Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

222 t CHAPTER NINE
builder chooses. Technically, there is only one “Friday mosque”—
the assembly mosque for the Friday community prayer; all others
are merely oratories—in each community, just as there is one cathedral
in each major Christian community, but the size of the
Muslim population soon outstripped that notion. Now the common
custom is simply that there must be at least one Friday
mosque in each community.
The conceptual centrality of the Muslims’ Friday mosque is its
only connection with the Christian cathedral. The latter is the seat
of a bishop in a juridically constructed diocese. Islam possesses no
bishops (or priests, for that matter) and has neither dioceses nor
even parishes. More basically, the Muslim mosque is the functional
equivalent of the Jewish synagogue, an assembly place for prayer;
the analogue of the Christian church is the now defunct Jerusalem
temple, the site of sacrifice. The most distinctive furniture of a
church is an altar of sacrifice, absent in both mosque and synagogue,
and its most distinctive official is the sacrificing priest, who
is nowhere to be found in Islam. Although the ongoing line of
Jewish kohenim or priests may be identified by their kinship caste
markings, they can no longer, absent the temple, perform their primary
function of sacrifice on the altar of the Lord.
The Hajj
Daily prayer is one of the liturgical Pillars of Islam; the other is the
hajj, the pilgrimage to the holy places of Mecca and its environs,
which every Muslim must make at least once during his or her
lifetime, if circumstances permit. This complex ritual, much of
which is both time- and place-tied, unfolds between the eighth and
thirteenth days of the lunar pilgrimage month (Dhu al-Hijja).
The hajj was a long-standing pre-Islamic ritual in the environs of
Mecca; how long we cannot say, although its rites seem redolent of
primitive Semitic practices. They antedated Muhammad’s lifetime,
at any rate, as did the umra, a more local Meccan festival celebrated
by the townspeople in and around the Kaaba. Though
Muslims are loathe to imagine the Prophet in any connection with