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Since the Turkish conquest, however, the ancient custom has been restored; and on Fridays, as well as at the end of the first daily evening prayers, the Sultan, Mohammed Aly Pasha, and Sherif Yahya are included in the formula. The right of preaching in the Mambar is vested in several of the first olemas in Mekka; they are always elderly persons, and officiate in rotation.
About the Mambar, the visitors of the Kaaba deposit their shoes; as it is neither permitted to walk round the Kaaba with covered feet, nor thought decent to carry the shoes in the hand, as is done in other mosques.
I mention this for the sake of future travellers, who, on discovering them, might perhaps consider them as the vestiges of some powerful Greek or Egyptian colony. The historians of Mekka remark, and not without astonishment, that the munificent Khalife Haroun er Rasheid, although he repeatedly visited the Kaaba, added nothing to the mosque, except a new pulpit, or mambar.
In ancient times, Mohammed himself, his successors, and the Khalifes, whenever they came to Mekka, mounted the pulpit, and preached to the people. The Khatyb, or preacher, appears in the Mambar wrapped in a white cloak, which covers his head and body, and with a stick in his As in other mosques, two green flags are placed on each side of him.
The dome was again raised over it; the gates were distributed as they now are; a new mambar, or pulpit, was sent as a present from Cairo, and the whole mosque assumed its present form. Since the above period, a few immaterial improvements have been made by the Othman Emperors of Constantinople."
The small buildings just mentioned, which surround the Kaaba, are the five Makams, with the well of Zemzem, the arch called Bab-es'-Salam, and the Mambar. Opposite the four sides of the Kaaba stand four other small buildings, where the Imaums of the orthodox Mohammedan sects, the Hanefy, Shafey, Hanbaly, and Maleky, take their station, and guide the congregation in their prayers.
On the sides of the Mambar, or the pulpit, and of both the Mahrabs, large wax candles are placed, as thick as a man's body, and twelve feet high, which are lighted in the evening by means of a ladder placed near them. They are sent from Constantinople.
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