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“The holy precincts around the Kaaba contain stories stretching back to the very beginning of time,” writes Sardar. Adam, remembered in Islam as the first prophet, is said in Arabian tradition to have visited the city and to be buried there. It is also believed by some to be remembered as a place of pilgrimage in the Bible, under its earlier name of Baca: “Blessed are those… who have set their hearts on pilgrimage,” reads Psalm 84. “As they pass through the valley of Baca, they make it a place of springs.” Exactly what the pilgrims were worshipping seems to have changed over time: a succession of pagan deities were the subject of rituals in the Kaaba over almost a millennium. Then in the early 7th century the prophet Muhammad swept them all away and replaced the idols with the idea of a single almighty god, Allah. His revelations were said to have been dictated to him, through the person of the Angel Gabriel, in a cave on a mountainside high above the city. Recently, scholars such as Patricia Crone and Tom Holland have cast doubt on whether Mecca was actually the place where Muhammad received his revelations and where the Qur’an reached its substantive form. The geography of the Qur’an, with its vines and olive groves, they argue, appears to resemble far more the Mediterranean littoral than the bleak wastes of the Hejaz. Slightly frustratingly, this version of events is dismissed by Sardar in little more than a footnote, with the observation that “absence of evidence amounts to little more than absence of archaeology”, itself the results of the Saudi royal family’s “horror of history”. What Sardar gives us, instead, is a beautifully rendered account of the Muslim version of events, as told by a rational, likable, intelligent and mildly sceptical follower of the prophet. Sardar aims to make us understand why this great city has been the focus for the prayers of so many billions of human beings through time and across the globe. The tale opens with Abraham, and his concubine, Hagar. At the urging of his wife, Sarah, Abraham took Hagar and her son, Ishmael, and left them in the desert outside the site of the future city of Mecca. But God answered Hagar’s prayers for help and the spring of Zamzam was revealed to them. According to the Qur’an, it is their descendants who first peopled the valley and built the city.
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