Sacred places: the mosque, the House and the pilgrimage

This lesson asks you to describe the main features of places of worship, to explain how believers' convictions about place shape what they do, and to identify pilgrimage destinations and say how a pilgrimage differs from other spiritual journeys. The curriculum itself names Mecca and the hajj. The museum offers the Prophet ﷺ's Mosque, the Kaaba and the hajj; your class adds the sacred places and other spiritual journeys of the other traditions. ¹

For each place, list the features the source names, then the acts that believers perform there or toward it. Ask which features serve the acts, and which show the importance people give to the place.

Al-Samhudi writes in Wafa' al-wafa that the Prophet's she-camel knelt at the site of the Prophet's Mosque and he said: "This is the dwelling, God willing." It was a drying ground for dates belonging to two orphan boys, Sahl and Suhayl, sons of Amr ². The Prophet refused to accept it as a gift until he had bought it; according to al-Waqidi he bought it for ten dinars, which Abu Bakr paid ². In al-Bukhari's report, he told the Banu al-Najjar to name its price, and they said: "We ask for its price only from God." He ordered the graves of the polytheists dug up, the ruins levelled and the palms cut down, and the palms were set in rows facing the qibla ³. The Companions built it of mud brick on a stone foundation about three cubits high. Its qibla was at first toward Jerusalem; when the qibla was changed, the back door was closed and a door opened opposite it ².

The Kaaba. Al-Mubarakpuri says in The Sealed Nectar that it is the House that Abraham and his son Ismail built at Mecca, and that its site was a rise in the ground like a hillock ^{4 5}. The Encyclopaedia of Islam says Muslim tradition is the chief source on the early story, and that for Muslims these accounts rest on the Qur'an alone ⁶. On the historians' side it says that apart from Muslim traditions practically nothing is known of the Kaaba's history, that the accounts of Abraha's campaign suggest it existed and was worshipped in the sixth century but say nothing of its appearance, and that whether Qusayy demolished and rebuilt it is impossible to determine ⁶. The museum decides nothing between them.

It may be supposed that the Medina mosque was built as a sacred edifice. The Encyclopaedia of Islam's article on the mosque argues that the earliest mosque in Medina had nothing of a sacred building about it, and that what distinguished it from a church or the Meccan temple is that it had no specially dedicated ritual object; it also says the mosque was used from the first for common worship and quickly became the community's political and religious centre ⁷. The architecture section of the same encyclopaedia, by a different author, judges that the building was first and foremost a house for the Prophet and his family, and finds no evidence that it was the regular place of worship in the earliest years ⁸. The record reports both.

The account of the Prophet's Mosque rests on three kinds of source. Al-Samhudi's Wafa' al-wafa reports its area in different ways: seventy cubits by sixty, or a hundred by a hundred, or less than a hundred ². Sahih al-Bukhari gives its own report of the purchase. The Encyclopaedia of Islam gives two traditions that differ on who the orphans' guardian was, and reports both without choosing ⁹; its two sections on the mosque disagree on the number of entrances and on which side the wives' huts stood ^{10 8}. The record adds that Wikidata's date of 622 CE rests on one source and needs another ¹¹. For the Kaaba the lesson's source is al-Mubarakpuri, a modern biography.

The Kuwaiti encyclopaedia of jurisprudence defines the hajj as heading for a specific place at a specific time to perform specific acts ¹². Take one of the two places in this lesson: what would make a journey to it a pilgrimage in the encyclopaedia's sense, and what would leave it a visit?

• The Prophet's Mosque: its site, its building and materials, and where the two sections of the encyclopaedia differ.
• The Kaaba: al-Mubarakpuri's account, and what the encyclopaedia says historians can establish.
• The hajj: its definition in the Kuwaiti encyclopaedia and its relation to the umra.

Read the Prophet's Mosque, the Kaaba and the hajj. Sketch a simple plan or map of one of the two buildings from what the sources say, and add a note on what believers do there.