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‘We were not ordered with entering it but only with circumambulating it.’ Ḥadīth and fiqh on entering the Ka'ba

1984; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1017/s0041977x00037290

1474-0699

G. R. Hawting,

Historical and Linguistic Studies

Works of fiqh often have chapters or sections concerned with various questions related to the topic of entering the Ka'ba, usually signalled by headings such as Fī dukhūl al-Ka'ba or Al-ṣalāt fī ( jawfi ) 'l-Ka'ba . In them a number of ḥadīths are referred to, many of which are to be found in the classical collections and some of which occur as well in ‘historical’ literature such as sīra and ta'rīkh . This paper discusses the way in which this material is presented and developed, both in fiqh and in ḥadīth and ‘historical’ literature, what sort of questions it is concerned with, and what reasons there may be for its existence. This last question is taken up at the end of the paper but here it may be said that I think that the fiqh and ḥadīth material is relevant to an understanding of the development of the Muslim sanctuary and that it illustrates a tension, which is also observable in other traditional material, between two concepts of the sanctuary: is it ‘open’, comparable to a temple or church, or is it ‘closed’, like an ark or sacred stone? Both concepts exist within Muslim tradition, and it seems to me likely that the material discussed in the following two sections has been generated, originally, by the tension between them.