Kaaba

• 1. The Ring of Pilgrims

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  For all but one day of the Islamic year, a ring of pilgrims surrounds the Kaaba. The exception is the 9th of Dhu'l-Hijja, known as the Day of Arafah, when the cloth covering the building is changed. The Kaaba is a stone building at the center of the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Muslims regard that mosque as the holiest site in Islam. Wherever a Muslim stands in the world, this building fixes the direction faced in prayer, known as the qibla.

  Yet the building's past is full of open questions. Who first raised its walls? What filled its interior before Islam arrived? Why did the earliest Muslims once pray toward Jerusalem instead? And how did a structure that has burned, flooded, been bombarded and been rebuilt still keep its basic shape?

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• 2. Name and Cousins

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  In Arabic, the word ka'ba literally means cube. The most popular explanation for the building's name is therefore its shape. Some scholars doubt that the cube sense of the root is old enough and search for other origins. One disputed hypothesis links the name to a southern Arabian or Ethiopian word, mikrab, which signifies a temple. Another relates it to Kʿbt, a word connected with the Kaaba of Najran.

  The Meccan building belonged to a wider family. Pre-Islamic sanctuaries of a similar architectural style are broadly labelled Kaabas. Most are known from the Arabian Peninsula, though others turn up elsewhere, including a Kaaba of Zoroaster. The scholar Imoti contends that Arabia once held many such sanctuaries. In his account, only the Meccan one was built of stone.

  The Black Stone has relatives too. Scholars have compared it to baetyls, pre-Islamic sacred stones that were often black and thought to be of meteorite origin. People venerated them in houses or temples devoted to a particular deity. Imoti argues that the other Kaabas had counterparts of their own. The South Arabian city of Ghaiman had a Red Stone. The Kaaba of al-Abalat, near modern-day Tabalah, had a White Stone. G. E. von Grunebaum points out that experiences of the divine in that era were often tied to stones, mountains, special rock formations, or "trees of strange growth."

  Over time the Kaaba came to be seen as an axis mundi, a world center with the Gate of Heaven directly above it. In that view it marked the point where the sacred world crossed the ordinary one. The embedded Black Stone, a meteorite fallen from the sky, was a further sign of that link between heaven and earth.

  Outside sources are harder to pin down. Wensinck identifies Mecca with a place that Ptolemy calls Macoraba. Grunebaum adds that the name marks a South Arabian foundation created around a sanctuary. Patricia Crone, in Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam, argues the identification is false. She places Macoraba in southern Arabia, in the region then called Arabia Felix. A recent study revisited the arguments for Macoraba and found them unsatisfactory.

  Diodorus Siculus, drawing on an earlier report by Agatharchides of Cnidus, describes a Red Sea coast temple "which is very holy and exceedingly revered by all Arabians." Edward Gibbon believed this was the Kaaba. Ian D. Morris argues that Gibbon misread the source, because Diodorus places the temple too far north to be Mecca.

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• 3. The House of Ibrahim

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  The Qur'an calls the Kaaba by several names built on the Arabic word for house. These include al-Bayt in 2:125, Baytī, meaning my house, in 22:26, and al-Bayt al-Ḥarām in 5:97. Ibrahim himself says Baytik al-Muḥarram in 14:37, and 22:29 uses al-Bayt al-ʿAtīq. The Qur'an also speaks of its beginnings. One verse reads: "Verily, the first House (of worship) appointed for mankind was that at Bakkah (Makkah), full of blessing, and a guidance for mankind."

  According to Islamic tradition, Ibrahim returned to the valley of Mecca several years after leaving his wife Hajar and their son Ismail there on Allah's command. Father and son then raised the foundations together. The Qur'an records their prayer: "Our Lord! Accept (this service) from us: For Thou art the All-Hearing, the All-knowing." When the work was done, God enjoined the descendants of Ismail to make an annual pilgrimage, the Hajj, and to offer the Qurban, a sacrifice of cattle. The surrounding area became a sanctuary where bloodshed and war were forbidden.

  Ibn Kathir, in his famous commentary on the Qur'an, weighs two interpretations of the Kaaba's origin. In the first, the site was a place of worship for angels before humans were created. A later house there was lost in the flood of Nuh's time, and Ibrahim and Ismail then rebuilt it. Ibn Kathir regarded this tradition as weak. He preferred a narration from Ali ibn Abi Talib, which says that other temples may have come earlier. Even so, the Kaaba was the first Bayt Allah, the House of God, dedicated solely to him. A hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari adds that the Kaaba was the first masjid on Earth and Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem the second. In Islamic cosmology, a pilgrimage site called Zurah was the precursor to the Kaaba.

  Christian and Jewish-adjacent writers had their own speculations. The Khuzistan Chronicle, a Nestorian Christian chronicle written no later than the 660s CE, admits its author could not discover what the Kaaba of Ibrahim was. It guesses that Abraham, grown rich and wishing to escape the envy of the Canaanites, lived in tents and built the place for worship and sacrifice. The chronicle adds that Arab worship there was nothing new. A 10th-century Samaritan work, the Asatir, tells yet another version: Ismail and his eldest son Nebaioth built both the Kaaba and the city of Mecca.

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• 4. Idols and Sanctuary

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  Pre-Islamic poetry attributed to Zuhayr ibn Abi Sulma names the Quraysh and Jurhum tribes as the builders of the Kaaba. Scholars disagree about how important the site was then. Christian J. Robin argues that it became prominent in the last decades of the 6th century, after the Quraysh defeated Abraha in battle. Peter Webb, reading the same poetry, argues that it was never a major pilgrimage destination. In his view it played a local role in Western Arabia rather than a pan-Arabian one.

  Islamic tradition describes a busy shrine. Bedouin tribes came on pilgrimage once every lunar year and set aside their feuds while they did so. The Kaaba held 360 idols, perhaps one for each day of the year, as well as sculptures and paintings. Among them were angels, Ibrahim holding divination arrows, and Isa and his mother Maryam. Inside were also decorations, money, and a pair of ram's horns. Those horns were said to belong to the ram that Ibrahim sacrificed in place of his son Ismail.

  The Book of Idols by Hisham ibn al-Kalbi traces the idolatry to a man named 'Amr ibn Luhay. He descended from Qahtan, was king of Hijaz, and lived about 400 years before Muhammad's birth. He placed an idol of Hubal on the roof of the Kaaba. The figure was made of red agate and shaped like a human. Its right hand had broken off and been replaced with one of gold. When moved inside, it stood before seven arrows used for divination. Islamic tradition blames the descendants of Ishmael who settled around the Zamzam Well for slowly turning the worship away from its monotheist origins.

  To keep the peace between warring tribes, Mecca was declared a sanctuary where no violence was allowed within 20 mi of the Kaaba. The combat-free zone let Mecca thrive as a trading center as well as a pilgrimage site. A king named Tubba' is considered the first to have a door built for the Kaaba, according to sayings recorded in Al-Azraqi's Akhbar Makka. Circumambulation in this period was often performed naked by men and almost naked by women.

  It remains disputed whether Allah and Hubal were one deity or two. Uri Rubin and Christian Robin propose that Hubal was venerated only by the Quraysh. On their hypothesis, the Kaaba was first dedicated to Allah, a supreme god of people from many tribes. The Quraysh pantheon was installed only after the Quraysh conquered Mecca, a century before Muhammad's time.

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• 5. Muhammad and the Kaaba

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  A cloak spread on the ground settled a quarrel between Meccan clans. Around 600 CE, Muhammad took part in rebuilding the Kaaba after a fire weakened its structure and a later flood damaged it. Ibn Ishaq's biography and Al-Azraqi's chronicle of Mecca describe the dispute over which clan should set the Black Stone in place. Muhammad's solution was to have all the clan elders lift the cornerstone on a cloak. He then set it into its final position with his own hands.

  The Quraysh bought the timber for the job from a Byzantine ship wrecked on the Red Sea coast at Shu'aybah. The work was carried out by a Coptic Egyptian carpenter from that ship, called Baqum, a form of the name Pachomius. Money ran short during the rebuilding. The Quraysh left out six cubits of the northern part of the structure. That omitted strip is now known as Al-Hateem, or Hijr Ismail.

  In the early years at Mecca, Muslims faced Jerusalem in prayer, while pilgrimage to the Kaaba was already a duty whose rites were not yet fixed. Muhammad and his followers were severely persecuted, and in 622 CE they migrated to Medina. In 624 CE, Muslims believe, a Quranic revelation changed the qibla from Al-Aqsa to the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca. Muhammad's night journey, the Isra', is said to have taken him from the Kaaba to the Masjid al-Aqsa and then heavenward.

  In 628 CE, Muhammad led a group toward Mecca to perform the Umrah, but the Quraysh stopped him. He secured the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, which let Muslims perform pilgrimage at the Kaaba freely from the following year. Then, in 630 CE, the Banu Bakr, allies of the Quraysh, violated the treaty, and Muhammad conquered Mecca. His first act was to remove the statues and images from the Kaaba.

  One report, narrated by Abdullah, says 360 idols stood around the Kaaba that day. Muhammad struck them with a stick, saying: "Truth has come and Falsehood has vanished..." The reports differ on the paintings. Ibn Ishaq and Al-Azraqi say he spared a painting of Mary and Jesus and a fresco of Ibrahim. Another account from Al-Azraqi has him order every picture erased except the one of Maryam. In the same account, he condemned the image of Ibrahim with the words "May Allah kill those representing him as a venerable old man casting arrows in divination."

  Muhammad then restated the sanctity of Mecca and its Great Mosque. In 632 CE he performed the Hajj known as the Hujjat ul-Wada', the Farewell Pilgrimage, because he prophesied his impending death during it.

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• 6. Fire, Flood and Siege

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  On the 31st of October 683, fire severely damaged the Kaaba during the first siege of Mecca. The war pitted the Umayyads against 'Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr, an early Muslim who ruled Mecca for many years between the death of Ali and the Umayyads' consolidation of power. 'Abdullah rebuilt the Kaaba to include the hatīm. He relied on a tradition in several hadith collections that the hatīm was a remnant of the foundations of the Abrahamic Kaaba, and that Muhammad had wished to include it.

  Stones bombarded the Kaaba again in the second siege of Mecca in 692. The Umayyad army was led by al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf. The fall of the city and the death of 'Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr let 'Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan reunite the Islamic possessions and end the long civil war. In 693 CE, 'Abd al-Malik had the remnants of al-Zubayr's Kaaba razed. He rebuilt it on the foundations laid by the Quraysh, restoring the cube shape of Muhammad's time. Its basic shape and structure have not changed since.

  The Black Stone has suffered more than the walls. A stone fired from a catapult has struck and smashed it, and it has been smeared with excrement. During the Hajj of 930 CE, the Shi'ite Qarmatians under Abu Tahir al-Jannabi attacked Mecca. They defiled the Zamzam Well with the bodies of pilgrims and stole the Black Stone. They carried it to the oasis of al-Aḥsāʾ in Eastern Arabia. The Abbasids ransomed it back in 952 CE, and by then it had been smashed into several fragments.

  Rain did its own damage in 1626. After heavy flooding, the walls of the Kaaba collapsed and the Mosque was damaged. During the reign of the Ottoman emperor Murad IV, the Kaaba was rebuilt that same year with granite stones from Mecca, and the Mosque was renovated.

  In 1916, Hussein bin Ali had launched the Great Arab Revolt, and Ottoman troops bombarded Mecca in the Battle of Mecca. A shell hit the Kaaba and set fire to its protective veil. Propaganda for the revolt later exploited the incident to show the impiety of the Ottomans and the legitimacy of a holy war against them.

  Another attack came in the age of modern kings. On the 15th of March 1935, three armed men from Oman tried to assassinate King Ibn Saud while he performed the Hajj. He survived unhurt thanks to the intervention of the crown prince, and his bodyguards killed the three attackers.

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• 7. Stone, Teak and Gold

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  The Kaaba is a cuboid of stone about 15 m high, with sides measuring 12 m by 10.5 m. Its four corners roughly point toward the four cardinal directions. They carry the names Rukn al-Yamani, Rukn ush-Shami and Rukn al-'Iraqi, along with the corner of the Black Stone, which faces very slightly southeast. Observers have noted that the long axis of the building lines up with the rising of the star Canopus. Its short east-west facades roughly align with the sunrise of the summer solstice and the sunset of the winter solstice.

  The Black Stone sits in the eastern corner. Pilgrims begin their circling there. The entrance, called the Bāb ar-Raḥmah, is a door set 2.13 m above the ground in the north-eastern wall. A wooden staircase on wheels is usually stored in the mosque between the Banū Shaybah gate and the Zamzam Well. In 1979, gold doors weighing 300 kg replaced silver ones. The artist Ahmad bin Ibrahim Badr made the gold pair, and his father Ibrahim Badr made the silver pair in 1942. The oldest surviving door dates to 1045 AH, which is 1635-36 CE.

  The rebuilding of 1627 added two features meant to protect the foundation from rainwater. One is the Mīzāb ar-Raḥmah, a gold rain spout. The other is the Shadherwaan, a slanted structure covering three sides of the Kaaba. Opposite the north-west wall stands the Hatīm, a semi-circular white marble wall 1.31 m high and 1.5 m wide. The space between it and the Kaaba was originally part of the building, so pilgrims do not enter it while circling. Nearby, the Station of Ibrahim, a glass and metal enclosure, holds what is said to be the imprint of Ibrahim's feet. He is said to have stood on the stone while building the upper parts, lifting Ismail onto his shoulders for the very top.

  The interior is surprisingly restrained. The floor is marble and limestone, standing about 2 m above the ground where pilgrims circle. White marble tiles clad the walls halfway to the roof, with darker trim along the floor. Three pillars stand inside, though some accounts wrongly report two. A small altar or table sits between them, and lamp-like objects hang from the ceiling. The roof and ceiling are made of teak wood capped in stainless steel. A black cloth embroidered with gold Qur'anic verses runs along the top corners of the walls. Caretakers anoint the marble with the same scented oil used on the Black Stone outside.

  Outside, the Kiswah, a black silk and gold covering, is replaced every year during the Hajj. Two-thirds of the way up runs the hizam, a band of gold-embroidered Qur'anic text that includes the Shahada. The curtain over the door, the sitara, is especially ornate. Both carry verses and supplications in gold and silver wire.

  Inside hang ten engraved white marble slabs. Nine were written in Thuluth script and one in prominent Kufic. The tenth records the expansion of the mosque under Fahd of Saudi Arabia. Two slabs honor Circassian sultans who ruled the Islamic world from 1382 to 1517. The slab of Sultan Barsbay, dated 1423, records a wide restoration and calls him Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. His son Sultan Qaitbay is honored on a slab dated 1479, which notes a restoration inside the Kaaba on the first of Rajab in 884 AH.

  Images of the Kaaba have their own history. The earliest depiction seems to have been in the mosaics of the Great Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, built in 705-15. That image does not survive. In 1093-1095, a monumental depiction of Mecca was carved on a slab in Mosul. In 1193, an illustrated Hajj certificate carried what is the earliest known circulating image of the Kaaba. Today the building appears on the reverse of the 500 Saudi riyal banknote and the 2000 Iranian rial banknote.

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• 8. The Circling

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  Seven times, in a counterclockwise direction, pilgrims circle the Kaaba in the rite called Tawaf. It is compulsory in both the Hajj and Umrah. The area where pilgrims walk is the Mataaf, and a marble stripe marks where each circuit begins and ends. Pilgrims walk the first three circuits at a hurried pace on the outer part of the Mataaf. They walk the last four closer to the building at a leisurely pace. The circling is believed to show the unity of the believers as they move together around the Kaaba, calling on the One God.

  Tawaf begins at the corner of the Black Stone. Pilgrims are to kiss or touch the stone if possible, though large crowds often prevent it. They chant the Basmala and Takbir at the end of each circuit. Wudu, the ritual ablution, is mandatory, because tawaf is considered a form of worship. Hajj pilgrims are generally advised to make tawaf at least twice, once as part of the Hajj and once before leaving Mecca.

  There are five kinds of tawaf. The arrival tawaf is for those who do not live in Mecca. The greeting tawaf is performed on entering the Masjid al-Haram at other times. The Umrah tawaf belongs to that pilgrimage. The farewell tawaf comes before leaving Mecca. The tawaf of visiting is performed after completing the Hajj. Facing the qibla while reciting the Qur'an is also considered good etiquette.

  Twice a year the building itself is opened for the ceremony called the Cleaning of the Sacred Kaaba. It takes place on the 1st of Sha'baan, about thirty days before Ramadan, and on the 15th of Muharram. The keys are held by the Banī Shaybah tribe, an honor bestowed on them by Muhammad. Members of the tribe greet visitors who enter on the day.

  Preparations begin a day earlier, when Zamzam water is mixed with Tayef rose, 'oud and musk. The Governor of the Makkah Province and accompanying dignitaries clean the interior with cloths dipped in the scented Zamzam water. Water with rose perfume is splashed on the floor and wiped with palm leaves. The whole process usually takes two hours.

  One claim ties the building to a single birth. Many Shia and Sunni sources, among them Al-Hakim al-Nishapuri, Al-Fakihi and Al-Masudi, have written that Ali ibn Abi Talib, the first Imam of the Shiites, was the only person born inside the Kaaba.

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