Dār an-Nadwa

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19th century plan of the Holy Mosque in Mecca. On the right, northern side, the building extension ( ziyāda ) can be seen on which the Dār an-Nadwa originally stood

Dār an-Nadwa ( Arabic دار الندوة 'Assembly House') was a central building in Mecca , in which in pre-Islamic times the council ( malaʾ ) of the Quraish met and various rites of passage were celebrated. The building was on the north side of the Kaaba behind the place where the tawāf was performed. Its door opened to the Kaaba.

Function as a meeting house in pre-Islamic times

According to Islamic tradition, the Dār an-Nadwa was established by the Quraishite Qusaiy ibn Kilāb . Except for members of his family, only male Quraishites over forty years of age were allowed to attend the meetings of the Dār an-Nadwa. All important Quraysh affairs had their place here: court meetings, deliberations on war and peace, marriages and circumcision of boys, as well as special ceremonies at which the young girls were declared fit for marriage. Her youth clothes were torn during this. The Dār an-Nadwa was also the starting and ending point of all caravans.

Qusaiy bequeathed the building to his son ʿAbd ad-Dār along with the presidency of the congregation. It stayed in his family in early Islamic times. The Dār an-Nadwa was also the building in which the Quraish are said to have drawn up the plan to assassinate the Prophet Mohammed in 622 , after he had already gained followers outside of Mecca, especially in Medina , and several of his companions had already emigrated there. The Qur'anic word in Sura 8:30 is supposed to refer to this fact : “At that time, when the unbelievers were plotting against you in order to arrest you or even to kill or drive you away. Yes, they plotted, and God plotted too. God is the best schemer. ”According to the account of Ibn Ishāq , the Quraish appeared on this occasion to Iblis (the devil) in the form of a sheikh from the Najd and led them to the murder plan.

Decline: From the pilgrims' hostel of the caliphs to the dump

In early Islamic times, the Umayyad caliph Muʿāwiya I (ruled 661–680) bought the Dār an-Nadwa Ibn Rahīn al-ʿAbdarī, one of the descendants of ʿAbd ad-Dār, for 100,000 dirhams. The then head of the Kaaba, Schaiba ibn ʿUthmān, who also came from the ʿAbd-ad-Dār family, asserted a right of first refusal , but was fooled by the caliph so that he could not see it. Muʿāwiya renewed the building and stayed in it when he went on Hajj . The later Umayyad caliphs also used the Dār an-Nadwa as a hostel when they went on pilgrimage to Mecca. After the expansion of the Holy Mosque by ʿAbd al-Malik and his two sons al-Walīd I and Sulaimān ibn denAbd al-Malik , the building protruded more and more into the courtyard of the Holy Mosque. After the expansion of the Holy Mosque by the Abbasid caliph al-Mahdī in the early 780s, one of the mosque's 23 gates was named after the Dār an-Nadwa. It was one of the six gates on the north side of the mosque and opened to the Dār an-Nadwa.

The early Abbasids also descended in the Dār an-Nadwa when they came to Mecca on pilgrimage. But after Hārūn ar-Raschīd bought the Dār al-Imāra of the Banū-Chalaf family from the Chuzāʿa tribe and prepared this building especially to accommodate stately pilgrims, the Dār an-Nadwa visibly fell into disrepair. Abū Muhammad al-Chuzāʿī (d. 921), who narrated the Mecca chronicle of al-Azraqī and wrote an addendum, reports in it that the women's apartments of the Dār an-Nadwa were rented to strangers for a time while in the room for the men the mounts of the governors of Mecca were housed. Then, so al-Chuzāʿī further, the governors of Mecca quartered their black slaves here, but they played jokes and annoyed the neighbors. At the end of the 9th century, the building finally fell into disrepair that it became a garbage dump.

Demolition and construction of the Dār-an-Nadwa extension of the Holy Mosque

Depiction of the holy mosque by Fischer von Erlach , on the right side of which the Ziyādat Dār an-Nadwa is visible.

Because of the stench emanating from the building and the swamp that was washed out of the building into the mosque courtyard when it rained , the postmaster ( ṣāḥib al-barīd ) of Mecca made a petition to the vizier ʿUbaidullāh ibn Sulaimān Ibn Wahb in 894 and suggested that demolish the building and expand the mosque to cover the area in question. The Abbasid caliph al-Muʿtadid bi-Llāh (r. 892–902) had this plan implemented. A man named Abū l-Haiyādsch ʿUmair ibn Haiyān al-Asadī was commissioned with the construction work. With his helpers and workers, he got the garbage out of the Dār an-Nadwa and tore down the building. The new building, which he erected in its place, he equipped with the columns, arches and arcades with a roof made of gold-decorated teak . To connect this extension ( ziyāda ) with the rest of the mosque, he broke twelve new gates (six large and six small) on its outer wall. He also broke three gates to the main street and equipped the new building with its own minaret . The construction work was completed within three years. The new yard was 49 cubits long and 47 cubits wide.

In the year 918 Muhammad ibn Mūsā, the governor of the caliph al-Muqtadir , had the gates between the "extension of the Dār an-Nadwa" ( Ziyādat Dār an-Nadwa ) and the Holy Mosque widened to form arcaded arches, so that now all who were in the extension who could see the Kaaba. The Ziyādat Dār an-Nadwa thus became an integral part of the Holy Mosque in Mecca and has shaped its appearance for centuries. It only disappeared around the middle of the 20th century in the course of the Saudi expansion of the mosque.

literature

  • al-Azraqī : Aḫbār Makka wa-mā ǧāʾa fī-hā min al-āṯār. Ed. ʿAbd al-Malik Ibn Duhaiš. Maktabat al-Asadī, Mecca, 2003. pp. 649–56. Digitized
  • Walter Dostal: "Mecca before the time of the prophet - attempt of an anthropological interpretation" in Der Islam 68/2 (1991) 193-231.
  • Rudi Paret: Art. "Dār an-Nadwa" in The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition Vol. II, p. 128b.
  • Ferdinand Wüstenfeld : History of the city of Mecca, edited from the Arabic chronicles. Leipzig 1861. Digitized

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Wüstenfeld § 24.
  2. ↑ Cf. Ibn Saʿd: Kitāb aṭ-Ṭabaqāt al-kabīr . Ed. Sachau. Vol. I, p. 39, lines 20-24. Digitized
  3. ↑ See Wüstenfeld § 127.
  4. ↑ Ibn Hišām : Kitāb Sīrat Rasūl Allāh From d. Hs. On Berlin, Leipzig, Gotha a. Leyden ed. by Ferdinand Wüstenfeld. 2 vol. Göttingen 1858–59. P. 323f. Digitized - German partial translation by Gernot Rotter under the title Das Leben des Propheten . Goldmann, Stuttgart, 1982. pp. 101f.
  5. ↑ See Wüstenfeld § 127.
  6. ↑ al-Azraqī: Aḫbār Makka wa-mā ǧāʾa fī-hā min al-āṯār. 2003, p. 650.
  7. ↑ al-Azraqī: Aḫbār Makka wa-mā ǧāʾa fī-hā min al-āṯār. 2003, pp. 650f.
  8. ↑ See Wüstenfeld § 169.
  9. ↑ al-Azraqī: Aḫbār Makka wa-mā ǧāʾa fī-hā min al-āṯār. 2003, p. 651.
  10. ↑ See Wüstenfeld § 201.
  11. ↑ al-Azraqī: Aḫbār Makka wa-mā ǧāʾa fī-hā min al-āṯār. 2003, p. 654.
  12. ↑ al-Azraqī: Aḫbār Makka wa-mā ǧāʾa fī-hā min al-āṯār. 2003, pp. 655f.
  13. ↑ Wüstenfeld: History of the City of Mecca . 1861, p. 208.
  14. ↑ Cf. Qutb ad-Dīn an-Nahrawālī: Kitāb al-Iʿlām bi-bait Allāh al-ḥarām . Ed. F. Desert field. Leipzig 1857. p. 148. Digitized