The ethics of aesthetics: legal reasoning, sacred space, and the politics of renovation in sixteenth-century Ottoman Mecca

Official URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15685195-BJA10073

This article examines two treatises by the Shāfiī jurists Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī and Abd al-Raḥmān ibn Ziyād, who held differing positions on the legality of Ottoman plans to rebuild part of the Kabas roof in 959/1551–52 – a proposal that echoed earlier controversies. The jurists of early Islam, including al-Shāfiī, had rejected similar interventions, even when the goal was to restore the Kaba to the form favoured by the Prophet Muhammad. Their opposition was rooted in fears of harm (mafsada) to the Kabas sanctity (ḥurma) and concern for the welfare (maṣlaḥa) of both the building and the Muslims who venerated it. Drawing on classical Shāfiī precedents, al-Haytamī and Ibn Ziyād disagreed over whether the Ottoman proposal constituted a legitimate act of preservation or a breach of legal and architectural decorum. I situate their disagreement within broader Shāfiī debates about the legal status of sacred architecture, the inviolability of the Kaba, and the limits of dynastic authority over sacred spaces. In doing so, I shed new light on how maṣlaḥa was interpreted and contested in classical Islamic jurisprudence, and how Ottoman governance in Mecca required jurists to revisit inherited legal traditions to address new political realities.