The Ka‘ba, Paradise, and Ibn al-Khaṭīb in Shālla (Rabat): the ‘work’ of 14th century Marīnid funerary complex

Abstract

By the mid 14th century, the initially modest burial ground of the Marīnid dynasty (668/1269-870/1465) in Shālla had become a funerary complex with several buildings, and its main ‘work’ was to attract and impress huge numbers of visitors. One such visitor was Lisān al-Dīn ibn al-Khaṭīb, who, this article shows, lived mostly at the royal shrine from 761/1360 to 763/1362. Following a reconsideration of the time he spent there, and based essentially on his own accounts, this paper focuses on two intertwined hermeneutical questions concerning how the experience of visiting Shālla resonated in the visitors’  perception. First, it  demonstrates that some people  construed the  fourteenth- century garden at Shālla as a representation of paradise. Second, after a short discussion on how the Marīnid shrine developed into a centre of pilgrimage, it argues that some of the coeval written accounts interpret Shālla as an analogue of the Kaʿba and that some of its visitors performed rites borrowed from the pilgrimage to Mecca. The aim of this article is to investigate some of the ways in which Shālla ‘worked’ of glorifying the members of the Marīnid dynasty.