The book:
Our pick this month is Mecca: The Sacred City by Ziauddin Sardar. Despite being the birthplace of the second-largest world religion, there are comparatively few English-language books dedicated to Islam’s spiritual homeland. Sardar reveals a fascinating history of this most influential of cities.
Himself a liberal and mildly sceptical follower, Sardar examines the religious struggles and rebellions in Mecca that have powerfully shaped Muslim culture, and their influence on world events to this day. Through reportage and memoir he creates an understanding of the city’s significance to billions of human beings through time and across the globe, and also provides thoughtful – and somewhat scathing – criticism of the commercial-isation and distortion the holy site has been going through since coming under the control of the ultra-puritanical Wahhabis and their Saudi patrons.
We hope you enjoy this illuminative, accessible and beautifully written account of the holy site of one of the most influential religions in world history.
What the Guardian thought:
In the history of religion, and in the wider story of mankind’s yearning to understand its place in the universe, Mecca is almost as important a site as Jerusalem, yet in English it is still virtually unwritten. There are a few Victorian travelogues, it is true –Sir Richard Burton disguised in his walnut greasepaint and turban, etc – but for every book on Mecca there are several shelves on Jerusalem; for every study of the Hejaz, there exists a groaning library on the Holy Land.
What Sardar gives us, instead, is a beautifully rendered account of the Muslim version of events, as told by a rational, likable, intelligent and mildly sceptical follower of the prophet.
Exactly what the pilgrims were worshipping seems to have changed over time: a succession of pagan deities were the subject of rituals in the Kaaba over almost a millennium. Then in the early 7th century the prophet Muhammad swept them all away and replaced the idols with the idea of a single almighty god, Allah.
Muhammad’s revelations and his successful establishment of an empire of faith changed the fortunes of Mecca for ever, turning it into the greatest religious centre for Islam. Yet while the city was coveted by a succession of the great Islamic dynasties that ruled the Middle East, Mecca never became a major cultural or political centre like Alexandria or Damascus: instead, like Jerusalem, it was always a city of faith and left to the pilgrims and their devotions.
The villains of this story, throughout the second half of the book, are the ultra-puritanical Wahhabis and their Saudi patrons. Sardar gives an excellent account of the Wahhabis’ first capture of the city in the early 19th century when the Ottomans were busy with Napoleon’s arrival in Egypt, when they destroyed all the Sufi and Shia shrines in Arabia and Iraq. At the time, most Muslims regarded the Wahhabis as an extreme and alien sect, a perversion bordering on infidelity – kufr. Even to this day, the Wahhabis make up only a small percentage of the world’s Muslims. However, the Wahhabis have used their oil to attempt to remake Islam in their own narrow and puritanical image.
Sardar surveys modern Mecca with a love that is mixed with a profound sense of disappointment and loss. Yet the book that results is a major achievement and a hugely enjoyable and important study of one of the world’s great cities.
William Dalrymple - Read the full review
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