Vielhaber 1 Greg Vielhaber Lisa Claypool, Dana Katz ART 301: Recent Writing on Art February 29 th, 2008 At the center of the world: sacred spaces and organized bodies in Mecca In a traditional Muslim understanding of the world, Mecca is both the metaphysical and material center of the earth. Moving through the city during the Hajj, the spiritual obligation of all Muslims if they are able to make the journey and one of the five pillars of Islam, is to be constantly passing through sacred space. The focus of this essay will be on the symbolic value of Mecca during the Hajj, as this pilgrimage is when Mecca seems to embody more symbolic value (symbolic value is a metaphysical value attributed by the logics of a culture, or more generally, a narrative ) than during other parts of the year. However, I will return to this point later. Originally, the Hajj rituals followed Mohammed s supposed last travels through the areas around Mecca. This means the pilgrims would travel through Mohammed s supposed path, with a few alterations (for example, walking in circles around certain areas seven times). Additionally, traditionally there were accepted routes from countries such as Egypt, Syria, and Iran, in which the entire route to Mecca was sacred. Now with the massive increase of Muslims in the world, with an estimated 2 million participants every year, the accepted path of the Hajj has been modified, both in the external route and the internal. The kind of altercations the Saudi Arabian government has been forced to make beg the question: what is essential to the pilgrimage of the Hajj; surely it is not simply the space itself that is sacred? The answer is obviously no: the symbolic value embedded in the
Vielhaber 2 Hajj is determined elsewhere, away from Mecca, in the country, city, neighborhood, where the pilgrims originate. Nowadays, People arrive by train, boat, car, plane, etc, whatever means suits them while the path and specific rituals within Saudi Arabia, the visit to Mecca and nearby cities or encampments such as Mina, have been altered. For example, on the grounds of the grand mosque in Mecca, Masjid al-haram, there exists a black Stone encased in silver: Mohammed was supposed to have kissed this stone. During the Hajj, participants are to walk in the grand mosque around the black stone seven times (seven is a sacred or perfect number in Islam) and upon each rotation they are to kiss the stone. However, due to the massive traffic of people as well as the casualties ensued simply from people being trampled, pointing at the stone as each rotation has been completed is now culturally acceptable instead of kissing the stone. Additionally, The Saudi Arabian government puts at least some (many Muslims feel a lack of) financial effort into organizing mass groups of people through the rituals so that personal injury is greatly reduced. Recalling Lefebre s analytics of the city, the binary of the urban and the city, how do these terms manifest in Mecca during the Hajj? With so many competing conceptions of what exactly the Hajj means placed in juxtaposition to each other what kind of affect does the city of Mecca have on the urban? The city of Mecca, in its metaphysical as well as material construction in mediation through the symbolic value(s) of the religion(s) of Islam, unifies the significance of the city and urban through the Hajj: the city and the urban are the same for the pilgrim while in the Masjid Al Haram. Before a further discussion of Mecca begins a brief theoretical discussion is necessary on Lefebvre s binary. We should perhaps introduce here a distinction
Vielhaber 3 between the city, a present and immediate reality, a practico-material and architectural fact, and the urban, a social reality made up of relations which are to be conceived of, constructed or reconstructed by thought (Lefebvre 104). These two terms are necessarily entangled in that altering one will necessarily alter the other, but their effects can be traced and analyzed as categorically different, in different registers of the psyche and its comprehension of city spaces. Both the city and the urban require symbolic codes (narratives) to make sense of, to inscribe meaning into the interactions with the two different spaces of the city. What is so special about the city of Mecca? Attached are two aerial images of Mecca. The grand mosque by far occupies the largest space. This is not to insinuate that business doe not take place in Mecca; there are market places and even some industry. However, the locus of symbolic value, and perhaps economic as well, is the grand mosque and surrounding areas. The city is built such that the mosque and adjacent hills are literally the center. The obvious effect this has on the urban is that the most important relationships in the register of Islamic life, those with the highest symbolic value (if we are to refer to urban as its own narrative) are located in the center. The question then of course arises, how did the urban affect the city in its material development? This question is much more difficult to resolve because Mecca is a very old city; even in the times of Mohammed, it was considered ancient. Yet this question is not as troubling as it perhaps seems: simply, bodies require space and food. As the Hajj increases in popularity, more lodgings and stores that provide essentials are needed to supply the incoming pilgrims.
Vielhaber 4 More hotel space does not explain, though, how these two analytical tools become unified in Mecca during the Hajj: Mecca is a ritualized space. Every part of Mecca, every location, every interaction, is in some sense, sacred during this pilgrimage. The value attributed to these interactions are determined elsewhere, in some foreign place. However, because everything is treated in the psychic register of sacred, the relations subjects have with their physical environment, the city, as well as with other bodies, the urban, become a text, a thing that insists upon interpretation by the subject through the cultural symbols (subdivisions of Islam) known to him. It is not simply the nature of a pilgrimage that unifies urban and city: Mecca in particular, in its very construction, in the way the city frames the space, orients the sacred social interactions towards the center (the area with the highest Islamic symbolic value) allows for the urban and city to unite. Recall that the city and the urban both work from their own logics in mediation with a symbolic narrative, for example, Islam. By having the most important mosque be the center of the city, and having the pilgrimage of the highest symbolic value pass through the center, the greatest urban value is moved to the center of the city. The Masjid Al Haram is the most symbolically valuable city space in mediation with Islam; during the Hajj, the urban relations developed are also the most symbolically valuable in mediation with Islam. When both logics (city, urban) are at their maxim of symbolic value, they become the same space because in mediation with Islam, they both occupy the same symbolic arena: Masjid Al Haram becomes constituted, in mediation with symbolic value of the various sects of Islam, an amalgam of both material objects of high symbolic worth, its value as center city space, and sacred interactions with Allah (the very pilgrimage itself) and fellow Muslim pilgrims.
Vielhaber 5 Works Cited Lefebvre, Henri. The Specificity of the City. Visual culture; Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies. Ed. Joanne Morra and Marquard Smith.
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