The publication of this volume is testimony to a sea-change in the study of the art, architecture and material culture of the Islamic lands that has reshaped the field over the past two decades. That shift reflects a peculiar paradox of Islamic art history as a field that emerged under the rubric of religion but which, until recently, has failed to take the relationship between artistic and devotional practice seriously. While the study of the mosque as an architectural type has been a canonical stalwart, the study of devotional art more broadly has generally been a neglected topic, apart from a few pioneering outliers. Indeed, the very existence of devotional art in Islam has, at times, been seen as an oxymoron, especially in view of the widespread cliché of Islamic art as an aniconic art.
A range of scholarship appearing from the early 2000s onwards has put paid to such idées reçues, while drawing attention to a dizzying array of media and materials attesting to the vibrancy of the forms of devotional art (both representational and non-representational, figurative and non-figurative) that have proliferated throughout the Islamic lands. Four subjects have emerged as central: the representation (in various forms) of the Prophet Muhammad (and, in Shiʿi contexts, the ahl al-bayt); relics and their depiction; the representation of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina; and the art, architecture and material culture associated with pilgrimage to both centres.
Much of this recent work has focused on the early modern period (however one defines it) and on the devotional arts of the Ottoman lands in particular. The essays in this volume introduce a range of materials that have not previously been part of the rapidly evolving conversations around the arts of devotion. Focusing on depictions of Mecca and Medina, their range is indicative of the wide variety of artifacts on and in which images of the holy cities circulated. While the conventional nature of such imagery qualifies its absolute documentary value, considering the destruction wrought on the holy cities over the past few decades,1 many of the images discussed in this volume provide a poignant insight into the extended topography of pilgrimage before and after modernity.
The geographic scope of the essays is striking, extending from Arabia to Bosnia and the Ottoman lands to Iran and South and Southeast Asia. The volume closes with Avinoam Shalem’s analysis of an important series of seventeenth-century European drawings of Mecca, mistakenly assumed to be the burial place of the Prophet Muhammad. The topic is especially appropriate as a closing essay, since the misprision continued well into the twentieth century, even being repeated by the high priest of modernism, Le Corbusier.2
Taken collectively, several major themes run through the essays. I will highlight just three: the role of the holy cities as centres of artistic production; the relationship between the commemorative, documentary and prophylactic or protective value of images of the Ḥaramayn; and the implications of iconographic and stylistic variety in the depictions.
Some of the illustrated certificates and scrolls discussed in the volume seem to have been produced in the Hijaz, raising interesting questions about the region as a centre of artistic production for materials related to pilgrimage. This is an oddly neglected topic within a canon that has tended to privilege imperial patronage in large urban centres over political (if not religiously and symbolically) more marginal regions. And yet, from an early date, Mecca and Medina lay at the centre of cosmopolitan scholarly networks extending from the Maghrib to Southeast Asia and from Central Asia to East and West Africa. There is no reason to assume that the artistic networks governing the production and dissemination of textual and visual representations of the holy cities were any less vibrant. On the contrary, we might bear in mind the substantial numbers of Indian artists reportedly operating in the Hijaz in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These and other resident artisans and artists produced both illustrated devotional texts and single page depictions which had a wide circulation and could serve as models for larger, less ephemeral renderings of the holy cities.
If the holy cities formed the hub of transregional artistic and scholarly networks that constituted an early form of globalism fostered both by the notion of the umma and the imperatives of pilgrimage, that network was characterized by both centripetal and centrifugal forces. Not only were ideas, images and texts disseminated from the Hijaz but also carried there by pilgrims, contributing to the latter’s experience of artifacts and images drawn from the widest possible geography. Perhaps the most obvious instantiation of this push and pull is the fate of the rich imperial textiles dispatched from Cairo, and later Istanbul, to cover the walls of the Kaʿba and the Rawḍa; once they had served their function and been replaced, they were collected for redistribution, many being dispatched back to the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, where they were preserved as precious relics.3
This transformation of mundane materials into charged carriers of sanctity highlights the paradoxical (and often contested) belief in the capacity of material artifacts to transmit immaterial baraka or blessings, including those of place, something addressed in several of the essays. However, beyond their likely role as indexes of place or carriers of its blessings, many of the images discussed in this volume were, either implicitly or explicitly, associated with prophylaxis and protection. The perceived efficacy of images of Mecca and Medina in this regard seems to have been established early, for an unstudied subgroup of early block-printed pilgrimage scrolls datable to between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries bears texts explicitly attesting to their function as amulets, combining documentary and protective functions.4 Moreover, the earliest extant dated images of Mecca may appear not on paper but on a highly portable class of metal magic-medicinal bowls all bearing the date 574/1174–75, some of which describe themselves as talismans offering protection from a range of quotidian threats, ranging from illness to fire, theft and even drowning at sea.5
The capacity of images of Mecca and Medina to protect against similar maladies and mishaps is common to many of the images discussed in this volume, where their efficacy is often concatenated by association with images of prophetic relics, such as footprints, sandals and (more rarely) handprints. While a physical association with the holy cities was evidently considered sufficient to transmit something of their blessings, in other cases, even reproducing the distinctive forms of the Kaʿba and the Rawḍa in the absence of any indexical connection to either city could be considered sufficient to imbue painted images with something of their baraka and protective qualities. Moreover, similar to many amulets and talismans, some of the images of Mecca and Medina form part of complex assemblages: quite literally so in the case of the segmented paper scroll discussed by Deniz Beyazit. The additive aspect of such materials is perfectly in keeping with the nature of many esoteric texts, generally compiled as majmūʿāt or miscellanies, in which diverse formulae and texts are united in a segmented whole.
Taken collectively, the essays highlight a third aspect of such imagery that has received far less attention than it deserves; iconographic and stylistic variety. Perusing the images discussed below, one is struck by the diversity of possibilities, which extend well beyond the much-vaunted shift from combining multiple views in a single image to the perspectival views favoured from the eighteenth century onwards. While many of the images attest to a concern with veracity – for example, faithfully rendering the addition of minarets, pavilions and gates as the architecture of the Ḥaramayn was transformed by imperial patronage – they also reflect regional iconographic and stylistic trends. These might be seen as a means of domesticating the pilgrimage cities, bringing them home to diverse audiences in an established and familiar visual language. But, at their most intriguing, they extend beyond stylistic variants to encompass more extensive choices: the unusual Southeast Asian depiction of the Kaʿba in section rather than elevation discussed by Nurul Iman Rusli is a case in point.
The significance of such differences awaits further investigation, but finds its corollary in the consistent manner in which the topography of Mecca and Medina is depicted in popular early modern devotional and pilgrimage texts, such as the Futūḥ al-Ḥaramayn. The rather abstracted quality of such topographic renderings relates them to images found in other genres of illustrated texts, including the diagrams found in scientific texts intended for edification and instruction, and perhaps even the condensed, schematic imagery often associated with amulets and talismans. It is almost as if the potency of line itself condensed and distilled the essence of place while creating a series of visual associations that underline the likely role of such imagery in educating for and memorializing the (sometimes vicarious) experience of pilgrimage. If the absence of such figures in most extant copies of the text has less to do with a reluctance to figure than with the adoption of resonant genre conventions, the rare cases discussed by Marika Sardar in which human figures were inserted suggests that, for some consumers of such imagery at least, such abstracted imagery was insufficient to close the gap between image, place and viewer.
The insertion of figures into the imagery of the Futūḥ brings its iconography close to that found in other genres of illustrated texts, such as the depictions of the ill-fated lovers Layla and Majnun discussed by Nicoletta Fazio. The overlap reminds us of the affective magnetism of the holy cities and their images, the yearning, passion and desire that both inspire(d), even in pictorial form. As so many pilgrims have noted, the experience of pilgrimage could and can be transformative. Sometimes the experience and its commemoration by means of imagery carried from Mecca or Medina coincided, as is the case with the nineteenth-century wall-paintings of the holy cities in Sarajevo discussed by Haris Dervišević. It is possible that the models for these monumental depictions were chromolithographs, a reminder of how the advent of photography, chromolithography and even the mass-produced commercial imagery found on postcards expanded the possibilities for the dissemination of such imagery exponentially.
See, for example, Daniel Howden, “The destruction of Mecca: Saudi hardliners are wiping out their own heritage”, Independent, 6 August 2005, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-destruction-of-mecca-saudi-hardliners-are-wiping-out-their-own-heritage-304029.html; Ziauddin Sardar, “The destruction of Mecca”, The New York Times, 30 September 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/01/opinion/the-destruction-of-mecca.html; Adeel Mohammadi, “The destruction of Jannat al-Baqī: A case of Wahhābī iconoclasm”, University of Toronto Undergraduate Journal of Middle East Studies 8 (2014–15): 47–56; Rosie Bsheer, Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia (Cambridge: Stanford University Press, 2020).
Le Corbusier, La Ville Radieuse (Paris, Éditions Vincent, Fréal & Co., 1964 [1933]), 154.
See, for example, Hülya Tezcan, Sacred Covers of Islam’s Holy Shrines with Samples from the Topkapı Palace (Istanbul, Masa, 2017).
Sule Aksoy and Rachel Milstein, “A collection of thirteenth- century illustrated Hajj certificates”, in Ugur Derman Festschrift: Papers Presented on the Occasion of his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Irvin Cemil Schick (Sabanci University, Istanbul, 2000), 128, pl. 11; Lyla Halsted, “Printing, protection, and pilgrimage: A block printed Arabic amulet depicting Mecca and Medina”, Muqarnas 42 (forthcoming, 2026).
Roberta Giunta, The Aron Collection: Islamic Magico- Therapeutic Bowls (Instituto per L’oriente C.A. Nallino, Rome, 2018), 213–218.