. Under such circumstances, it is difficult for any society to survive a serious external threat. The Muslim rule over the Iberian Peninsula started to shrink on account of the treachery of the different Muslim Princes until Granada fell to the hands of the Crusades on 2 January 1492.
When Abu Abdullah the last king of Granada, looked at the Alhambra for the last time, tears came into his eyes. At this, his aged mother Aisha said: 'Abu Abdullah Cry like a women for a kingdom you could not defend as a man.' But our history should play a more inspiring and guiding function than to reminisce about the past. When one sees all these marvels, and all these palaces left in Andalusia-one wonders: Surely, there must have been injustice, there must have been oppression. As Abu Dharr said to Mu'awiya: '0 Mu'awiya! If you are building this palace with your own money, it is extravagance and if with the money of the people, it is treason'. We should not glorify our past and our ancestors regardless of their mistakes. Our study of the history of Islam should be more objective, and not a mere justification of all acts by our predecessors.
Conclusion
We must aim to ensure that the tragedy of Andalusia is not repeated. To do that we must not address our children: Once upon a time in Palestine... Once upon a time in Bosnia... We need a true Islamic Renaissance that will lead us to the eternal and universal Islam. An Islam that is the constant appeal for resisting all oppression because it excludes any submission other than to the will of God and holds man responsible for the accomplishment of the divine order on earth. An Islam, in the words of Roger Garaudy, whose principles are:
in the economical field: God alone possesses,
in the political field: God alone commands,
in the cultural field: God alone knows.
It is for us to respond to this eternally living call: without imitating the West and without imitating the Past.
References
*The Holy Qur'an, Translated and Commented by Abdullah Yusuf Ali.
*Ibn Rushd, On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy, trans. by George F. Hourani, 1960.
*Roger Garaudy, 'For an Islam of the XXth Century', Report presented at the 1st International Conference of Muslims of Europe, Seville, 18-21 July, 1985.
*Roger Garaudy, L' Islam, en Occident, Editions l'Harmattan, 1987.
*Khola Hassan, The Crumbling Minaret of Spain, Ta- Ha Publishers, London, 1988.
*Pamphlet about the Calahora Tower in Cordoba, 1988.
*Ali Shariati, And Once Again Abu Dharr, trans. by Laleh Bakhtiar and Hussain Salih, The Abu Dharr Foundation, Tehran, I 985.
*Titus Burckhardt, Art of Islam, World of Islam
Festival Trust, London, 1976.
*J. D. Dodds (ed), Al-Andalus, The Art of Islamic Spain, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1992.
*W. Montgomery Watt, A History of Islamic Spain, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1967.
-----------------------------
[Currently, the author is a Research Associate at the School of Mathematical Studies, University of Portsmouth. He obtained his PhD in Computational Mathematics from Wessex Institute of Technology, Southampton, and a BSc in Pure Mathematics from the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Rabat, Morocco.]
Bismillaah Ar-RaHmaan Ar-RaHeem
Bismillaah Ar-RaHmaan Ar-RaHeem
As-Salaamu `Alaikum wa RaHmatullaahi wa Barakaatuh
According to Abdallaah bin Bakr bin Habeeb al-Sahmee: We were told by a man in the mosque of al-Junaabidh that `Umar bin `Abd al-`Azeez delivered a sermon to the people in Khunaasirah in which he said:
O people, you were not created in vain, nor will you be left to yourselves [See 75:36]. Rather, you will return to a place in which Allaah will descend in order to judge among you and distinguish between you. Destitute and lost are those who forsake the all- encompassing mercy of Allaah, and they will be excluded from Paradise, the borders of which are as wide as the heavens and the earth. Don't you know that protection, tomorrow, will be limited to those who feared Allaah [today], and to those who sold something ephemeral for something permanent, something small for something great, and fear for protection? Don't you realize that you are the descendants of those who have perished, that those who remain will take their place after you, and that this will continue until you are all returned to Allaah? Every day you dispatch to Allaah, at all times of the day, someone who has died, his term having come to an end. You bury him in a crack in the earth and then leave him without a pillow or a bed. He has parted from his loved ones, severed his connections with the living, and taken up residence in the earth, whereupon he comes face to face with the accounting. He is mortgaged to his deeds: He needs his accomplishments, but not the material things he left on earth.
Therefore, fear Allaah before death descends and its appointed times expire. I swear by Allaah that I say those words to you knowing that I myself have committed more sins than any of you; I therefore ask Allaah for forgiveness and I repent. Whenever we learn that one of you needs something, I try to satisfy his need to the extent that I am able. Whenever I can provide satisfaction to one of you out of my possessions, I seek to treat him as my equal and my relative, so that my life and his life are of equal value. I swear by Allaah that had I wanted something else, namely, affluence, then it would have been easy for me to utter the word, aware as I am of the means for obtaining this. But Allaah has issued in an eloquent Book and a just example (sunnah) by means of which He guides us to obedience and proscribes disobedience.
He lifted up the edge of his robe and began to cry and sob, causing the people around him to break into tears. Then he stepped down. That was the last sermon he gave before he died, may Allaah have mercy on him.
For variant versions of this sermon, see Ibn `Abd al-Hakam, Seerah 43-45, 132-33; Ibn Katheer, Bidaayah, IX, 199; This translation was taken from The History of al-Tabaree, Vol XXIV, by D.S.Powers/
In the same book, it is also related that,
According to `Abdallaah - his father - al-Fudayl - `Abdallaah: I was told that `Umar bin `Abd al-Azeez wrote to the Syrian army as follows: "As-salaamu `alaikum wa rahmatullaah. Now then, whoever contemplates death frequently speaks little, while he who knows that death is certain is satisfied with a little. Farewell."
* * *
According to Mansoor bin Muzaahim - Shu`ayb, that is, Ibn Safwaan - Ibn `Abd al-Hameed: `Umar ibn `Abd al-`Azeez said:
He who gives sincere advice to his brother in matters of religion and looks out for the well being of the latter's daily affairs has fulfilled his brotherly obligation and carried out the duty that was incumbent upon him. Fear Allaah. Accept these words, for they are offered as sincere advice to you with regard to your religion; and cling fast to them, for they constitute a warning that will save you in the afterlife. The sustenance has been apportioned; therefore, let no believer exceed what has been apportioned to him, and be united in seeking the good. In contentment there is abundance, substinence, and sufficiency. The term of this life is in your necks, and Jahannam lies before you. What you see will pass away, what has been is as if it never was, and all will soon be dead. You have seen the stages of the dying man, both when he is in the agony of death, and then after his demise when he has tasted death and the people all around him are saying, "He has passed away, May Allaah have mercy on his soul." You have witnessed the hasty manner in which he is removed, and the division of his estate, when his face is lost, his memory forgotten, and his doorway forsaken, as if he had not mixed with those who keep their word, nor inhabited the lands. Therefore, beware the horror of a day on which not so much as the weight of an ant on the scale will be despised.
According to `Abd al-Rahmaan bin Mahdee - Sufyaan: `Umar bin `Abd al-`Azeez said:
He who acts without knowledge causes more corruption than good, and he who does not consider his speech to be part of his actions sins repeatedly. Satisfaction is scarce, and the true believer should rely on patience. Allaah never bestowed a blessing upon one of His servants and then took it away from him, giving him patience in return for that which was taken away, except that the replacement was better than what was taken away from him." Then he recited the following verse: "Surely the patient will be paid their wages in full without reckoning." [39:10]
As-Salaamu `Alaikum wa RaHmatullaahi wa Barakaatuh
According to Abdallaah bin Bakr bin Habeeb al-Sahmee: We were told by a man in the mosque of al-Junaabidh that `Umar bin `Abd al-`Azeez delivered a sermon to the people in Khunaasirah in which he said:
O people, you were not created in vain, nor will you be left to yourselves [See 75:36]. Rather, you will return to a place in which Allaah will descend in order to judge among you and distinguish between you. Destitute and lost are those who forsake the all- encompassing mercy of Allaah, and they will be excluded from Paradise, the borders of which are as wide as the heavens and the earth. Don't you know that protection, tomorrow, will be limited to those who feared Allaah [today], and to those who sold something ephemeral for something permanent, something small for something great, and fear for protection? Don't you realize that you are the descendants of those who have perished, that those who remain will take their place after you, and that this will continue until you are all returned to Allaah? Every day you dispatch to Allaah, at all times of the day, someone who has died, his term having come to an end. You bury him in a crack in the earth and then leave him without a pillow or a bed. He has parted from his loved ones, severed his connections with the living, and taken up residence in the earth, whereupon he comes face to face with the accounting. He is mortgaged to his deeds: He needs his accomplishments, but not the material things he left on earth.
Therefore, fear Allaah before death descends and its appointed times expire. I swear by Allaah that I say those words to you knowing that I myself have committed more sins than any of you; I therefore ask Allaah for forgiveness and I repent. Whenever we learn that one of you needs something, I try to satisfy his need to the extent that I am able. Whenever I can provide satisfaction to one of you out of my possessions, I seek to treat him as my equal and my relative, so that my life and his life are of equal value. I swear by Allaah that had I wanted something else, namely, affluence, then it would have been easy for me to utter the word, aware as I am of the means for obtaining this. But Allaah has issued in an eloquent Book and a just example (sunnah) by means of which He guides us to obedience and proscribes disobedience.
He lifted up the edge of his robe and began to cry and sob, causing the people around him to break into tears. Then he stepped down. That was the last sermon he gave before he died, may Allaah have mercy on him.
For variant versions of this sermon, see Ibn `Abd al-Hakam, Seerah 43-45, 132-33; Ibn Katheer, Bidaayah, IX, 199; This translation was taken from The History of al-Tabaree, Vol XXIV, by D.S.Powers/
In the same book, it is also related that,
According to `Abdallaah - his father - al-Fudayl - `Abdallaah: I was told that `Umar bin `Abd al-Azeez wrote to the Syrian army as follows: "As-salaamu `alaikum wa rahmatullaah. Now then, whoever contemplates death frequently speaks little, while he who knows that death is certain is satisfied with a little. Farewell."
* * *
According to Mansoor bin Muzaahim - Shu`ayb, that is, Ibn Safwaan - Ibn `Abd al-Hameed: `Umar ibn `Abd al-`Azeez said:
He who gives sincere advice to his brother in matters of religion and looks out for the well being of the latter's daily affairs has fulfilled his brotherly obligation and carried out the duty that was incumbent upon him. Fear Allaah. Accept these words, for they are offered as sincere advice to you with regard to your religion; and cling fast to them, for they constitute a warning that will save you in the afterlife. The sustenance has been apportioned; therefore, let no believer exceed what has been apportioned to him, and be united in seeking the good. In contentment there is abundance, substinence, and sufficiency. The term of this life is in your necks, and Jahannam lies before you. What you see will pass away, what has been is as if it never was, and all will soon be dead. You have seen the stages of the dying man, both when he is in the agony of death, and then after his demise when he has tasted death and the people all around him are saying, "He has passed away, May Allaah have mercy on his soul." You have witnessed the hasty manner in which he is removed, and the division of his estate, when his face is lost, his memory forgotten, and his doorway forsaken, as if he had not mixed with those who keep their word, nor inhabited the lands. Therefore, beware the horror of a day on which not so much as the weight of an ant on the scale will be despised.
According to `Abd al-Rahmaan bin Mahdee - Sufyaan: `Umar bin `Abd al-`Azeez said:
He who acts without knowledge causes more corruption than good, and he who does not consider his speech to be part of his actions sins repeatedly. Satisfaction is scarce, and the true believer should rely on patience. Allaah never bestowed a blessing upon one of His servants and then took it away from him, giving him patience in return for that which was taken away, except that the replacement was better than what was taken away from him." Then he recited the following verse: "Surely the patient will be paid their wages in full without reckoning." [39:10]
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