Tag Archives: mecca

Praying along a busy street in Kolkata

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SEI VUI IS OUR favourite Chinese restaurant in Kolkata. It is located on Black Burn Street that runs through what remains of the city’s old Chinatown. Black Burn Street runs off a busy main thoroughfare: Khirode Vidya Binode Avenue.  On Friday, the 27th of December 2024, we walked to Sei Vui from Dalhousie Square at just after midday. 

 When we arrived at Khirode Vidya Binode Avenue,  we saw something we had never observed before. There were many Muslim men in rows of four or five lining the north side of the road for many hundreds of yards. They were all facing the same direction.  Some of these rows had many more men and extended into side streets including Black Burn Lane. Each man was barefooted and had his own prayer mat. This long line of men were performing Friday prayers. Every now and then they prostrated themselves on their mats, and then stood up again.

 

Our host and friend at Sei Vui explained that the local mosque is too small to accommodate the large number of Muslim men in the area. So, they pray in the street, facing the mosque.  He said that he thought that what we had seen was a phenomenon unique to Kolkata. He believed that most other Muslims would not consider worshipping out on a busy street. On special occasions, there are so many worshippers that Khirode Vidya Binode Avenue has to be closed to vehicular traffic during the prayers.

 

It so happens that Khirode Vidya Binode Avenue runs in a mainly east/west direction. Also, the east end of the avenue is very slightly south of its west end. This being the case, by facing westward,  as the worshippers were doing, one is looking approximately towards Mecca, which is west of Kolkata and slightly north of it.

 

We had an excellent lunch at Sei Vui.  After we had finished, the prayers were over, the worshippers had left, and the avenue was back to normal.

 

Magnetism, Mecca, and an artist from Arabia

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IT IS THE AMBITION of many Muslims to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. Part of this involves visiting a sacred black stone, the Ka’abah, which is cuboidal in shape. One part of the annual pilgrimage, the Haj, involves pilgrims circling the Ka’abah seven times clockwise – a ceremony known as the ‘Tawaf’.

The artist and physician Ahmed Mater, who was born in Saudi Arabia in 1979, has created artworks based on the pattern created by the pilgrims circling the Ka’abah, as seen from above. Some of these are aerial photographs, but others are based on magnetism. Those who have studied physics even at an elementary level will be familiar with the demonstration of the shapes of magnetic fields that can be achieved by scattering iron filings near a magnet on a sheet of paper. The magnet arranges the filings in a pattern that corresponds to the shape of its magnetic force field.

What Ahmed Mater did was to create a cubic magnet in the shape of the Ka’abah. Then he scattered iron filings around it on a sheet of paper. The filings then arranged themselves according to the magnetic field of the cuboid magnet. Next, the artist gave the magnetic miniature Ka’abah a twist. This caused the filings to rearrange themselves into swirls, which when viewed from above, resemble the pilgrims encircling the sacred stone in Mecca.

This simple artwork demonstrates not only the fascination of magnetism, but also the spiritual magnetism of the Ka’abah, which draws Muslims to Mecca. In discussing this work of art, Tim Mackintosh-Smith makes an interesting point:

“But Ahmed Mater’s magnets and that larger, Meccan lodestone of pilgrimage can also draw us to things beyond the scale of human existence, and in two directions at once – out to the macrocosmic, and in to the subatomic. In the swirl of Ahmed’s magnetized particles and the orbitings of the Mecca pilgrims are intimations of the whirl of planets, the gyre of galaxies.” (www.ahmedmater.com/essays/magnetism-tim-mackintosh-smith).

The artworks based on magnetism and the Tawaf, are just a small selection of the intriguing, beautiful works by Ahmed Mater, which are currently being exhibited at Christies in King Street (London) until the 22nd of August 2024.