TWO RARE EARLY PHOTOGRAPHS OF MECCA BY AL-SAYYID ‘ABD AL-GHAFFAR AL-TABIB, CIRCA 1880

Albumen prints laid down on a card album page with gilt margin rules on a maroon ground. Arabic inscriptions to negative photographs. 19.5 by 24 cm.

CATALOGUE NOTE The photographs depicting pilgrims gathered around the Kaaba taken from within the holy sanctuary from just above ground level, inscribed in Arabic, at the top, al-salwa hawla Al-Kaaba, ‘Prayers around the Kaaba’; at the bottom, futughrafiyyat al-sayyid ‘abd al-ghaffar tabib bi-makka, ‘Photography of al-Sayyid ‘Abd al-Ghaffar Tabib, physician in Mecca’. ‘Abd al-Ghaffar is credited with being the earliest Arabian photographer. He was reputed to have learned the art of photography from the Dutch orientalist Christian Snouck Hurgronje who stayed with the physician in Mecca in 1884-85. The photographs reproduced in Hurgronje’s Bilder aus Mekka are now believed to have been done by ‘Abd al-Ghaffar (see F. E. Peters, The Hajj: the Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and Holy Places, Princeton 1996, pp. 14-15; also Claude W. Sui, ‘Early Photography of the Holy Sites of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula’, in Markus Ritter, Staci G. Scheiwiller (edd.), The Indigenous Lens?: Early Photography in the Near and Middle East, Berlin & Boston 2018, pp. 111–144. For a view of pilgrims on the plain of Arafat by ‘Abd al-Ghaffar, dated to 1888, see V. Porter (ed.), Hajj: journey to the heart of Islam, London 2012, pp. 132-133, fig. 90.