Charles Long's definition of religion as orientation makes Islam an unusually religious religion. Not only are Muslims required to orient themselves to the qibla, or the direction of the Kaʿba, for ritual prayer, but being oriented to the qiblais compulsory for bodies placed in the grave and the performance of certain rituals of the pilgrimage to Mecca, and it is recommended for ritual ablution and petitionary prayer (duʿāʾ). Depending on the jurist and law school, turning the heads of animals about to be ritually slaughtered towards the qibla is also either compulsory or recommended.Conversely, it is forbidden to orient oneself to the qibla when defecating or urinating; and transgressing the requirement to have a qibla orientation for the other actions is sometimes regarded as an ingredient of sorcery (siḥr). For good reason, then, Muslims are known as ‘the people of the qibla’ (ahl al-qibla), an appellation that allegedly dates to the time of the Prophet.

Arguably, these acts of orientation about the Kaʿba have their apotheosis in the annual pilgrimage, or Hajj, to Mecca, the site of the Kaʿba. This event has proven sufficiently fascinating to outside observers to make Mecca enter the English language as the very definition of a desirable, popular destination. This interest notwithstanding, for a building that does more than just fascinate but in Islamic culture functions variously and profoundly, the Kaʿba has received little attention in architectural scholarship and barely figures in the many survey texts of Islamic art. The aim of this book is to correct that neglect, by studying how the Kaʿba works or is alleged to work in the Islamic world, and what that work enables for Islam and generates for the Islamic world. In brief, the book studies the work of a building the Qurʾan calls the Ancient House (al-Bayt al-ʿAtīq).

The Work of Art

The idea that a building, painting or sculpture works in this or that culture should need no special pleading. From Hegel's talk of art liberating ‘the real import of appearances’ and presenting ‘ the Absolute itself ‘, to Heidegger's notion of the artwork setting up and opening a world, one speaks about the work of art with good reason.