“Wine, Water, and Prayer: Early Debates at the Meccan Sanctuary.”

Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 75/3 (2012): 570-72.

International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2008

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Routledge Handbook of Islamic Ritual and Practice, 2022

The dominant wisdom in modern scholarship is that the seventh century Arab conquests were associated with intensive activities of appropriation of earlier non-Islamic sacred spaces in subjugated territories. According to this standpoint, such pre-existing sanctums were initially shared between the Muslim victors and local non-Muslim communities. Soon afterwards, particularly in the Umayyad period, as Islam gained more adherents from other faiths, such shared spaces would be entirely expropriated and converted into mosques. These were to be joined by the proliferation of custom-built mosques in the subsequent years as Islam gained yet more adherents, while throughout the Muslim empire the transformation of non-Muslim places of worship into mosques continued but in a seemingly less systematic way. The present chapter aims to scrutinise this theory, analysing textual and archaeological evidence to investigate the extent of early Islamic adaptation of non-Muslim sanctuaries to serve as mosques. The chapter also explores the practicality, legal acceptability and religio-political implications of such a practice, with special emphasis on the conversion of churches in the early period.

History of Religions: 49 (3), pp. 329–332, 2010

“Mecca and Medina” and “Jerusalem.” Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012.

The Religious Architecture of Islam Volume I Asia and Australia, 2022

Journal of Al-Tamaddun, 2024

Compared to other religious systems rooted in Late Antiquity, Islam placed greater emphasis on the transcendent, assigning less value to physical forms per se. This article seeks to explore conceptions relating to what made a place 'holy' in early Islamic places of worship, delving into understanding the significance of sacred spaces in Islam, and dissecting the procedures and beliefs instrumental in the consecration of such locations. The primary focus rests on mosques, which were deemed the pinnacle of sacred spaces during the nascent Islamic period. This discourse deliberately omits discussion on Islamic funerary structures, which emerged in the classical form later in the third/ninth century. Instead, it analyzes the cases of the Ka'ba in Mecca and the Prophet's mosque in Medina. The former serves as an exemplar of Islamized sanctuaries, whereas the latter epitomizes the prevalent archetype of sacred spaces in early Islam.

The Islamic History and Thought Series (Piscataway NJ: Gorgias Press, 2019)

In the absence of reliable archaeological evidence, the question of how the mosque was made represents a real challenge. Its origin remains moot despite many attempts to settle the question. While the structure built by the Prophet Muḥammad at Madina, soon after the Hijra in 622 AD, is believed by many to have later provided the prototype of the mosque, the dominant theory that it was only a private residence casts doubt on that belief. The current study provides fresh evidence, based on the Qurʾān, ḥadīth and early poetry, that this structure was indeed built to be a mosque. The study further investigates what such a finding may have to say apropos a number of undecided issues such as the immediate origins of the mosque type and the kind of impulses and modalities that determined its design and character. More particularly, this study seeks to explore whether early Islam, within the framework of the Prophet’s teachings and practices, as well as the Qurʾān, might have provided the necessary prompts for the making of the mosque and the shaping of its essential functional and architectural features. It also investigates how such religious imperatives may have interacted with the political, cultural and socio-economic contexts in which the mosque type materialized. As such, this book scrutinizes two dominant tendencies regarding the mosque type: the modern Western views on its non-Islamic origins and the Islamic legalistic views on what it should look like. This survey is positioned at the intersection between art, historiography, religious sciences and politics; it is not a typical monograph on architecture. As we shall see, it cuts across topics such as early Islam’s outlook on visual arts and aesthetics in general.