The Ceremony That Could Not Survive the Twentieth Century

The mahmal ran into an argument it could not win. Wahhabi religious authority, which became decisive in the Hijaz in the 1920s, regarded the ceremony as an innovation with no basis in the practice of the early community, and objected to the honours paid to the litter, the music and drums that accompanied it, and the crowd behaviour around it. Friction turned into open incident, and the Egyptian mahmal ceased to travel. For a while the procession continued within Cairo as a civic occasion detached from the journey, and then it lapsed. The litters and their textiles are now in museums, which is the ordinary fate of a ceremonial object whose ceremony has stopped.

Two things about the mahmal remain unsettled and should be recorded as unsettled. Accounts differ over what, if anything, was placed inside it, some describing it as entirely empty and others reporting copies of the Quran carried within it. And the traditional attribution of its origin to a thirteenth century Egyptian ruler is a story told about the object rather than a documented beginning; historians treat it with reserve while agreeing that the practice is firmly attested from the Mamluk period. Neither uncertainty affects what the object did, which was to make a political claim about the pilgrimage in a form nobody could miss.