Makkah and Pan-Islamism

Author: Spahic Omer
Publisher: USIM Press
ISBN:9786297636160
Weight: 0.3 kg
Pages: 208 pp
Year: 2024
Price: RM56

By the letter of the revelation, Makkah is a holy city and a blessed sanctuary. As such, it always occupied a special place in the lives and minds of Muslims. Mandatorily, the city with its holy mosque is the qiblah (direction) for Islamic five daily prayers and is the locus of the annual hajj pilgrimage. Impulsively on the other hand - Makkah is a qiblah and orientation to a great many Muslims in various religious and worldly activities of theirs. The more pious a person is, the more directed towards Makkah he is; and the more dedicated in his worship he becomes, the more he starts to gravitate towards the city's hallowed status and blessed merits.

This book delves into the relationship between the city of Makkah and the Pan-Islamism (calls for Islamic unity and solidarity) of the latter 19th and the early 20th centuries. It examines the conceptual dimensions of the main themes both in the Muslim and Western scholarships. Specimens are taken from the two intellectual domains to demonstrate how different the Islamic notion of unity and its association with Makkah was from the Western notion of Pan-Islamism and its natural gravitation towards the holy city. Differences were pronounced as emphatically on the philosophical as on the practical levels.