Darb Zubaydah

1 · POSITION

Darb Zubaydah is the pilgrim road from Kufa in Iraq to Mecca, about 1,300 kilometres long, four-fifths of it in present-day Saudi Arabia. Under the Abbasid caliphs it was equipped as no road in Arabia had been: milestones and markers, wells, pools, dams, palaces, paved stretches, and rest stations a day apart. It is entered here as a hospitality system built for strangers on foot, and named for the woman who paid for much of it. [1, 2]

2 · A ROAD OLDER THAN ITS NAME

Tribes, travellers and trading caravans used the way between Iraq and western Arabia before Islam. The Abbasids made it a state work: in 751 the first Abbasid caliph ordered new milestones and fire-signals laid along it, and its great period ran from about 750 to 850, the years the nomination calls a golden age. The road kept working, with gaps, until the last organised pilgrim convoy along it was led in 1243. [1, 2]

3 · ZUBAYDAH’S STATIONS

Zubaydah bint Ja’far, wife of the caliph Harun al-Rashid, made the pilgrimage in 176 AH and suffered on the way; the road is named for what followed. She personally met the cost of building many of the intermediate rest stops for pilgrims on foot. Twenty-seven main stations and twenty-seven substations have been identified, the main stations about fifty kilometres apart, with smaller resting places between them. [1, 2]

4 · WHAT SURVIVES

Saudi Arabia and Iraq have put the road forward together for the World Heritage List: the tentative listing was submitted in January 2022 and proposes thirteen component sites, nine in Saudi Arabia and four in Iraq. The station at Rabadhah was abandoned after a Qarmatian attack in 931, and the road’s decline is dated from the tenth century. [1, 2]

5 · ⚑ CANDOUR

⚑ The count of resting places between the stations is given as 27 substations by the tentative listing and as 58 rest stops by another account; both are printed. The road is a candidate for the World Heritage List, not inscribed on it. The register’s own phrase — the largest single hospitality system it holds, and the oldest — is the register’s judgement, not a source’s. [1–2]