A murk such as this spreads impenetrably. Where precisely Muhammad believed Bakka to have stood it is surely now impossible to say. Such evidence as might once have existed has long since been lost. Clues remain, but they are all of them ambiguous and fragmentary in the extreme. The ancient Greeks told the story of a robber named Procrustes, who would tie his victims to a bed, and then either stretch or mutilate them until they had been made to fit it: a methodology that the historian of early Islam often has little choice but to follow. Speculation as to where Bakka may originally have stood must perforce be procrustean—but since this caveat applies as surely to theories that would identify it with modern-day Mecca as to those that would not, there seems no need to apologise for it. Some mysteries are doomed forever to defy solution.
That said, it is possible to hazard a speculation. It is surely significant, at the very least, that Arabs in the wilds beyond Palestine had a pronounced taste for the appropriation of biblical settings. No less than Jews or Christians, they had long flocked to the sanctuary at Mamre: the very place—or maqom—where Abraham “had stood before the Lord.” Furthermore, they had achieved what no other people beyond the limits of the Christian empire had even thought to obtain: a convincing claim upon the authentic bloodline of Abraham. The right of the Arabs to the title of “Ishmaelites,” by virtue of their descent from Hagar, Abraham’s concubine and Ishmael’s mother, was freely acknowledged across the Fertile Crescent; and if the faintest hint of a sneer might occasionally linger when someone from beyond the deserts brought up the name, then the Arabs themselves were perfectly capable of a matching snobbery all of their own. Far from feeling embarrassed at having had a slave-girl in the family, those who were aware of their Hagarene lineage had come to revel in it. In the 660s, some two centuries after Theodoret had first reported the Ishmaelites’ pride in their ancestry, a Nestorian chronicler on the Persian border with Mesopotamia alluded to the existence of a mysterious domed sanctuary, supposedly founded by Abraham and sacred to the Arabs. “Indeed,” the chronicler added, “it is nothing new for the Arabs to worship there—for, from the beginning, from their earliest days, they have shown reverence to the father of the head of their nation.”76 A most arresting detail—for this is almost identical to what is reported in the Qur’an. There, in the passage on the House at Bakka, the Prophet identified the man who founded it as having been none other than Abraham himself. Is it possible, then, that the sanctuary praised in the Qur’an as the primal, the “blessed place,”77 was the same identical one known as far afield as Persia as “the Dome of Abraham”?
Muslim scholars, in their understandable efforts to identify Bakka with Mecca, went to great and often fantastical lengths to explain how a patriarch who, according to venerable tradition, had been promised Canaan by God, and not Arabia, might conceivably have ended up in Mecca. Some had him abandoning Hagar and Ishmael there during the course of an extended road-trip; others, rather startlingly, described him as being guided by the Shekhinah—the name applied by the rabbis to the divine presence on earth. Such theories—floated in contradiction to both the Bible and an entire millennium of obsessive elaboration upon the story of Abraham and his bloodline—seem to have been wholly original to the Muslim scholars themselves.f Certainly, if any contemporaries of Muhammad believed that Abraham had been active in Mecca, there is no record of it. That Abraham had settled in Canaan, and that Hagar and Ishmael had taken refuge in one of the various stretches of wilderness that neighboured it, remained in the Prophet’s lifetime what it had always been: something that everyone took utterly for granted.
Nor, in fact, is there anything in the Qur’an itself that would serve to contradict this universal presumption. Just the opposite, in fact. The Bakka described by the Prophet shimmers with the same numinous aura that had long attached itself to another sanctuary: Mamre. “It is the place where Abraham stood to pray”:78 so the Prophet describes Bakka. Of what, then, can this conceivably be an echo, if not the maqom? Certainly, between the Hebrew word for “place” and its Arabic equivalent, there was a manifest resonance. “Take as your place of prayer,” it is recorded in the Qur’an, “the place where Abraham stood”79—the Maqam Ibrahim. In time to come, with Mecca enshrined once and for all as the site of Islam’s holiest sanctuary, Muslim scholars would identify this Maqam Ibrahim with a stone that stood just to the north of the Ka’ba—an explanation that gives little hint as to its far more likely origins, many hundreds of miles to the north.80
That the Prophet repeatedly echoes the traditions associated with Mamre in his accounts of how the House at Bakka came to be built does not mean, of course, that the two shrines were one and the same thing—but it does suggest, to haunting and potent effect, a very particular context for his revelations. The Qur’an is a work manifest with distinctive habits of worship. Again and again, throughout its pages, the Prophet is insistent that these derive, not from his own invention but from the deepest wellsprings of monotheism. The ground he treads, he and the Mushrikun both, is stamped with the footprints of Abraham, and of Ishmael, the patriarch’s son, and of Lot, his nephew, as well. Why, then, the Prophet demands, do his opponents not read the lessons that are written for them in such a landscape? “Lot too was a messenger,” he reminds the Mushrikun:
Remember when We delivered him and all his household,
Except for an old woman, who was left behind.
Then We destroyed the others.
You pass by them morning and night; will you not understand?
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The allusion is to the petrified remains of the Sodomites—and it could hardly be any clearer in its implications. Wherever the Prophet’s audience may have been settled, it was evidently at no great remove from what the Arabs themselves called the Bahr Lut, the “Sea of Lot”—what we know today as the Dead Sea.
And if the Qur’an is to be trusted, and if Muhammad’s opponents did indeed live within an easy journey of the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah, then the significance of the sanctuary at Bakka would hardly have been confined to the dimension of the heavenly alone. Back in the reign of Justinian, when a Roman ambassador had reported on the great desert shrine where “even the wild beasts live in peace with men,” he had included another intriguing detaiclass="underline" that it was sacred to “a majority of the Saracens.”82 Could this desert shrine have been Bakka? The ambassador’s description is so vague that it is impossible to say for sure. Nevertheless, a particularly intriguing detail among the Prophet’s many revelations does seem to echo the Roman report. The Qur’an reveals that Abraham and Ishmael raised a prayer to God as they laboured to build the House at Bakka: “Make our descendants into a community devoted to you.”83 Which was, of course, to cast those descendants, the Ishmaelites, as something rather more than the sum of their parts. Fragmented into various tribes they might have been, and yet they were to be regarded, so it would seem from the Qur’an, as a single people—a “community.” Bound by a unity of purpose, and joined by a common ancestry, what would they therefore share in, if not a God-sanctioned partnership—a shirkat?