What No One Produces: The Islamic Authority Of Olfaction

Written by Adill Ali. Read time 15mins.

Abstract

The scent of an early Islamic sanctuary was an instrument of rule. Caliphs paid for the perfume that covered the Kaʿba and the Foundation Stone in Jerusalem, rival dynasties competed for the credit of having been first to provide it, and attendants controlled who might carry any of it away. A second claim on scent appears later in the sources, made by the mystical tradition, whose masters of olfaction were held to perceive through smell what other people could not, and whose perception was kept within the bond of a Sufi order. Read together, the two look like a shift in authority from the one who supplies a scent to the one who claims to perceive it. This essay argues that the shift is less clean than it looks, and that the reason lies in a position held within the same tradition. On al-Āmidī's occasionalism, the perception of a smell occurs by the power of God and in keeping with His custom, so that no created party brings the perceptual event about. The caliph holds the material and its giving, which can be owned and administered. The saint may hold access to a perception, and the reading of what it discloses. The event itself, on this account, is produced by neither. The contest over sacred scent was therefore a contest over something that neither party to it made, and what each party held was narrower than what each claimed. The argument holds only if the occasionalist commitment holds, and the essay says so. It also leaves open a question that the commitment raises and does not settle: what to make of the share of the one who smells.

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Twice a week the attendants of the Dome of the Rock prepared the chamber. They covered the whole of the Foundation Stone, the Ṣakhra (الصخرة), in a perfume compounded of musk, ambergris and saffron, and they walked its circuit carrying censers until the room stood full of scented smoke. Then the curtains were lifted and the smoke let out, and the space was opened. Visitors came in and prayed at the stone, and when they left the scent went with them, worked into their clothes and their skin. Days later a man could be known by it in the street. Here was someone who had been inside the Ṣakhra.

That is the picture to hold, because everything in this essay turns on it. A scent was bought, applied and released, and a person carried it out of the building and was recognised by it elsewhere. Each of those steps was somebody's doing, and the question is whose.

The reports describing the rite were set down generations after the building went up in the 70s/690s, belonging at the earliest to the late Umayyad period and reaching their fullest form later still, in the geographers and in the compilers of the merits of Jerusalem (Bursi 2020, 201). What they preserve, then, is the rite as later writers understood it rather than a record made at the time. The practice was real enough for jurists to argue about its consequences, which is the use made of it here.

The provision

Scenting a sanctuary was expensive, and the expense was the point. The caliph ʿAbd al-Malik, who built the Dome, provided rooms within the complex for making the perfume and attendants funded from the public treasury to apply it (Bursi 2020, 202). Perfume of this kind was not a gesture. It was an endowment, renewed, staffed and paid for, and everyone in Jerusalem could smell where the money had gone.

Because provision was visible, it was worth claiming, and the sources show the claim being fought over. At the Kaʿba in Mecca one group of reports holds that Muʿāwiya was the first to perfume the House with khalūq (خلوق) and incense, setting aside for it a daily ration of perfume and sending scent for it in the pilgrimage season. Another group gives the precedence instead to his enemy ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Zubayr, the counter-caliph who held the Ḥijāz against the Umayyads and rebuilt the House, and who is said to have been the first to scent the building (Bursi 2020, 206–207). Two rival houses cannot both have been first. What matters is that both wanted the title, and that the sources preserving their claims were partisan for one side or the other. To have been the first to perfume the sanctuary was a thing worth inventing a report about.

The authority in question here is worth naming plainly, because a later part of this argument depends on keeping it distinct from another kind. Provisioning a scent is a jurisdictional matter. It is the power to pay for a sacred place, to maintain it, to mark it and to say who may do so. Nothing in it concerns perception. A caliph who endows a perfume is doing what a caliph does with a road or a wall.

That the authority was jurisdictional shows most clearly in how the perfume was administered once it was on the stone. It was treated as property, and access to it was controlled. The Meccan jurist ʿAṭāʾ b. Abī Rabāḥ held that a pilgrim might carry away some of the Kaʿba's perfume with the permission of the attendants, and in another version he put it as an instruction: do not rub perfume from the House unless it is given to you (Bursi 2020, 219–220). Permission was required because the substance was administered, in the way that a building's fabric is administered. Saʿīd b. Jubayr took the same view with more force, and when he saw an attendant taking some of the perfume he would strike her (Bursi 2020, 219). Here is the material layer in plain form. A quantity of scented matter existed, it belonged to the sanctuary, and somebody decided who could have any of it.

The perception

The second claim on scent that appears in the sources is of a different kind, and the difference is the hinge of this essay. Where the caliph's claim concerned a substance, this one concerns an act of perceiving.

Ibn al-ʿArabī holds that the gift of perceiving what is ordinarily hidden belongs to all five senses and not to sight alone, so that a person may be a master of vision, or of hearing, or a master of breath and fragrances, which is to say a master of olfaction (Lange 2025, 189). Such a person smells what others in the room do not. Later writers took the idea up and guarded it. Bursavī, writing at the turn of the twelfth century, treats mystical olfaction as an actual bodily perception with bodily effects, and he restricts it: not everyone is granted it, and it stays within the master-disciple bond of the Sufi order, passed to the initiated (Lange 2025, 187, 200).

Set the two claims side by side and a movement suggests itself. The caliph's claim rests on a substance he can buy and control. The saint's claim rests on a perception that no purchase can secure, and it is gatekept by an order rather than a treasury. Read together in this way, the account Bursi gives of caliphal provisioning and the account Lange gives of mystical olfaction suggest a shift from one form of authority over scent to another, from the one who supplies it to the one who claims to perceive what others cannot. That reading is a synthesis of the two studies rather than a claim either study makes, and it is offered here as such.

The shift is worth stating clearly before it is complicated, because the complication is the argument of this essay. On the face of it, authority over sacred scent moves across the centuries from the palace to the lodge, and from the power to provide a smell to the power to perceive one.

The custom

The complication comes from within the tradition itself, from a position taken by a theologian who was writing about how perception works.

Al-Āmidī was asked, in effect, to choose among the accounts of how a smell reaches a nose, and he declined to choose. Whether perception comes about by a physical connection (ittiṣāl, اتّصال) between the smell and the organ of smell, or by a transformation of the medium that carries it, the perception of a smell occurs, he held, only by the power of God and in accordance with His custom (ʿāda, عادة) (al-Āmidī, Abkār al-afkār, I, 489). He was applying to smell the account his school applied to everything else. Fire does not burn cotton by a power of its own; the burning occurs at the touching of the two, by God's custom, and the fire is the occasion rather than the cause.

Put in the plainest terms, this is the claim: when a person smells something, the smelling happens because God makes it happen, in the regular way He has established, and neither the fragrant thing nor the nose nor the air brings it about by any power belonging to it. The regularity is real and can be relied upon. What it is not is a power possessed by any created thing.

Now bring that back to the sanctuary, and the picture of the two claims changes.

Consider what the caliph held. He held a quantity of aromatic substance, and the money to buy more, and the staff to apply it, and the right to decide who could take any away. All of this is real, and all of it is material. He arranged the conditions under which people would smell something in that chamber. On the occasionalist account he did not produce a single one of the perceptions that followed, because those occurred by a custom he neither established nor sustained. His authority reached the arrangement and stopped there.

Consider next what the saint claimed. He claimed to perceive what others in the same room did not, and his order claimed the right to say who might come to such perception and what it meant. Access and interpretation are real things to hold, and an institution can hold them. But a perception that occurs by God's custom is received rather than made, and the one who receives it does not author it. The order that gatekeeps access to such perception controls a threshold. The custom on the far side of that threshold is not in its gift.

So the two claims fall on the same side of a line neither of them crosses. The caliph held the material and its giving. The saint may have held access, and the reading of what was disclosed. The perceptual event itself, which is the thing that made the scent worth having at all, was produced by neither, so that the sanctuary's scent was contested as a possession while the part of it most worth possessing belonged to no party in the contest.

This is a claim about causal production and nothing wider. It does not say that the caliph had no authority, because he plainly did, over the substance and its distribution, nor that the saint's claim was empty, because access and interpretation are genuine things to hold and to withhold. The claim is narrower and firmer: neither party brought about the perception, and both spoke as though the perception were theirs to control.

What the law would not fix

There is a further limit on the provisioner's authority, and the law supplies it, since the same aromatics that sanctified the stone were substances the jurists gendered and restricted, saffron and khalūq counted among the perfumes for women (Lange 2025, 192). Perfume of any kind was forbidden to the pilgrim in the state of iḥrām, and forbidden firmly, so that Saʿīd b. Jubayr and Ibrāhīm al-Nakhaʿī would tell a man who had scented himself for the pilgrimage to wash his head with dirt (Bursi 2020, 230).

Follow one man through that. He enters the Ṣakhra and leaves with saffron in his clothes, put there at a caliph's expense as an act of devotion to a sacred place. If he is in iḥrām, the same saffron on the same skin is a thing to be scoured off. Nothing about the substance changed. What changed was the state of the person carrying it.

The point this supports is about value rather than about what a smell is. One aromatic substance carries different significance according to the body, the place and the ritual state it meets, and its significance is settled in that meeting rather than fixed within the substance itself. The provisioner could put the saffron on the stone. He could not fix what it would mean on every body that carried it out of the door.

The share of the one who smells

One question remains open, and it sits at the point where this argument is thinnest.

The argument says that the perceptual event is produced by no created party. That conclusion follows from the occasionalist commitment, and it is worth being plain that it follows only from there. A reader who does not hold that commitment can accept everything else in this essay, the provision, the contest, the gatekeeping, and decline the conclusion. The essay does not establish occasionalism. It takes a position that al-Āmidī took, and it draws out what that position implies for a dispute about authority.

Within the commitment, a further question presses. The one who smells is not absent from the event. Something happens in that person and not in the person standing beside him who notices nothing. Whether that difference is a kind of production, and so a share in the event that belongs to the perceiver, or whether it dissolves entirely into the custom that God sustains, is a question al-Āmidī's position raises without answering. Both readings are available. If the perceiver's share dissolves into the custom, then the saint's claim to authority falls as short as the caliph's, and the argument above holds without remainder. If instead the perceiver's share is real in a way that amounts to some part in bringing the perception about, then the saint's claim names something true that the caliph's provision never touched, and the two claims are not symmetrical after all. The material examined here does not decide between these, and this essay does not decide either.

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Return to the man in the street with the scent of the sanctuary in his clothes. Everything that put it there can be traced to somebody. A caliph paid for the perfume, attendants compounded and applied it, a keeper decided what might be carried out of the chamber, and the man himself walked in and stood where the smoke was. Every one of those is an act, and every one of them has an owner.

The moment a passer-by catches the scent and knows where the man has been, the chain of acts runs out. That moment was arranged by many people and made by none of them.

A perfumer stands in the same position, and it is worth saying so plainly, because the temptation to claim more is strong and the practice does not support it. What a perfumer makes is a material and a set of conditions: this in the bottle, at this strength, to be worn on skin, in this air, by a person who will meet it in a moment nobody present can foresee. That is a great deal to arrange, and arranging it well is the whole of the craft. The moment when someone smells it and something happens in them belongs to a different order. It is the thing the work is for, and it is not the thing the work produces.

References

Bursi, Adam. 2020. "Scents of Space: Early Islamic Pilgrimage, Perfume, and Paradise." Arabica 67 (2–3): 200–234.

Lange, Christian. 2025. "Thinking Through Smell: Theories of Olfaction in Early Modern Ottoman and Islamic Culture." Der Islam 102 (1): 168–210. https://doi.org/10.1515/islam-2025-0006.

al-Āmidī, Sayf al-Dīn. 1423/[2002–3]. Abkār al-afkār fī uṣūl al-dīn. Edited by Aḥmad Muḥammad Mahdī. 5 vols. Cairo: Dār al-Kutub.