What is the Ka'ba and why it is pivotal to the Islamic world? Why do pilgrims go about it, not in it? Is it empty? And why is a hollow building covered in black silk?
The most sacred site of Islam, the Ka'ba (the granite cuboid structure at the centre of the Great Mosque of Mecca) is here investigated by examining six of its predominantly spatial effects: as the qibla (the direction faced in prayer); as the axis and matrix mundi of the Islamic world; as an architectural principle in the bedrock of this world; as a circumambulated goal of pilgrimage and site of spiritual union for mystics and Sufis; and as a dwelling that is imagined to shelter temporarily an animating force; but which otherwise, as a house, holds a void.
The Kaaba Orientations : Readings in Islam's Ancient House
Description
Table of Contents
LIST OF FIGURES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Introduction
Chapter One: The Kaʿba as Qibla
Chapter Two: The Kaʿba as Navel
Chapter Three: The Kaʿba as Substructure
Chapter Four: The Kaʿba as Beloved
Chapter Five: The House as Holder
Chapter Six: The House as Dwelling
Conclusion
bibliography
ENDNOTES
Author Description
Simon O'Meara is an architectural historian of early to pre-modern urban Islamic culture, with a methodological interest in using the discourses of Islam to explore Islamic visuality and understand what scholarship can struggle to accommodate or see. He is Lecturer in the History of Architecture and Archaeology of the Islamic Middle East at SOAS, University of London.