Near the small village of al-Badiyah (sometimes “Bidya”) on the east coast of the United Arab Emirates stands the oldest mosque in the Emirates. It is a very small stone-and-mud-brick structure designed to hold, at most, a few dozen people. Although it has a primitive “mihrab” (a niche in the wall indicating the direction of Mecca for prayer), it lacks a minaret, often thought essential to mosque architecture.

Aside from the great Muslim shrines at Mecca and Medina, medieval Arabia often lacked mosques altogether — and for a very good reason. It’s not because devotion to Islam was lacking, although this certainly waxed and waned throughout time. Rather, it’s because the bedouin nomads of Arabia, with no permanent abode, rarely were able to build mosques. The expenditure of so many resources for a place of worship that would only be used at limited times during their annual wanderings made it impractical.

Throughout the world, the builders of great temples and cathedrals in their cities have always been sedentary, including sedentary Muslims. So how did nomads worship in the absence of such buildings? Most commonly and simply, they prayed in the open, under the sky or in family groups around the sacred fires of the camp. Pre-Islamic Mongols and Turks, for example, were noted for worshipping the sky (Tengri) as the supreme god. Sometimes, their temporary open-air shrines were marked with rocks laid on the ground with a fire in a central location to burn offerings.

Since nomadic tribes tend to wander seasonally through the same pastureland each year, some of these open-air nomad shrines might become centers of annual nomad pilgrimage for tribal festivals. The Kaaba in Mecca is the most famous of such pilgrimage destinations. And some scholars think that many ancient American Indian sacred centers, such as New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon, were also ritual pilgrimage sites, with people gathering annually, sometimes coming to worship from hundreds of miles away.

The lives of nomads were harsh, and nomadic peoples needed some type of protection from the elements. This shelter generally took the form of tents. In such circumstances, a special tent was often erected to contain images, furniture, clothing or vessels and utensils dedicated to the gods. The most famous example of this is the portable tent shrine of the Israelite tabernacle (“mishkan”) (Exodus 25-27, 35-40).

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Similarly, the Mongols had a huge tent shrine, just like the Israelite tabernacle, that accompanied them on their military campaigns. When the Turkic Khazar nomads of southern Russia converted to Judaism in the eighth century, their warlord, Butan, received a vision in which an angel ordered him to rebuild the Mosaic tabernacle. The shrine he built, probably a Judaized nomadic tent, remained in use for at least a century, and the practices associated with it represent the last vestiges of Jewish blood sacrifice.

A variation on the tent shrine can be found in palm-frond shrines. Such palm “shacks” were easy to make with simple and widely available materials but would leave almost no archaeological remains. While a tent shrine could be packed up and carried with a tribe on its wanderings, a palm shrine was temporary. An example can be seen today at the mosque at al-Badiyah. The “women’s mosque” is a small room next to the stone mosque, with palm-frond walls and roof, and carpets laid on the ground. This nomadic practice can also be found reflected among the Israelite nomads in the Hebrew Bible. The feast of "tabernacles" or “booths” (“sukkot”) in the Bible (Leviticus 23:20-23) harks back to a nomadic festival for which small, temporary palm-frond houses were erected.

On occasion, some of these shrines might become semipermanent, the tent or palm fronds being eventually replaced by simple stone walls. A semipermanent Midianite temple shrine from the 12th century B.C., with foundation stones and religious artifacts, has been found at Timna in modern Israel. Among the artifacts discovered was the image of a small bronze serpent, perhaps a parallel to the bronze serpent (“nehushtan”) raised by Moses (Numbers 21:4-9) and later kept in Solomon’s temple (2 Kings 18:4). This type of shrine represents a transition phase between a fully portable nomadic tent shrine and a permanent stone temple. Likewise, a parallel to the Israelite passage from portable tent shrine to stone temple can still be seen reflected in the mosque at Badiyah.

Daniel Peterson founded BYU's Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, chairs The Interpreter Foundation and blogs on Patheos. William Hamblin is the author of several books on premodern history. They speak only for themselves.

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