Medina and Mecca Revisited

Abstract

The illustrations of Medina and Mecca in al-Ǧazūlī’s prayer book Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt have drawn the attention of many scholars, who have come up with different interpretations. In the present article, a subgroup within the Maghribī manuscripts of that text is defined for the first time: luxury manuscripts that date from the 11–12th/17–18th centuries and that were mostly produced for important owners, certainly in Morocco, possibly in other parts of the Magrib. The manuscripts in this subgroup have an illustrated and illuminated addition that physically precedes the text of Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt, but that does not belong to the text of the prayer book. In the present article that addition is for the first time identified as such and described. A small corpus has been assembled and, by way of example, the article contains a detailed description of two manuscripts belonging to that newly defined subgroup: MS Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Arabe 6983, and MS Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Or. oct. 240.