An Empty Litter That Everybody Watched

The mahmal is a rare thing: a sacred object that is explicitly empty. A camel carried a wooden frame under a tall embroidered cover at the head of the Egyptian pilgrim caravan, and the whole point was that nothing rode in it. What it carried was a claim. The ruler who despatched the caravan was asserting his standing as the protector of the pilgrimage, and the litter made that assertion visible for the entire journey, in every town it passed and above all in Cairo, where its departure and its return were among the great annual spectacles of the city, with drums, troops and crowds.

Because the object was about sovereignty rather than about contents, it multiplied. Damascus sent its own mahmal with the Syrian caravan. Other states adopted the practice when they were in a position to make the same claim, and dropped it when they were not, so the presence or absence of a mahmal in a given year is a usable index of political control over the pilgrimage routes. It travelled in company with the kiswa, the embroidered covering sent to be placed on the Kaaba, which was likewise produced in Cairo for long stretches of this history, so the two together made the Egyptian contribution to the pilgrimage physical and unmistakable.