【读书】神圣与亵渎：《圣城麦加》

Sacred and profane

神圣与亵渎

Mecca: The Sacred City. By Ziauddin Sardar. Bloomsbury; 408 pages
书籍推介：《圣城麦加》

译者：mimocrys

ZIAUDDIN SARDAR is both fascinated and appalled by Islam’s holiest city. One of Britain’s best-known Muslim writers and commentators, he grew up in the Punjab with a fascination for the Kaaba, the huge brick cube, draped in black cloth, which is the centrepiece of Mecca’s Sacred Mosque.
对这座伊斯兰最神圣的城市，ZIAUDDIN SARDAR既曾深深着迷，又曾备感震惊。作为英国著名穆斯林作家和评论家之一，在旁遮普长大的他对位于麦加大清真寺广场中心的、外覆黑布的大型石造建筑克尔白神庙充满了向往。

He knew that it was to Mecca that Muslims must direct their prayers, and to Mecca that they must go on pilgrimage, or haj, at least once in a lifetime. But as he learned more of the city’s history, he discovered another Mecca at odds with the first, a place of feuds and power struggles, of greed and bigotry. These two cities form the subject of his book—a project of love and disenchantment—which tells Mecca’s story from pre-Islamic times until today. The city is unique, and yet, seen through Mr Sardar’s eyes, it is also a microcosm: “a stage where the condition of the Muslim world…could be seen enacted.”
他知道麦加是穆斯林祈祷的朝向，每个穆斯林一生中至少要来这里朝圣一次。但随着他对麦加历史了解的深入，他看到了与圣城之名并不相符的另一个麦加——冤仇难解，兄弟阋墙，贪欲无止，偏见盛行。这两个麦加构成了他书的主题——他的笔倾注了对麦加的爱恋，也述说了对麦加的失望——讲述了从伊斯兰到来之前直至现在的麦加故事。这座城市独一无二，同时在Sardar看来，也是一个缩影——“透过麦加，我们可以看到穆斯林世界现状如何确立。”

For Western readers much of the story will be unfamiliar. Non-Muslims are now excluded from the city, but this was not always so. The Prophet Muhammad rubbed shoulders with Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and pagans. It was only later, under the seventh-century Umayyads, that Christians and Jews were excluded, something that Mr Sardar deplores. Readers might suppose that, in Islam’s golden age, Mecca, like Baghdad and Damascus, was a centre of culture and civilisation. It was not. It “founded no great library, no university, no hospital”. The city was as profane as it was sacred. The merchants took pleasure in music and dancing, in their concubines—and in fleecing pilgrims.
对西方读者来说，这个故事大部分都是陌生的。非穆期林现在被排斥在这座城市之外，但历史上并非总是如此。穆罕默德曾与基督徒、犹太教徒、拜火教徒及其他异教徒和平相处。只是后来在7世纪倭马亚人统治下，基督徒和犹太教徒才被逐出圣城。Sardar对此痛心疾首。读者可能以为，在伊斯兰的黄金时期，麦加和巴格达及大马士革一样，是阿拉伯地区文化和文明的中心。事实并非如此。这里没有建造宏大的图书馆，没有大学，没有医院。这座城市被亵渎了，正如它被神化一样。这里的商人夜夜笙歌，妻妾成群，甚至敲诈朝圣者，并以此为乐。

Arabian history, in which rulers and conquerors come and go with numbing frequency, is not always fun. Mr Sardar tries to enliven it with quirky asides (about religious extremism, the “what ifs” of history and the poetry of William Butler Yeats). Some of the best pages describe his own experience of the haj, including the drama of 1979 when fanatics took over Mecca’s Sacred Mosque and held it for two weeks, an event he witnessed.
兴勃亡忽的统治者和征服者来去匆匆，令人麻木，这样的阿拉伯历史并不总能让人感兴趣。Sardar为此加了一些新奇的题外话（诸如宗教极端主义、历史假设、叶芝的诗），以为这段历史添些活力。一些极佳的章节中描述了他去麦加朝圣的亲身经历，包括他亲眼目睹的1979年闹剧——麦加禁寺被狂热分子占领两周。

In the author’s view, Mecca turned in on itself long before the birth of modern Saudi Arabia in the 1930s. The Saudis, with their puritanical and iconoclastic creed of Wahhabism, have made things much worse, he believes. He is scandalised by their treatment of the holy city, its sanctuaries now dwarfed by high-rise blocks and five-star hotels. Worse, they have destroyed shrines and tombs they feared could become objects of worship. In the process, the city’s religious diversity has “virtually disappeared”.
在作者看来，早在1930年代沙特阿拉伯王国建立之前，麦加就已与外界隔绝。他认为持清教徒式的、反对多神崇拜信条的瓦哈比主义的沙特人使麦加每况愈下。他对沙特人对圣城的所作所为备感震惊，如今，神殿与其周围的高层建筑、五星酒店相比显得矮小无比。更有甚者，瓦哈比派摧毁了圣地和陵墓，担心这会成为人们崇拜的对象。在此过程中，麦加的宗教多样性“事实上已不复存在”。

Mr Sardar worked in Jeddah at the Haj Research Centre between 1975 and 1979. He and his colleagues campaigned for a more enlightened approach to the city’s architecture and human ecology. He left disillusioned that their advice was not heeded.

本站仅提供存储服务，所有内容均由用户发布，如发现有害或侵权内容，请点击举报。