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Miḥrāb1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

Extract

THE origin of the term miḥrāb is somewhat obscure. In Islām it is usually particularly applied to the prayer-niche, and the article in the Encyclopaedia of Islām2 treats of it only as such, yet this technical usage of the word seems to be derived from a more primitive and general meaning, and on the balance of the evidence its emergence as a name for a part of the sanctuary appears to be Islāmic only. Miḥrāb has been discussed by Nöldeke,3 by Horovitz,4 and by Landberg.5 It has been discussed in connexion with architectural studies by Creswell,6 and by Sauvaget.7 These studies cite a number of references and sources which I have re-examined, but do not propose to repeat in toto. Each of these authorities shows conclusively that the employment in the technical sense of prayer-niche is not early.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1959

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References

page 439 note 2 El, under ‘Ḳibla’, ‘Mihrab’.

page 439 note 3 Neue Beiträge zur semitischen Sprachwissenschaft, Strassburg, 1910, p. 52, footnote.Google Scholar

page 439 note 4 Bemerkungen zur Geschichte und Terminologie’, j (Strassburg), XVI, 1927, 260–3.Google Scholar

page 439 note 5 Glossaire , Leiden, 1920–1942, 393 seq.

page 439 note 6 Early Muslim architecture, Oxford, 1932, I, p. 99.Google Scholar

page 439 note 7 La mosquée omeyyade de Médine, Paris, y, 145 seq.Google Scholar

page 439 note 8 Cairo, A.H. 1306, I, 206.Google Scholar

page 439 note 9 seems also applicable to houses of some sort, for there are two ḥaḍramī villages with these names.

page 439 note 10 Brockelmann, GAL, I, 107, Suppl., I, 166 seq.Google Scholar

page 439 note 11 Ibn Duraid, al-Ishtiqāq ed. F. Wüstenfeld (Göttingen, 1854), p. 47, reads lam adnu ḥattā, for lam alqa-hā aw, the former being preferable.

page 439 note 12 Qur'ān XXXVIII, 21.

page 440 note 1 The eommentators render this phrase as, Idh taṢa“adū sūr

page 440 note 2 Al-Faiyūmi, al-MiṢbāḥ al-munīr, Cairo, 1912, 198. could mean ‘most honourable’.

page 440 note 3 Lisān al-'Arab, I, 206, new ed., I, 305.Google Scholar

page 440 note 4 The famous castle of the site of which is still known to this day.

page 440 note 5 XIX, 10.

page 440 note 6 cf. Brockelmann, , GAL, I, 103. Abū 'Ubaidah was born in 110/728.Google Scholar

page 441 note 1 Qur'ān XXXIV, 13. These were provided for Solomon along with jifan like cisterns (jābiyah), and cooking pots. The decorated miḥrābs were then probably places where guests were entertained. In view of recent archaeological discoveries in Southern Arabia it is interesting to find the commentators state that Solomon's throne was set on two lions while two eagles (nasr) were above it.

page 441 note 2 An angel's head in marble discovered in ḥuṢn al-Ranād in Tarīm has been embodied in the new castle built on that site.

page 441 note 3 Of al-Azharī, ob. A.H. 270.

page 441 note 4 Rathjens, C. and Goitein, S. D., Jewish domestic architecture in San'a, Yemen, Jerusalem, 1957, 73. See also p. 451 infra.Google Scholar

page 441 note 5 Building and builders in ḥaḍramawt’, Le Muséon, LXII, 1949, 284. Perhaps in Ibn al-Mujāwir, al-MustabṢir, ed. O. Löfgren, Leiden, 1951–4, II, 181, there is an echo of this sense of qaṢr.Google Scholar

page 441 note 6 ‘The meaning of Jewish Quarterly Review, XX, 1908, 637–9.

page 442 note 1 Ṣifat jazīrat al-'Arab, ed. Müller, D. H., Leiden, 18841891, I, 107, 195.Google Scholar

page 442 note 2 cf. Mordtmann, J. H. and Mittwoch, E., Sabäische Inschriften, Hamburg, 1931, 221–3.Google Scholar

page 442 note 3 cf. R, 4632, where M. Höfner renders it ‘Kampfszene’. Maḥmūd al-Ghūl has supplied me with the followiag additional material on tḥrb.

CIH, 537, 10–12, reads:

10. /thmdhw/bhr

11. 'yt/hr'y/lhm

12. w/btḥrbn

Mordtmann and Mittwoch translate: ‘and in gratitude to him for the vision which he showed them in ?’. With this inscription they compare two more in which offerings of thanksgivings for visione are made. In ono case the vision was shown or revealed in bN'MN/w'LM, two temples of in the other ‘WM, in the temple of'Awwam’. On all of this they comment: ‘In all three cases it has to do with Incubationsorakel, vision during retreat’. One more inscription mentions revelation of a vision to be compared with these, RES, 3929, 5, which reads: ḥgn/khr'yhw/bsnthw/, to be translated, ‘In accordance with what he showed him in his slumber’. With snt compare Arabic sinah ‘slumber’, as in Qur'ān II, 255, sinat-un wa-lā nawm-un.

So from these inscriptions we perceive that visions were revealed in temples during sleep, and in tḥrb. I do not think that tḥrbn in CIH, 357, 12, should be equated either with a temple or with slumber, but that it is another aspect or circumstance associated with the ritual or manner of seeing visions.

With this form of Incubationsorakel one can compare two practices in Islam; the Ṣalāt al-istikhārah and al-i'tikāf fi 'l-masjid. In the former a person seeking God's help through a revelation of His will to indicate a correct decision he should make, would, according to ‘unorthodox’ practices, perform a special prayer, and then go to sleep in full ritual purity of person and place—which would sometimes be in the mosque itself, hoping a vision would revea to him, while slumbering, what he sought to know. (Cf. El, art. ) In i'tikāf the worshipper retires for the last ten days of Ramaḍān into the premises of the mosque, laying on himself rigorous rules of abstinence. The retreat is closely related to the watching of Lailat al-Qadr which is supposed to fall sometimes during these last ten days of that month. It is possible to equate tḥrbn as a practice with i'tikāf. Linguistic support can be found in the statement that the miḥrāb al-masjid is so called because the Imām is alone in it, and that the miḥrāb is the place where the king is alone (cf. Tāj, supra). This sense of retreat or isolation compares exactly with miḥrāb in Qur'ān III, 37, 39, and XIX, 11. I take tḥrbn here, if it is understood as an act, as the verbal noun of form V. As such it could be denominative, in the sense of per-forming something in, or to do with, a miḥrāb. In this connexion it may be recalled that Arabic miḥrāb can apply to a tent (Lane), and that the Prophet performed his i'tikāf in a tent within the mosque. If, however, tḥrbn is to be taken as denoting a place, then it is possibly a tif'āl like Arabic as Professor Beeston suggests, cf. SA tqr ‘dressed stones’, possibly for tinqar (root nqr). As a substantive tḥrb could possibly have meant ‘place of retirement’, in this case either a cell in the temple, or, quite probably, a tent or some other ad hoc building. Another form tḥrbt seems probably to have been some sort of structure. Gl., 738 (RES, 4632) was discovered built into the wall of an irrigation kiosk. Over it was a sculpture representing a man with an axe in his right hand and a shield in his left, with two alert dogs on both sides. The text reads:

1. /bny

2. (ḏ)YHRḥB/šmw/tḥrbt

3. (n/)lwfyhm/ Maria Höfner translates:

1. and his son of the clan

2. have erected this fighting scene

3. for their safety

Dr. Höfner holds that the word tḥrbt is explained by the relief sculpture and that the dogs represent enemies, but I suggest that if the irrigation kiosk into which the inscription was built is a structure of antiquity, and if the inscription is a part of the original structure, the tḥrbt refers to the kiosk itself. The word would then bear the sense of ‘chamber’ or ‘kiosk’, possibly for observation. This may be further corroborated by RES, 3512, an inscription unfortunately badly damaged. It is on a libation altar in the British Museum, and it seems to have been offered as an act of thanksgiving for the building of a tḥrb. Line 3 reads: ‘of fresh fruits (or dates) for the offering (or perhaps the meal, feast) for the kiosk of stone’. ('m'dm, cf. Arabic ma'd ‘tender vegetables, fresh fruits or dates’; mwqr, cf. Arabic walcrah, wakīrah ‘food, a meal, given or made on the occasion of finishing a building’, verb wakara; lim, cf. Arabic salimah, pls. silām and salim, ‘a stone’, in the dialect of ḥimyar. As for the interchange between s and it is sufficient to indicate that this inscription is in ḥaḍramī, a dialect which is known for the changing of s into .) (M.G.)

page 444 note 1 Maḥmūd al-Ghūl has drawn my attention to the following passage from the Tāj al-'arūs, older edit., x, p. 323:

page 444 note 2 Photocopy in SOAS, part II, tale no. 407.

page 444 note 3 Muī Bakr al-rawī, Cairo, A.H. 1319, I, 141. al-rawī, op. cit., I, 136–7, discusses the construction of the Masjid Āl Bā 'Alawī formerly known as the Masjid Banī Aḥmad at Tarīm by the famous Saiyid Muḥammad b. Qasam. It was built of good clay from Bait Jubair, the unbaked clay brick (libn) transported to Tarīm on the engine known as al-jarādīm, ‘which is an engine set on wheels (a 'jāl) drawn by oxen and mules, it also being called al-'arābah’. It was rebuilt by 'Umar al-Miḥḍār in 801/1398–9, and a minaret added in local style, not like those of the Holy Cities which are after Turkish style. Then he built for it a maḥall kanīn, ‘for prayer in the winter days’ adjacent to it on the east side, ‘and it was made a waqf as a mosque known to them as a ḥammām’. ‘On account of its being a kanīn, cisterns (birak) were made near by it in which water is heated; they call it a ḥannām because the ḥammām is derived from ḥammām, i.e. “hot water”, for it is not the Persian ('ajamī) ḥammām concerning prayer in which the prohibition has come down to us.’ The author then cites two Traditions on this subject. This passage is not very explicit as to the location of the kanīn but it looks as if it was built on the side opposite the qiblah, perhaps added to the front of the mosque.

page 446 note 1 Materiale for South Arabian history’, BSOAS, XIII, 2, 1950, 305.Google Scholar

page 446 note 2 op. cit., tale no. 328.

page 446 note 3 Hadramaut, Leiden, 1932, opp. p. 192.Google Scholar

page 446 note 4 A1-Iklīl al-waqqād, cf. ‘Materials for South Arabian history, II’, BSOAS, XIII, 3, 1950, 589. I was able to examine copies of this work in Huraiḍah and in Saiwūn in 1954.Google Scholar

page 446 note 5 Discussed in ‘The cemeteries of Tarīm’, Le Muséon, LXII, 1949, 158.Google Scholar

page 447 note 1 Dakkah, is discussed in ‘A Judeo-Arab house-deed from ḥabbān’, JRAS, 1953, p. 129. Cairo, 1903, 77, refers to the dakkah of a house.Google Scholar

page 447 note 2 De Slane, W. M., Le Diwan d' Amro 'l-Kaïs, Paris, 1837, p. 52/33.Google Scholar

page 447 note 3 Uqūd al-almās, Singapore, 1949– , II, 75.Google Scholar

page 447 note 4 op. cit., 108.

page 447 note 5 op. cit., 154.

page 448 note 1 Quatremère, E. M., Histoire des sultans mamelukes, Paris, 1837, II, appendix, p. 282Google Scholar seq.; cf. ibid., I, 164, citing a text referring to the Umaiyad Mosque mentioning a ‘miḥrāb avec (fī-hi) trois maḲṢūrah’. Quatremère quotes several references to miḥrāb in the Damascus mosque which seem to show that the maqṢūrah contained or abutted on to a miḥrāb. Perhaps the phrase quoted means that the miḥrāb was so large that there were several maqṢūrahs in front of it. For this study the material he quotes is, however, rather late, except in so far as it seems to suggest that the name miḥrāb may have been particularized from the whole maqṢūrah to the qiblah in front of it.

page 448 note 2 The governors and judges of Egypt, ed. Guest, A. R., London, 1912, p. 62.Google Scholar

page 448 note 3 The history of the conqmst of Egypt, ed. Torrey, C. C., New Haven, 1922, p. 238.Google Scholar

page 448 note 4 Ed. Amedroz, H. F., History of Damascus, Leiden, 1908, 9.Google Scholar

page 448 note 5 Tabarī, ed. M. J. de Goeje, etc., Leiden, 1879–1901, I, 2408. ḥawqal, Ibn, Viae et regna …, ed. De Goeje, M. J., Leiden, 1873, 112 seq.Google Scholar

page 448 note 6 Lammens, H., ‘Ziād ibn Abīhi’, Rivista degli Studi Orientali, IV, 19111912, 246.Google Scholar

page 448 note 7 Here I have rendered ittaqū following my theory that it is not always to be derived from the root but often from the root and that it means as it would in tribal law in South Arabia to-day, to purify or absolve oneself from. I think it will be conceded that this gives a better sense here.

page 448 note 8 Tāj al-'arūs, older edition, I, 759.Google Scholar

page 449 note 1 Wensinck, A. J., Concordance de la Tradition musulmane, Leiden, 1936–.Google Scholar

page 449 note 2 Rhodokanakis, N., Der Dîwân des 'Ubaid-Allâh ibn Kais ar-RuḲajjât (Sitzungsberichte der Kais. Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien. Philos.-hist. Kl., CXLIV), Wien, 1902, 74.Google Scholar

page 449 note 3 ibid., 222.

page 449 note 4 Tāj al-'arūs, op. cit., I, 486Google Scholar

page 450 note 1 Al-Mubarrad, al-Kāmil, ed. Aḥmad Muḥ. Cairo, 1937–56, II, 607. The phrase ‘on the side of’ is susceptible of more than one interpretation; cf. W. Wright's edition, 378.

page 450 note 2 The Hombrechtikon plaque’, Iraq, XVI, 1, 1954, 23–8. May this plaque perhaps represent a hierodule dancing at some religious ceremony, and a male devotee who has stripped himself naked in his ecstasy ?Google Scholar

page 450 note 3 Al-Kāmil, op. cit., II, 767; W. Wright's ed., 460.Google Scholar

page 450 note 4 Gloss. , 394.

page 450 note 5 Diokson, H. R. P., The Arab of the desert, London, 1949, 68–9. The cloth projecting above the tent poles might eonceivably be compared with a dome (qubbah), or vice versa the dome might be likened to the projection of the tent.Google Scholar

page 451 note 1 See p. 442, n. 3.

page 451 note 2 See p. 442, n. 3.

page 451 note 3 The Tāj al-'arūs refers to 'Alī sitting in the raḥbat Masjid al-Kūfah, wa-hiya Ṣaḥnu-hu; cf. Samūrah, Ibn, Tabaqāt al-fuqahā' al- Yaman, ed. Saiyid, Fu'ād, Cairo, 1957, 36.Google Scholar

page 451 note 4 Meulen, D. van der, Aden to the Hadramaut, London, 1947, illustration no. 61.Google Scholar

page 451 note 5 Al-Mufaḍḍalīyāt, ed. Lyall, C. J., Oxford, 1921, p. 213; trans., Oxford, 1918, p. 75.Google Scholar

page 452 note 1 Quoted in Gloss, 395.

page 452 note 2 cf. Guillaume, A., The life of Muḥammad, O.U.P., 1955, 32.Google Scholar

page 452 note 3 Ibn al-Mujāwir, op. oit., II, 182.Google Scholar

page 452 note 4 Vorislamische Altertümer’, Südarabien-Reise, Hamburg, 1932, II, 65.Google Scholar

page 452 note 1 Sauvaget, op. cit., pp. 94 (fifteenth century pian), 90.

page 452 note 2 op. cit., p. 109.

page 452 note 3 See the pian, based on that of Rathjens and von Wissmann, and supplemented with photographs in Hugh Scott,In the high Yemen, London, 1942, p. 127.Google ScholarRustah, Ibn, Kitāb al-A'lāq al-nafīsah, ed. Goeje, M. J. De (BGA), Leiden, 1892, VII, 110, reports that it was built on a pre-Islāmic site, a temple one surmises, and that this masjid jāmi 'was construeted by order of the Apostle of God, near the walls of of stone and gypsum (jiṢṢ). In the place of the miḥrāb was the grave of one of the prophets (fi mawḍi ‘al-miḥrāb qabr min qubūr al-anbiyā’).Google Scholar

page 452 note 4 Slatin, Rudolf C., Fire and sword in the Sudan, trans, by Wingate, F. R., London, 1897, 320. It looks as if ‘niche’ is a rather unintelligent gloss of the translator, for what Slatin describes is manifestly not a niche, but a species of maqṢūrah.Google Scholar