Smelling Sacred Spaces: Pilgrimage Practices and Olfactory Experiences in Early Islam

Pilgrimage (in Arabic, hajj) is one of the canonical five pillars of Islam, the collection of practices and beliefs understood to be foundational for all Muslims. Testimony to Muslims performing the hajj to Mecca is available from very early in Islamic history: it is described as “a duty owed to God by people who are able to undertake it” in the Qur’an, and pilgrims on their way to Mecca recorded their wishes that “God, please accept my hajj” in eighth-century graffiti found on stone walls along the pilgrimage routes in Syria and the Arabian Peninsula. Yet early Muslims performed many types of pilgrimage in addition to the hajj itself: literary sources suggest that Mecca was only one of several holy places towards which early Muslims traveled, with sites in Jerusalem, Medina, and Iraq also occupying space in the emerging Islamic sacred geography. While different early Muslim groups did not always agree on the specifics of pilgrimage, they seemingly all considered travel to holy sites as an important aspect of their communal religious practice.

But what was pilgrimage actually like for these early Muslims: what physical, bodily experiences did they have when they visited sacred spaces such as the Ka‘ba in Mecca, or other holy places, such as the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem? Unfortunately, we do not have detailed firsthand accounts of pilgrimage from the first several centuries of Islamic history to tell us exactly what people saw and did. We can, however, reconstruct many interesting aspects of what visitors to these early Islamic sacred spaces encountered through reading early Islamic historical and legal texts. One noteworthy feature—that has been left largely unexamined by historians of religion—is the rich aromas that hovered around these early Islamic sacred spaces.

Smell was an important component of religious practice in the ancient world and continues to be so today. Think, for example, of the clouds of fragrant incense smoke found in churches, temples, and shrines from a variety of religious traditions. This practice of making sacred spaces smell pleasant was also found among early Muslims. Statements ascribed to the Prophet Muhammad encourage people to aromatize their mosques with perfume, while the early caliph ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab (r. 634-644) reportedly brought an incense censer to the mosque in Medina and said it should be used every Friday during the congregational prayer.

But even more so than mosques, early pilgrimage destinations—such as the Ka‘ba and the Dome of the Rock—were made particularly aromatic by early Muslims, who coated these holy buildings with layers of perfume and filled them with wafts of incense. The outside of the Ka‘ba was covered in a saffron-based perfume and texts report that one early ruler “perfumed the Ka‘ba so much that whoever entered the sacred area of Mecca encountered its scent.” This perfume would sometimes even stain visitors’ clothes as they circumambulated and embraced the Ka‘ba. Similar activities occurred at the Dome of the Rock, which was filled with incense and covered with perfume that was specifically manufactured for the sacred site by special attendants. People in Jerusalem knew that the Dome of the Rock had been prepared for its visitors from the sight and smell of a cloud of incense billowing out from the building, as well as from an announcement made in the marketplace: “The Rock is open for the people! Whosoever wants to pray there, let them come!” Clearly smell was an important part of visiting these early Islamic sacred spaces.

Yet pilgrims’ engagements with these locations’ scents was not restricted to the pilgrimage destinations themselves: in some cases, pilgrims took these smells home with them, as a sort of pilgrimage souvenir. Among the archaeological evidence for such practices are glass pilgrimage bottles from Jerusalem that bear an image of the Muslim ruler who built the Dome of the Rock—‘Abd al-Malik b. Marwan (r. 685-705)—and which were perhaps used to collect perfume that had anointed the Rock. While such objects allow us merely to hypothesize about what early Muslims may have done with them, early texts explicitly describe Muslims collecting perfumed materials from sacred spaces such as the Ka‘ba. Visitors would collect some of the perfume that had been used to anoint the Ka‘ba and use it for healing and blessing. This is much like the practices found among other religious groups in the late ancient Near East, such as Christians, who similarly collected perfumed materials from the shrines of saints and other sacred spaces and took them home in special containers.

While people in the modern world often minimize the importance of smell—emphasizing other senses, such as sight, for example—the sources studied here show just how important scents could be in the early Islamic world. The perfumed odors at the Ka‘ba and the Dome of the Rock offered a whiff of what Paradise was imagined to be like: an idea reinforced, at the Dome of the Rock, by the mosaic images of paradisiacal splendor found on the building’s interior walls. Such sights and smells likely contributed to a feeling of heaven on earth at pilgrimage sites, of experiencing the joy of Paradise before getting there.

Adam Bursi is a postdoctoral fellow in the ERC project “SENSIS: The Senses of Islam” in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University.