The Ka'ba Orientations: Readings in Islam's Ancient House
Simon O'Meara
Abstract
This book is about the most sacred site of Islam, the cuboid, black-robed Kaʿba of Mecca, a building the Qur’an calls the ‘ancient house.’ It explains how the building has been used, conceptualised and represented by Muslims from the earliest period of Islam onwards, and reveals the strata in the Kaʿba’s many meaning and the profundity of its importance for the Islamic world. It does this by investigating six of the building’s spatial effects: as the qibla (the direction faced in prayer); as the axis and matrix mundi of the Islamic world; as an architectural principle in the bedrock of this wo ... More
Keywords: Kaʿba (Kaaba), Mecca, Islam, Qibla, Pilgrimage, Circumambulation, Axis mundi, Orientation, Islamic world, Space
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2020 | Print ISBN-13: 9780748699308 |
| Published to Edinburgh Scholarship Online: September 2021 | DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9780748699308.001.0001 |
