Cambridge Unive rsit y Pre ss 978-1-107-04213-1 - The Holy ...assets.cambridge.org/97811070/42131/frontmatter/... · It shows that Medina’s emergence as a holy city, alongside Mecca

The Holy City of Medina

This is the fi rst book-length study of the emergence of Medina, in modern Saudi Arabia, as a widely venerated sacred space and holy city over the course of the fi rst three Islamic centuries (the seventh to ninth centuries CE ). This was a dynamic period that witnessed the evolution of many Islamic political, religious and legal doctrines, and the book situates Medina’s emerging sanctity within the appropriate historical contexts. The book focuses on the roles played by the Prophet Muh � ammad, by the Umayyad and early Abbasid caliphs and by Muslim legal scholars. It shows that Medina’s emergence as a holy city, alongside Mecca and Jerusalem, as well as the development of many of the doctrines associ-ated with its sanctity, was the result of gradual and contested processes and was intimately linked with important contemporary developments concerning the legitimation of political, religious and legal authority in the Islamic world.

Harry Munt is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Oriental Studies and Wolfson College at the University of Oxford.

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Cambridge University Press978-1-107-04213-1 - The Holy City of Medina: Sacred Space in Early Islamic ArabiaHarry MuntFrontmatterMore information

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Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization

Editorial Board

Chase F. Robinson , The Graduate Center, The City University of New York (general editor)

Michael Cook , Princeton University Maribel Fierro , Spanish National Research Council Alan Mikhail , Yale University David O. Morgan , University of Wisconsin-Madison Intisar Rabb , Harvard University Muhammad Qasim Zaman , Princeton University

Published titles are listed at the back of the book.











The Holy City of Medina

Sacred Space in Early Islamic Arabia

HARRY MUNT

University of Oxford






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© Harry Munt 2014

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2014

Printed in the United States of America

A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Munt, T. H. R. (Thomas Henry Robert), 1984– The holy city of Medina : sacred space in early Islamic Arabia / Harry Munt.

pages cm – (Cambridge studies in Islamic civilization) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-04213-1 (hardback) 1. Medina (Saudi Arabia) 2. Islamic shrines – Saudi Arabia – Medina I. Title. DS248.M5M86 2014 953.8–dc23 2014002462

ISBN 978-1-107-04213-1 Hardback

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To Rebekah











ix

Contents

Acknowledgements page xi

Notes on the Text xiii

Abbreviations xv

Introduction 1

1. H � aram and H � ima � : Sacred Space in the Pre-Islamic H � ija � z 16

2. Muh � ammad and the ‘Constitution of Medina’: The Declaration of Medina’s H � aram 42

3. Debating Sanctity: The Validity of Medina’s H � aram 65

4. The Construction of a Sacred Topography 94

5. Following in the Prophet’s Footsteps, Visiting His Grave: Early Islamic Pilgrimage to Medina 123

6. The Prophet’s Inheritance: Medina’s Emergence as a Holy City in the First–Third/Seventh–Ninth Centuries 148

Conclusion: From Yathrib to the Prophet’s City 184

Bibliography 191

Index 217











xi

Acknowledgements

I would like to begin by expressing my gratitude to Chase Robinson, who supervised all of my graduate studies and has continued to offer guidance and support since. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the examiners of my DPhil thesis, Robert Hoyland and Andrew Marsham, for all their suggestions, help and support, both during my viva and since. Several people have read and commented on chapters of this book, namely Nicola Clarke, Michael Lecker, Christopher Melchert, Chase Robinson and the two anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press. I am grateful for the opportunity here to acknowledge their generosity and the helpfulness of all their comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank Michael Lecker again, both for his encouragement of my work on early Islamic Medina as well as for helping me on several occasions to locate copies of works that I was having diffi culty fi nding. I have also benefi tted from assistance with queries from other people too numerous to mention; I am nonetheless indebted to all of them.

I have been fortunate throughout the period of my research to have been based at the Oriental Institute and Wolfson College at the University of Oxford. Both are extremely friendly places to work, and I have learned a great deal from conversations with teachers and colleagues there, who over the years have included, in addition to those mentioned previously, Arezou Azad, Mark Bainbridge, Nick Chatrath, Lidio Ferrando, Geert Jan van Gelder, Jeremy Johns, Judith Pfeiffer, Adam Silverstein, Adam Talib, Mathieu Tillier and Luke Treadwell. I would also like to express my thanks to the librarians at the Bodleian and the Oriental Institute Library for their help. I have been very privileged by the generosity of those who have funded my doctoral and postdoctoral research at Oxford






Acknowledgementsxii

and would like to acknowledge the support I have received in this regard from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the former and the British Academy for the latter.

At Cambridge University Press, Marigold Acland provided the ini-tial encouragement for this project. I also thank William Hammell and Sarika Narula for their support since, as well as Jeanie Lee, Ami Naramor and Bhavani for their assistance during the production process. Michael Athanson and Ryan Lynch generously gave their time to help with the production of Map 1 , and Joe LeMonnier created Map 2 .

Finally, I would like to take the opportunity here to thank my family. My parents and my sister, Jassy, have always been there to support me. My greatest debt, however, is, as ever, to Rebekah.






xiii

Notes on the Text

The transliteration system used throughout this book for Arabic words and phrases follows a slightly modifi ed version of the system recom-mended by the International Journal of Middle East Studies . Some proper nouns are fully transliterated, but others with common English equiva-lents are not; so, for example, al-T � a � ʾ if, but Medina, not al-Mad ı � na. For the very occasional transliteration of Persian, a slightly modifi ed version of the system used by the Encyclopaedia Iranica has been adopted. For the transliteration of languages other than Arabic and Persian, in partic-ular of Syriac and pre-Islamic Arabian languages, I have tried to follow systems that appear to an outsider such as myself to be relatively stan-dard in their respective fi elds.

As is now common in the fi eld, both hijr ı � and Common Era dates are usually given together in the form hijr ı � / CE ; Muh � ammad’s hijra to Medina thus took place in 1/622. On those few occasions when only a hijr ı � or a CE date is provided, this is made clear.

References have been given in a brief form in the footnotes, usually just the author’s surname and a short version of the work’s title, and fuller details can be found in the bibliography. A handful of works are referred to by other abbreviations, which are listed in the next section. The most common exception is encyclopaedia articles, which are referred to in the footnotes in the form: Name [ or abridged name ] of encyclopae-dia , s.v. ‘Title of article’ (Author’s name); for example, EI 3 , s.v. ‘Bu ʿ a � th’ (M. Lecker). The few citations from classical Greek and Latin sources are cited using referencing conventions common in works on ancient his-tory. Papyri and pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions are referred to using






Notes on the Textxiv

standard sigla, but a more precise reference to a published edition/trans-lation is also always provided.

All translations from the Qur ʾ a � n are my own, unless otherwise stated, although I have to acknowledge the considerable debt I owe to two previ-ously published translations: A. J. Arberry’s The Koran Interpreted , 2 vols. (London, 1955) and A. Jones’s The Qur ʾ a � n (Cambridge, 2007).

There is one fi nal stylistic abbreviation of which the reader should be aware. Many mentions of Muh � ammad in Arabic and Persian works are followed by one of a handful of standard invocations for God’s blessing upon him, sometimes also upon his family and/or Companions. In gen-eral, I do not translate these blessings to save cluttering the text, but I do indicate where they appear in the editions I have used by inserting the abbreviation ‘( s )’.






xv

Abbreviations

AAE Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy

BASIC Shah î d, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century

BSOAS Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies

CRAI Comptes rendus des s é ances de l’ann é e: acad é mie des inscriptions et belles-lettres

EI 2 Encyclopaedia of Islam , 2nd ed., eds. H. A. R. Gibb et al., 13 vols. Leiden, 1960–2009.

EI 3 Encyclopaedia of Islam Three , eds. K. Fleet et al. Leiden, 2007–.

EQ Encyclopaedia of the Qur ʾ a n , ed. J. D. McAuliffe, 6 vols. Leiden, 2001–6.

IJMES International Journal of Middle East Studies

ILS Islamic Law and Society

JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society

JESHO Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient

JRAS Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society

JSAI Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam

JSS Journal of Semitic Studies

MUSJ M é langes de l’Universit é Saint-Joseph

PSAS Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies






Map 1. The early Islamic H � ija � z.






Map 2. The sacred landscape of early Islamic Medina.






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Cambridge Unive rsit y Pre ss 978-1-107-04213-1 - The Holy ...assets.cambridge.org/97811070/42131/frontmatter/... · It shows that Medina’s emergence as a holy city, alongside Mecca