Kaaba

← Encyclopedia

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 meters 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.

It is, in plain description, a windowless cube of grey Meccan granite, a little taller than it is wide, with a single raised door in one face and a low semicircular wall — the hijr — set against its northwestern side. Nothing about the dimensions is monumental; the building would be lost beside the temples of Karnak or the Temple Mount platform. Its weight is not architectural. The Kaaba is the bayt Allah, the House of God, and the whole of the Great Mosque has been built and rebuilt around it as around a fixed center, the colonnades and minarets and the vast marble floor radiating outward from the one point they exist to frame.

The fabric of the shrine

The covering is renewed in an annual rite. The kiswa is woven of black silk, its upper band and the broad sash around its middle worked in gold and silver thread with Qur’anic inscription — among them the declaration of faith and the verses concerning the House. The old cloth is taken down and cut up; fragments pass into circulation as relics. Custody of the kiswa, like custody of the building itself, has been a marker of sovereignty across the centuries: the ruler who clothed the Kaaba and provisioned the pilgrimage claimed thereby to be the protector of the holiest place in the religion, and Egyptian, then Ottoman, then Saudi authority has each in turn asserted that role through the cloth. For centuries the new covering arrived from Cairo with the Egyptian pilgrim caravan, borne in a ceremonial palanquin; in the modern era it is woven in Mecca itself, at a workshop dedicated to the purpose, from raw silk dyed black and threaded with gold. The colors have not always been black: earlier coverings are recorded as white, green, and red before the black silk became settled custom. The cloth is the most visible thing about the shrine and the part most often renewed, and yet it conceals rather than adorns — the bare cube beneath is what the covering exists to honor.

The Black Stone, al-hajar al-aswad, is set into the eastern corner at roughly the height of a standing person, its broken pieces gathered within a ring of stone and bound by a heavy silver band. Pilgrims passing it reach to touch or kiss it where the crowd allows, and to salute it from a distance where it does not — a gesture, in the tradition’s own account, of greeting rather than worship, the stone honored as a marker of the House and as the point from which the circling begins, never as a thing divine in itself. The corner that holds it is the corner the circuits start and end on.

Tawaf and qibla

Around the building runs the tawaf: seven circuits walked counter-clockwise, the Kaaba kept to the pilgrim’s left, the crowd moving as one slow current. In the tradition’s reading the circling re-enacts acts ascribed to Abraham and his family at this place, and the running between the nearby hillocks of Safa and Marwa that completes the rite recalls the search of Hagar for water for her son. The hajj proper falls in the appointed days of the month of Dhu al-Hijja and gathers, in the modern era, some two million pilgrims at once onto the plain of Arafat and back to the Mosque; the lesser pilgrimage, the umra, can be made at any season. The istilam, the salute to the Black Stone, opens the circuits.

The orientation of prayer is the qibla, and it is fixed on the Kaaba. From every mosque on earth a niche in one wall — the mihrab — marks the direction; from any open ground the worshipper turns the same way; and the lines converge, across continents, on this single set of coordinates. According to the Qur’an the qibla was turned to Mecca during Muhammad’s lifetime, in the early Medinan years, away from an earlier orientation toward Jerusalem — the city that remained, and remains, the focus of the Temple Mount and the prior direction of prayer. The change is recorded in the second sura as a divine instruction to face the Sacred Mosque. The tradition does not present the two directions as rivals so much as a succession; the earlier facing toward Jerusalem sat within the shared Abrahamic horizon that Islam holds in common with Judaism and Christianity.

What the building is not is as defining as what it is. 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. On the few ceremonial occasions when the door is opened and the interior washed, what is revealed is an empty room — marble facing, three pillars, hanging lamps, and the inner side of the kiswa. 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.

Mecca before Islam

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 town sat in a barren valley off the incense and caravan routes of western Arabia, and its standing rested less on commerce than on cult: it was a haram, a sacred precinct in which bloodshed was forbidden and within which the tribes could meet, trade, and worship under a truce. A system of four sacred months suspended intertribal warfare and made the seasonal pilgrimage possible, and the Quraysh, the dominant Meccan tribe, held the hereditary custodianship of the precinct and its rites.

The pre-Islamic cult of the Hijaz is reconstructed from a literary tradition far later than the events it describes, and the best single witness within that tradition — the Kitab al-Asnam, the Book of Idols of Hisham ibn al-Kalbi, who died around 819 — describes a sanctuary thick with images. Inside or beside the Kaaba stood Hubal, rendered there as a human figure of red carnelian with a golden hand, before which divination arrows were cast to settle questions of paternity, blood-money, and travel. Three goddesses dominated the wider regional cult — al-Lat, honored at nearby al-Taif; al-Uzza, in a sacred grove at Nakhla; and Manat, at Qudayd on the coast — and the Qur’an names them together in the fifty-third sura. The epigraphic record of pre-Islamic Arabia, recovered from tens of thousands of South Arabian and North Arabian inscriptions, confirms the deep antiquity of the cult of betyls — sacred standing stones — and of pilgrimage to fixed sanctuaries during sacred months, even where it does not corroborate the literary tradition’s particular Meccan scene. The longer pre-Islamic religious world is treated in its own right; here it is the backdrop against which the shrine was rededicated.

The building itself was no fixed monument even in that age. The tradition recalls a reconstruction by the Quraysh in Muhammad’s youth, after flood or fire had weakened the walls, in which the tribes quarreled over which of them should have the honor of setting the Black Stone back into its corner and resolved the dispute by letting the young Muhammad place it on a cloth that all could lift together. The same account records that the Quraysh, short of building timber, left a portion of the original foundation outside the new walls — the arc of the low hijr wall traces it — so that the structure they raised was smaller than the one the tradition ascribes to Abraham. Later rulers would restore the full outline and then abandon the attempt again; the building has carried the marks of its rebuildings into the present.

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. The idols were broken or removed, the divination arrows cast out, and the House restored — in this telling — to the worship for which it had first been raised. The continuity is the point: the rites that had gathered the tribes were not abolished but purified and turned wholly toward God.

The House older than any temple

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 Qur’an describes Abraham and Ishmael raising the foundations of the House and praying that their work be accepted, and names the place as the first sanctuary appointed for humankind, at Bakka, blessed and a guidance to all. In this account the maqam Ibrahim, the Station of Abraham — a stone preserved near the building and shown to bear the imprint of his feet — marks where the patriarch stood at the work, and the well of Zamzam nearby is the spring opened for Hagar and Ishmael in the desert. 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 frame is thoroughly Abrahamic. The House is older than the Law given at Sinai and older than the Temple raised in Jerusalem; it stands, in the tradition’s reckoning, at the origin of monotheist worship, set up by the first man and refounded by the patriarch whom Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike claim as father. The pilgrimage to it and the prayer toward it are thus understood not as innovations of the seventh century but as the recovery of the oldest devotion, obscured in the age of the idols and made clear again. Sufi writers would later read the Kaaba inward as well as outward — the House of stone answered by a House within the heart, the circling of the body around the cube mirrored by the turning of the soul toward God — but the literal House remains the anchor, the visible center the inner journey is measured against.

The history-critical question

What the structure was before Muhammad’s rededication, and how old it is, the documentary record does not reach; 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. The narrative of a sanctuary dense with the idols of the tribes comes from compilers writing a century and more after the events, within a framework that conceived the age before Islam as a jahiliyya, an age of ignorance whose idolatry the Qur’an had abolished — a framework that, as G. R. Hawting argues, draws on older Near-Eastern monotheist polemic against idolatry and so cannot be read as a transparent window onto the Meccan cult. The epigraphic and documentary record of late-antique Arabia, surveyed by Christian Julien Robin and others, places the rise of the religion within a peninsula already crossed by currents of monotheism — Jewish, Christian, and the South Arabian invocation of a single merciful God — but it does not, on its own, fix the Kaaba’s early history. The building’s deepest past is held by the tradition, in the account it preserves of the House first raised for the worship of God; the documentary record reaches back only so far, and there it stops.

Sources and scholarship {#research}

The reference treatment of the shrine is Harry Munt’s article “Kaʿba” in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE (Leiden: Brill), which supersedes the first-edition article by A. J. Wensinck in collating the textual and archaeological evidence for the building, the Black Stone, and the rites. The source-critical frame for the pre-Islamic material is set by G. R. Hawting, The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Cambridge Core), which argues that the canonical account of Meccan idolatry is shaped by later theological need; Robert G. Hoyland, Arabia and the Arabs: From the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam (London: Routledge, 2001), gives the leading one-volume synthesis. For the late-antique Arabian setting from the contemporary inscriptions, Christian Julien Robin’s “Arabia and Ethiopia,” in S. F. Johnson, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 247–332 is fundamental, with his “Le judaïsme de Ḥimyar,” Arabia 1 (2003), 97–172, on the South Arabian monotheist transition. Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton University Press, 1987), reassessed Mecca’s place in late-antique commerce; Aziz al-Azmeh, The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity: Allāh and His People (Cambridge University Press, 2014), integrates the epigraphic and literary records. The single surviving “Book of Idols,” Hisham ibn al-Kalbi’s Kitab al-Asnam, edited by Ahmad Zaki Pasha (Cairo, 1914) and translated by N. A. Faris as The Book of Idols (Princeton University Press, 1952), remains the principal literary witness to the Meccan cult the rededication displaced.

The structure has been damaged, flooded, and rebuilt across the centuries, yet within it the House stays bare — no image, no relic, nothing the circling pilgrim has come to look upon. The Kaaba is the direction of the prayer and never its object: the millions who orient their five daily prayers upon it pray past it, toward the God it was raised only to point them toward.

→ Related: Islam · Qur An · Abraham · Adam · Temple Mount · Sufism · Christianity