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Episode 13. The Sanctuary at the Heart of Islam – Simon O’Meara and Seif El Rashidi

The Kaaba is the sanctuary at the heart of Mecca, to where millions of pilgrims head each year, and towards which the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims pray.  Join Dr Simon O’Meara for a fascinating conversation about the Kaaba and how Muslims have written about it over the centuries.

This podcast is part of Asia House Arts in Isolation Series and Converging Paths, an initiative organised in partnership with the Barakat Trust that promotes the arts and cultures of the Islamic World.

 

Mappa mundi with the Kaʿba at the centre, dated 1650 and pasted into a copy of an anonymous tenth/sixteenth-century Ottoman work, Tarih-i Hind-i garbi (‘History of the West Indies’). Gouache, gold and ink on paper; 13.6 × 23.2cm. Courtesy: Leiden University Library. MS Leiden, Or. 12.365, fol. 90b.
of Kharīdat al-ʿajāʾib wa farīdat al-gharāʾib (‘The pearl of wonders and the uniqueness of strange things’) by the Arab cosmographer Sirāj al-Dīn b. al-Wardī (d. after 1419 C.E.), dated 1503. The captions
Majnūn clasps the knockers of the Kaʿba. From a copy of the Khamsa by Niẓāmī, dated 1431. Gouache, gold and ink on paper; 13.7 × 23.7cm (folio). Courtesy: The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Inv. no. VP-1000, fol. 175r. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Vladimir Terebenin.

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