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The Kaʿba, Gender, and the Rites of Pilgrimage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2009

William C. Young
William C. Young
Affiliation:
Teaches anthropology at the Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan.
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Extract

This article examines the role gender plays in the pilgrimage rites in Mecca at the turn of this century. I argue, as a student of local cultures rather than a scholar of universalistic Islamic beliefs, that portions of the hajj at that time had a special significance for Arab Muslims in and near the Hijaz. Arab pilgrims served, ad dressed, and even dressed the Kaʿba like a bride. By ascribing feminine charac teristics to the Kaʿba, they temporarily transformed human gender roles and constructed an alternative model of gender that could be utilized when negotiating and renegotiating gender roles in everyday life.

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Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , May 1993 , pp. 285 - 300
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

NOTES

Author's note: It is my pleasure to thank Fadwa El Guindi, not only for her reactions to an earlier draft of this article, but also for the many insights she has shared with me over the years. Although I alone am responsible for any errors in the article's main thesis, she deserves credit for many of the conceptual dis tinctions that I have applied. I also thank Abdlaziz Shebl for his comments on the paper and his invalu able assistance in locating key sources. Finally, I express my gratitude to the seven anonymous reviewers of this article, whose thoughtful and constructive criticisms greatly helped me to revise and improve it.

1 The new ethnographies of Arab gender are represented by Abu-Lughod's, LilaVeiled Sentiments, (Berkeley, Calif., 1986);Google ScholarAltorki's, SorayaWomen in Saudi Arabia (New York, 1986)Google Scholar; Dorsky's, SusanWomen of ʿAmran (Salt Lake City, Ut., 1986);Google ScholarEickelman's, ChristineWomen and Community in Oman (New York, 1984);Google Scholar and Peteet's, JulieGender in Crisis: Women and the Palestinian Resistance Movement (New York, 1991).Google ScholarThose that focus on gender in ritual include Boddy's, JaniceWombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan (Madison, Wisc, 1989);Google ScholarCombs-Schilling's, ElaineSacred Performances: Islam, Sexuality and Sacrifice (New York, 1989);Google Scholar Fadwa El Guindi's El Sebouʿ: Egyptian Birth Ritual (an ethnographic film) (Los Angeles, 1987).

2 Fatna Sabbah's recent polemic represents the most extreme argument that Islam causes sexual inequality. Citing “evidence” from Arabic pornography, Sabbah claims that male Islamic writers view women as voracious sexual animals, and that “in the discourse of orthodox Islam … the relationship between the sexes is nothing but a reflection and incarnation of the … relationship between God, the Master, and his slave, the believer.” Sabbah, Fatna, Women in the Muslim Unconscious (New York, 1984), 81Google Scholar. Although her analogy (man/woman:: master/slave:: God/believer) is similar in form to an analogy which I will make later in this paper (groom/bride:: protector/protected:: pilgrims/Kaʿba), it is very different in content. Her analogy assumes a noncontextualized relationship of limitless authority; mine describes a relationship of obligation in only ritual contexts.

3 Hale, Sondra, “The Politics of Gender in the Middle East”, in Gender and Anthropology, ed. Morgen, S. (Washington, D.C., 1990), 246–49;Google ScholarJoseph, Suad, “Working Class Women's Networks in a Sectarian State: A Political Paradox,” American Ethnologist 10,1 (Winter 1983): 2–3;Google ScholarWaines, David, “Through a Veil Darkly: The Study of Women in Muslim Societies,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 24,4 (Fall 1982): 643Google Scholar.

4 Beck, for instance, cautions us not to view women's status as a direct expression of Islamic religious and legal systems, arguing that “the central issues are the structure and organization of class in equality in the Middle East.” Beck, Lois, “The Religious Lives of Muslim Women,” in Women in Contemporary Muslim Societies, ed. Smith, Jane I. (Cranbury, N.J., 1980), 31, 33, 37, 39–50.Google Scholar Mernissi notes with approval the positive view of sexuality in the hadith literature but argues that “sexual ine quality is the basis” of Islam (and Christianity as well). Mernissi, Fatima, Beyond the Veil (Bloomington, Ind., 1987), xxviii, 8, 107, 165–77.Google Scholar

5 Denny complains that almost all available studies are of the manāsik al-ḥajj (prescriptive manual) genre; see Denny, Frederick, “Islamic Ritual: Perspectives and Theories,” in Approaches to Islam in Religious Studies, ed. Martin, R. (Tucson, 1985), 67–71.Google ScholarEickelman, Dale and Piscatori's, JamesMuslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration, and the Religious Imagination (Berkeley, Calif., 1990) is to my knowledge the only full-length study of the hajj by anthropologists.Google Scholar It focuses more on travel to Mecca than on the pilgrimage rite itself, however. Three studies of Muslim pilgrimage elsewhere that deal with gender are Combs-Schilling, Elaine, Sacred Performances (New York, 1990)Google Scholar, Eickelman, Dale, Moroccan Islam (Austin, Tex., 1976)Google Scholar, and Fadwa El Guindi, El Moulid: Egyptian Religious Festival, an ethnographic film (Los Angeles, 1990).

6 Delaney, Carol, “The Hajj: Sacred and Secular,” American Ethnologist 17,3 (Summer 1990): 513–30.Google Scholar

7 Altorki, , Women in Saudi Arabia, 45–47.Google Scholar

8 Turner, Victor, The Ritual Process (Ithaca, N.Y., 1969);Google Scholaridem, , Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (Ithaca, N.Y., 1974), 166–230Google Scholar; idem, , Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York, 1978)Google Scholar.

9 Turner, , Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, 272–74, 276.Google Scholar

10 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Structural Anthropology (Garden City, N.Y., 1967), 202–38Google Scholar; idem, , The Raw and the Cooked (New York, 1975), 341Google Scholar; idem, , The Naked Man (New York, 1981), 668–84Google Scholar. See also Dumont, Louis, “A Structural Definition of a Folk Deity of Tamil Nad: Aiyanar, the Lord,” in his Religion/Politics and History in India (Paris, 1970)Google Scholar; Guindi, Fadwa El, “Internal and External Constraints on Structure,” in The Logic of Culture, ed. Rossi, I. (New York, 1981)Google Scholar; Valeri, Valerio, Kinship and Sacrifice: Ritual and Society in Ancient Hawaii (Chicago, 1985)Google Scholar.

11 Delaney's discussion of how Turkish Sunni Muslims perceive the hajj illustrates both unity and di versity in Muslim thinking. The villagers whom she interviewed believe that Mecca is the part of the earth closest to the “other world,” öbür dünya, from which they originally came and to which they will return; see Delaney, , “The Hajj,” 516–17Google Scholar. By itself this notion is not far from those found in the Qurʾan (see Sūrat al-Anʿām 36; Sūrat Maryam 40; Sūrat Yā Sīn 83). But Delaney's informants add to it the notion that the believer lives in a state of exile (ghurbet, cf. Arabic ghurba) from his heavenly place of origin and thus, to an extent, from Mecca as well. The idea that believers are in exile from Paradise and from Mecca is foreign to the many Arabic-speaking Muslims that I have known.

12 For example, the number of aghāwāt (eunuchs) present during the hajj was much larger in 1900 than it is today. See Huart, C., “Agha,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam (EI), 1st ed. (Leiden, 1987), 1:180Google Scholar; Allāh, Tawfiq Naṣr, “Nasl ‘munqaṭiʿ al-naẓir” (A Progeny Whose Like Is “Unmatched/Severed”) Majallat al-Yamama (Riyadh), 1092 (7 February 1990): 42–45, for further details.Google Scholar

13 Mortel, Richard T., “The Kiswa: Its Origins and Development From Pre-Islamic Times Until the End of the Mamluk Period,” Ages: A Semi-Annual Journal of Historical, Archaeological and Civilizational Studies (Riyadh) 3,2 (July 1988): 38–43.Google Scholar

14 Wellhausen, Julius, Reste arabische Heidentums (Berlin, 1897), 73.Google Scholar

15 Wensinck, A. J., “Kaʿba,” in EI, 1st ed., 4:591.Google Scholar

16 Burton, Richard F., A Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to al-Madina & Meccah (New York, 1964 [1855]), 1:212.Google Scholar

17 Rifʿ, Ibrahimat Bāshā, Mirʾat al-Ḥaramayn (Cairo, 1925), 1:5, 9–12; 2:304.Google Scholar

18 Survey Department of Egypt, Fihris al-āthār al-islāmiyya bi-madīnat al-Qāhira (Index of Islamic Antiquities in the City of Cairo) (Cairo, 1951), map (scale of 5,000:1) and indexGoogle Scholar; see also Abu-Lughod, Janet, Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (Princeton, N.J., 1971), 64, 84, 175.Google Scholar

19 Spiro, Socrates, Dictionary of the Colloquial Egyptian Dialect, Arabic-English (Beirut, 1973), 448.Google Scholar

20 Fakhouri, Hani, Kafr El-Elow, 2nd ed. (Prospect Heights, III., 1987), 66–69Google Scholar; Lane, Edward, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (London, 1978), 254.Google Scholar

21 Buhl, F., “Maḥmal,” in EI, 1st ed., 5:123–24Google Scholar; Lane, , An Account, 168, 254–55.Google Scholar

22 Rifʿat, Mirʾat al-Ḥaramayn, 2:304Google Scholar; Hava, J. G., al-Faraʾid Arabic-English Dictionary (Beirut, 1970), 819;Google Scholaral-Jurr, Khalil, Larousse: Modern Arabic Dictionary (Paris, 1973), 1262.Google Scholar

23 Rifʿat, , Mirʾat al-Ḥaramayn, 1:41Google Scholar.

24 Hosayn, Mirza Mohammad, A Shiʿite Pilgrimage to Mecca, 1885–1886, ed., trans., annot. H. Farmayan and E. L. Daniel (Austin, Tex., 1990), 215, n. 55Google Scholar; Huart, “Agha,” 180; Naṣr Allāh, “Nasl,” 45, who says there are still a few eunuchs serving the ḥaram in Mecca.

25 al-Jazaʾirī, Abū Bakr Jābir, Minhāj al-Muslim (Beirut, 1976), 276–80Google Scholar; Rifʿat, , Mirʾat al-Ḥaramayn, 1:100–104.Google Scholar

26 Al-Jazaʾirī, , Minhāj al-Muslim, 174–90.Google Scholar

27 Ibid., 178; Gilsenan, Michael, Recognizing Islam (New York, 1982), 117–20.Google Scholar I am not claiming that this is everywhere the case. However, during my fieldwork among the Rashaayda bedouin of Sudan I noticed that men in wuḍuʾ would not shake hands with women to greet them unless the women first wrapped their hands in their loose, wide sleeves. The men said that touching a woman would invalidate their wuḍuʾ. But this does not mean that they believed one sex to be more polluting than the other. As I have pointed out, women can also argue that the touch of a polluting man invalidates a woman's wuḍuʾ; American friends of mine working in Egypt heard this from women informants in 1985 (Burbage and Moore, personal communication). I am sure that my informants, male and female, thought that the sexes should be physically separate during prayer, but I doubt that there was general agreement about the reasons for this.

28 According to hadith, “circumambulation around the House is like the prayer”; see al-Jazaʾiri, , Min-haj al-Muslim, 279Google Scholar.

29 Al-Jazaʾiri, , Minhaj al-Muslim, 278–79.Google Scholar

30 In Ibn Battuta's time, the ritual specialists tried to solve this problem by dividing the maṭāf into sex-specific areas, spreading white sand over the peripheral portion and designating it for women; see al-Bustani, Karam, ed., Riḥlat Ibn Baṭṭuṭa (Beirut, 1963), 138Google Scholar. Shiʿitic tradition solves it by setting aside a period during the hajj for women to make the ṭawāf, see Farmayan and Daniel, eds. A Shiʿite Pilgrimage, 210. Neither of these solutions was accepted by the majority of pilgrims at the beginning of the present century, however.

31 For a discussion of ritual mediation, see Guindi, Fadwa El and Selby, Henry, “Dialectics in Zapotec Thinking,” in Meaning in Anthropology, ed. Basso, K. and Selby, H. (Albuquerque, N.M., 1976).Google Scholar

32 Junior aghāwāt were, required to remain inside the ḥaram for seven years continuously, serving the Kaʿba, before they could be confirmed in their roles and be advanced to more senior positions; see Naṣr Allāh, “Nasl,” 44.

33 There are other traditions that identify castration, not consecration, as the primary qualification for such “servants of the House.” Ibn Battuta, writing about the aghāwāt of the tomb of the Prophet in Medina, relates the following story: “The resident master is… Abu ʿAbd Allah…. He is the one who castrated himself, out of fear of fitna [sexual temptation]…. He was the slave of a shaykh named ʿAbd al-Hamid…, who would leave him in his house whenever he was away…. One time he went on a trip and left him… in his home. The shaykh's wife took hold of him and tried to seduce him…. He became afraid for his soul and so castrated himself and fainted. The people found him in this condition and nursed him back to health, and he became one of the servants of the noble mosque…”; al-Bustānī, Riḥlat Ibn Baṭṭuṭa, 121.Google Scholar

34 Jomier did not recognize that the decorated cloth over the door was called al-burquʿ. He said that the entire kiswa was called al-burquʿ, but only in Egypt; see Jomier, J., “Kaʿba,” EI, 2nd ed. (Leiden, 1978), 4:317Google Scholar. Perhaps he was misled by Rifʿat's vague wording in Mirʾat al-Ḥaramayn (1:7), where he uses the same word, sitāra (“curtain”), to refer to both the kiswa and the part of the kiswa known as the burquʿ. Later in the same volume (1:291), however, he gives the door covering its correct name (burquʿ). Ibn Battuta also called the covering of the door al-burquʿ (al-Bustānī, Riḥlat Ibn Baṭṭuṭa, 134), and Lane also reports that al-burquʿ is “the curtain of the door of the Kaabeh; a thing with which a woman veils her face.” See Lane, Edward, Arabic-English Lexicon (London, 1984), 1:192Google Scholar.

35 Rifʿat, , Mirʾāt al-Ḥaramayn, 1:7–8, 265, 277–78, 291–94.Google Scholar

36 William C. Young, “Decorated Bedouin Clothing.” Paper presented at the Middle East Studies Association Meeting, Philadelphia, 1982. In recent years the Rashaayda have shifted from a subsistence economy to wage-labor. Now that they can afford to buy a greater variety of clothing, some men wear pastel colors. This innovation was probably not known ninety years ago. Men still do not wear red or black.

37 See ʿAwaḍ, ʿAwaḍ Saʿud, “al-Zakhārīf wa-al-nuqūsh fi al-thawb al-Filasṭīnī,” Al-Maʾthūrāt al-Shaʿbiyya, 13 (1989): 29–37Google Scholar; Maghribī, Muḥammad ʿAli, Malāmiḥ al-ḥayāt al-ijtimaʿiyya fi al-Ḥijāz fi al-qarn al-räbiʿ ʿashar lil-hijra (Jidda, 1985), 73–74, 81–89Google Scholar; Köln, Rautenstrauch-Jöst-Museum der Stadt, Pracht und Geheimnis: Kleidung und Schmuck aus Palästina und Jordanien (Cologne, 1987)Google Scholar; Rugh, Andrea, Reveal and Conceal: Dress in Contemporary Egypt (Syracuse, N.Y., 1986), 77–101Google Scholar; Weir, Shelagh, Palestinian Costume (Austin, Tex., 1989), 45–72, 79–157Google Scholar.

38 Maghribī, , Malāmiḥ al-Hayāt, 76, 84–85Google Scholar; Spiro, , Dictionary, 489Google Scholar.

39 Verbs derived from the root ḥ-l-y have various denotations, depending on how it is vowelled. The verb ḥalā/yaḥlī is transitive and can have either a masculine or feminine subject, as in ḥalā sayfahu ḥalyan (he adorned his sword) or ḥalat bintahā ḥalyan (she adorned her daughter), but ḥaliya/yaḥlā is intransitive and can have only a feminine subject: ḥaliyat al-imraʾatu ḥalyan (the woman adorned herself); see Hava, , al-Faraʾid, 140Google Scholar; al-Jurr, , Larousse, 462Google Scholar. The feminine connotation of the word is so strong that some authors hesitate to apply it to men's jewelry. Maghribi, for instance, when describing the gold watches and rings worn by men in the Hijaz around 1900, says “The most important jewelry [hulī] used by men, if it is correct to apply the word hulī to something that men wear, was the ring,” Maghribī, Malāmiḥ al-Hayāt, 92.

40 A1-Bustānī, Riḥlat Ibn Baṭṭuṭa, 168Google Scholar; al-Jurr, , Larousse, 723Google Scholar.

41 Rifʿat, Mirʾāt al-Ḥaramayn, 1:265.

42 Naṣr Allah, “Nasl,” 45.

43 Al-Bustan, , Riḥlat Ibn Baṭṭuṭa, 171Google Scholar; Rifʿat writes: “The kiswa of the Kaʿba… is put on the Kaʿba at the same time as the covering for the station of Abraham, on the tenth day of Dhūūūū al-Ḥijja, when the people are at Mina,” Mirʾāt al-Ḥaramayn, 1:265. This is partly incorrect; the pilgrims go to Mina on the eighth day of the month, not the tenth. See al-Jazaʾiri, , Minhāj al-Muslim, 276.Google Scholar

44 See Maghribī, , Malāmiḥ al-Ḥayat, 49Google Scholar. In Palestinian tradition the definition of kiswa as a man's obligatory gift of clothing to his wife is explicit. The portion of a bride's wedding trousseau (jihāz) that she is given by the groom is called the kiswa. See Weir, , Palestinian Costume, 74Google Scholar.

45 Rifʿat, , Mirʾāt al-Ḥaramayn, 1:35Google Scholar. There are also instances of the Kaʿba being likened to a woman. For example, when al-Tabari wrote about the destruction of the Kaʿba by Umayyad armies in A.D. 683, he said that the house looked “like the torn bosoms of mourning women.” See Hitti, Philip, A History of the Arabs (London, 1970), 192CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 Non-Arab pilgrims—from Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, and elsewhere—may not have per ceived the feminine traits of the Kaʿba, since they did not view it through the filters of Arab traditions and the Arabic language.

47 Perhaps this structure is replicated at the level of the Arabic ritual lexicon. The words ḥaram (sanctuary) and ḥarām (forbidden, as in the phrase bayt Allāh al-ḥarām, “God's forbidden house,” i.e., the Kaʿba and the mosque surrounding it) are derived from the same root as ḥarim (women; the section of the house forbidden to men who are not related to its women). Other ethnographers of Islamic societies (Zeid, Ahmad Abou, “Honour and Shame among the Bedouins of Egypt,” in Honour and Shame, ed. Peristiany, J. G. [Chicago, 1965]Google Scholar; Bourdieu, Pierre, “La maison kabyle ou le monde renversé,” in échanges et Communications: Mélanges offerts à Claude Lévi-Strauss à l‧occasion de son 60ème anniversaire, ed. Pouillon, J. and Maranda, P. [Paris, 1968]) have suggested that the “feminine” part of the house is sacredGoogle Scholar; it may be that, in Mecca, the sacred part of the house is feminine.

48 Burton (A Personal Narrative, 141) says that, although the face veil was formally prohibited dur ing pilgrimage, some Turkish women pilgrims got around this prohibition by donning a mask during iḥram that did not actually touch their faces. Rifʿat, however, clearly disapproves of veiling during the hajj. For example, he complains that “For the bedouin men, iḥrām is only a matter of uncovering their forearms and their heads; the rest of their bodies remain covered. Their hair is tangled and uncombed, and most of them have long hair that is braided in a way that more resembles the hair of our women. As for their women, they are veiled, so that almost nothing of their features is visible” (Rifʿat, Mirʾat al-Ḥaramayn, 1:35). So it seems that the prohibition on veiling during the pilgrimage was taken seriously, at least by Rifʿat. For a description of the textual ban on veiling during the hajj, see Khamīs, Muḥammad ʿAṭiyya, Fiqh al-nisaʾ fi al-ḥajj (The Islamic Canon for Women during the Pilgrimage) (n.p., 1982), 64–66Google Scholar.

49 See Mernissi, , Beyond the Veil, 137–38.Google Scholar

50 That is, the constant confinement of elite women to houses. This is not to be confused with the sexual division of space, which can be imposed on any area or setting dynamically and which requires complementarity between women's and men's roles.

51 In profane contexts, women's ordinary apparel, with its gold and jewelry, reflected to some extent their removal from commerce; rather than manage wealth they wore it. But during the hajj neither men nor women had any special connection with trade.

52 See Scott, James C., Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, Conn., 1985Google Scholar).