Kaaba

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The Kaaba is a roughly cube-shaped stone building at the heart of the Great Mosque, the Masjid al-Haram, in Mecca, in the Hijaz region of western Arabia. It is the most sacred site in Islam: the point toward which Muslims orient themselves in their five daily prayers, and the destination of the hajj, the pilgrimage that every able Muslim is held to make once in a lifetime. The building stands about thirteen metres high, draped in the kiswa, a black cloth embroidered in gold and renewed each year. Set into its eastern corner is the Black Stone, which pilgrims try to touch or salute as they circle the structure.

Mecca was a sanctuary and a trading town before Islam, and the Kaaba already stood at its center, a shrine housing the idols of the Arabian tribes who came to it. The traditional account holds that the Prophet Muhammad, on taking the city in his lifetime, cleared the building of its images and rededicated it to the one God. What the structure was before that, and how old it is, the historical record does not settle; the surviving sources are later and largely internal to the tradition they describe. Scholarship can say with confidence that the site was an established pre-Islamic pilgrimage center, and rather less about the rest.

Muslim tradition gives the building a far longer history. It teaches that the Kaaba was first raised by Adam, lost, and rebuilt by Abraham and his son Ishmael at God’s command — making it, in this telling, the first house of worship set up for humankind, older than any temple. The rites performed around it, above all the tawaf, the seven counter-clockwise circuits pilgrims walk, are understood as a re-enactment of acts ascribed to Abraham and his family. The orientation of prayer toward it, the qibla, was according to the Qur’an turned to Mecca during Muhammad’s lifetime, away from an earlier direction toward Jerusalem.

The Kaaba is not entered in worship and holds nothing meant to be venerated inside; the devotion is directed at God, with the building as the fixed point that gathers it. That a single empty cube should knit the daily prayer of a fifth of humanity into one shared orientation is among the more striking facts in the geography of religion — millions of lines of sight, on five occasions a day, converging on one set of coordinates. The structure has been damaged, flooded, and rebuilt across the centuries; the spot has not moved.

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