Dhū l-Chalasa
Dhū l-Chalasa ( Arabic ذو الخلصة, DMG Ḏū l-Ḫalaṣa or Ḏū l-Ḫulaṣa ) was an ancient Arabic deity who was worshiped in pre-Islamic times and partly even later by the tribes of the Daus, Chathʿam , Badschīla and part of the Azd . Her sanctuary was in Tabāla between Mecca and Yemen and was seven days' journey from Mecca.
The object of worship was a white stone with a kind of crown carved on it. The place within Tabāla where the cult stone was worshiped was known as al-ʿAblā ' . The guardians of the sanctuary were provided by the Banū Umāma family of the Bahīla ibn Aʿsur tribe. Because of its popularity as a pilgrimage destination, the sanctuary was also known as the "southern Kaaba" ( al-Kaʿba al-yamānīya ), in contrast to the "northern Kaaba " ( al-Kaʿba aš-šāmīya ) in Mecca .
Arrow oracles were performed at the sanctuary. The arrows that could be thrown had the following names: "the one who commands " ( al-āmir ), "the one who prohibits" ( an-nāhī ) and "the one who waits" ( al-mutarabbiṣ ). The well-known pre-Islamic poet Imru 'al-Qais (d. Before 550) is said to have once asked the drawing lots and broken one of them because of his dissatisfaction with the result. After this incident, the oracle was never questioned again.
After taking Mecca in the spring of 630, Muhammad commissioned a man from the Badschīla tribe named Jarīr ibn ʿAbdallāh to destroy the sanctuary. Since the Chathʿam and the Bahīla did not want to accept the destruction, violent clashes broke out in which several hundred people died. Eventually the building in which the cult stone stood was set on fire. Ibn al-Kalbī , who wrote in the early 9th century, reports that in his time the earlier cult stone formed the doorstep of the mosque of Tabāla.
Remnants of the worship of the Dhū-l-Chalasa sanctuary were found centuries later. After Saudi troops had taken Mecca at the end of 1924 , Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud sent his governor in Taif in November 1925 to the mountains of the southern Hejaz to subdue the local tribes. In the area of the Daus tribe, in a village called Tharūq, they came across the walls of the ancient Dhū-l-Chalasa sanctuary, next to which stood a sacred tree called al-ʿAblā '. The governor had the tree burned and the building, made of huge stones, destroyed.
An eschatological hadith , which has been handed down in different collections, represents the return to worship of Dhū-l-Chalasa as a prerequisite for the occurrence of the final judgment. It reads: "The hour (sc. Of the final judgment) will only come when the Butts of the women of Daus crowd around Dhū-l-Chalasa again. "
The Chalasa sanctuary in Mecca
In Mecca itself there was an idol called Chalasa in pre-Islamic times, whose relationship to Dhū l-Chalasa is not clear. It was located in the lower part of the city and is said to have been set up by ʿAmr ibn Luhaiy from the Chuzāʿa tribe before the Quraysh came to power in Mecca. This idol was usually adorned with necklaces, offered barley and wheat as gifts, poured milk on it, offered sacrifices, and hung ostrich eggs on it. From this it was concluded that it must have been an agrarian shrine.
literature
- Toufic Fahd: Le panthéon de l'Arabie centrale à la veile de l'Hégire . Paris 1968. pp. 61-68.
- Toufic Fahd: Art. "Dhū l- Kh alaṣa" in The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition Vol. II, pp. 241b-242a.
- GR Hawting: The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam. Cambridge 1999. pp. 124-126.
- Julius Wellhausen : Remains of Arab paganism . 2nd ed. Berlin 1897. pp. 45–48.