Everyday Worship, Festivals and Pilgrimage under Umayyad Rule

Umayyad religious life took place in more than one political setting. The Syrian caliphate, ruled by a caliph, a title for the leader of the Muslim community, governed from Damascus between 661 and 750. In al-Andalus, Muslim-ruled lands on the Iberian Peninsula, the Umayyads ruled Córdoba in present-day Spain as emirs, Muslim rulers, from 756; they adopted the caliphal title in 929 and ruled until 1031. Friday prayer gathered Muslims in great mosques, Ramadan shaped a daily fasting schedule, and letters record arrangements for journeys to Mecca in western Arabia. Christian travel accounts from Syria and the Jordan, and a Jewish Sabbath poem from Córdoba, preserve other observances.

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Prayer in Damascus and Córdoba

Muslims performed ṣalāt, the formal prayers repeated each day, facing the qibla, the direction of prayer toward the Kaʿba, the cube-shaped sanctuary in Mecca. Prayer included standing, bowing and prostration, when the worshipper touched the forehead to the ground. Before prayer, Qur’an 5:6 prescribes washing the face, hands and arms, wiping the head and washing the feet. It permits clean earth in place of water for a person who is ill or travelling without access to it. This preparation, called ablution, made water part of ordinary worship as well as a feature of mosque design.

The Great Mosque of Damascus was founded under al-Walid I in 705–715. Its prayer hall has three aisles parallel to the qibla wall, with a mihrab, the niche marking the direction of prayer, at its center. In the Umayyad period, the community assembled at Friday noon for the khutba, or sermon, which ended with an invocation asking divine grace for the reigning ruler.

Córdoba’s Great Mosque was enlarged under al-Hakam II in 962–966. The added bays and a new mihrab shaped a ceremonial space within the prayer hall. Historian Susana Calvo Capilla describes daily prayer there as well as the larger Friday congregation and public religious and political ceremonies. The caliph attended Friday prayer. Calvo cites the twelfth-century geographer al-Idrisi’s account of attendants bringing from the treasury a Qur’an believed to have belonged to the caliph ʿUthman and displaying it beside the mihrab between two large candles. A mobile minbar, or sermon pulpit, was placed in 975–976 and brought out for Friday prayer. The surviving Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba preserves parts of this Umayyad prayer space within a building altered after the Christian conquest.

Ramadan fasting and Eid al-Fitr

The Qur’an prescribes fasting during Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar. Its instructions set the daily fast from dawn until sunset: food and drink were taken before dawn or after sunset rather than during daylight. The schedule altered when meals could be eaten, while the fast itself was an act of worship.

Eid al-Fitr marked the end of Ramadan with prayer and alms. Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, a ninth-century collection of hadith, reports about Muhammad and early Muslim practice. It attributes to Abu Saʿid al-Khudri an account of zakat al-fitr, the alms given at the fast’s close. Muslims gave a saʿ, a capacity measure, of food, dates, barley or raisins. When Muʿawiya, the first Umayyad caliph, took office and wheat was abundant, he proposed that a mudd, a smaller capacity measure, of wheat equalled two mudds of those foods. The report preserves a public proposal about which staple food could satisfy the obligation.

Pilgrimage and the journey to Mecca

The hajj is the pilgrimage to Mecca, performed during its appointed season and centered on the Kaʿba. Qur’anic instructions describe pilgrims departing from ʿArafat, a plain outside Mecca, and remembering God at al-Mashʿar al-Ḥarām, the Sacred Monument near Muzdalifa; they also tell pilgrims to bring provisions.

Two dated inscriptions locate routes from different Umayyad provinces. A graffito dated 82 AH, a year in the Islamic calendar counted from the Hijra, Muhammad’s migration in 622, or 701–702 CE, lies near Fayd on the road between Kufa and Mecca. Another, dated 91 AH or 710 CE, lies southeast of Tabuk on the route between Syria and Medina. Historian Harry Munt records both in his account of pilgrimage in late antiquity.

An Arabic papyrus letter from Egypt, dated 705–717, documents a pilgrimage invitation from Sahl ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAziz to Uqba ibn Muslim, one of the pilgrims travelling from Umayyad territories. Sahl says the caliph has announced the pilgrimage, offers his own riding camels, and tells Uqba to pay no more than the hire of a mount.

Christian and Jewish observances

The eighth-century nun Huneberc of Heidenheim recorded the pilgrimage of Willibald, an Anglo-Saxon cleric. At Homs in Syria in 724, local authorities detained the travellers as suspected spies. A Christian merchant supplied their dinner and supper each day, arranged baths twice a week, and took them to church on Sundays by way of the market, buying goods they wanted. A man from Spain whose brother served at the ruler’s court interceded, and the travellers were released.

During the pilgrimage Willibald and his companions lodged at a nearby monastery of about twenty monks before visiting the Jordan. Huneberc reports an annual Epiphany custom at the river, on the Christian feast commemorating Christ’s manifestation: a rope was stretched across the Jordan, while a small stream was led off separately; sick people and women hoping for children entered the river holding the rope. She separately notes that Willibald also bathed in the Jordan.

In mid-tenth-century Córdoba, the Jewish poet Dunash ben Labraṭ composed “Dror Yikra,” a poem for the Sabbath. It calls on its listeners to rest quietly and keep the Sabbath holy. Dunash, born in Fez in present-day Morocco and educated in Baghdad in present-day Iraq, had been invited to Córdoba by the Jewish court adviser Hasday ibn Shaprut.