| Summary: | Disconnected from the original place and time of Islam and its own glorious early‐Islamic history, medieval Damascus felt like a temporally and spatially distant city. Through participating in newer hadith practices that facilitated the compression of time, Damascene scholars were able to diminish temporal distance to be closer to the Prophet. They also devised new spatial descriptions that enabled them to redefine space so that it could be easily occupied and revalued. Having inherited traditions of both the later hadith practices and the newer spatial discourses, the sixteenth‐century Damascene scholar, Shams al‐Din Ibn Tulun (d. 1546) combines them to provide chronotopic solutions to address personal and collective voids precipitated by Damascene distance, which were further intensified by the new Ottoman condition. Ibn Tulun locates the Prophet in the crevices of Damascus and allows himself and the Damascenes to be the exclusive cultivators and preservers of a local "iconographical" effort to conjure up the Prophet.
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