Tawaf

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Tawaf is the Islamic rite of walking seven times around the Kaaba, the cubic shrine at the center of the Great Mosque in Mecca. The pilgrim moves counterclockwise, keeping the structure to the left, beginning and ending each circuit at the corner that holds the Black Stone. It is performed during the Hajj, the major pilgrimage that every able Muslim is obliged to make once in a lifetime, and during the lesser pilgrimage, the Umrah, which may be undertaken at any time of year.

The rite is fixed in its form. Seven circuits, no fewer; the first three at a brisk pace for men — the quick, shoulder-rolling stride called ramal — the remaining four at a walk; an act of greeting toward the Black Stone at the start of each round, the istilam, by touching or kissing it where the crush of bodies allows, or by raising a hand toward it from a distance where it does not. During the circling, men of the pilgrimage often bare the right shoulder, drawing the upper cloth beneath the arm in the manner called iztiba. The circling is done in a state of ritual purity, and during the pilgrimage proper the pilgrim wears the ihram, two seamless white cloths that erase the marks of rank and wealth. The seven rounds completed, the pilgrim turns toward the Maqam Ibrahim, the Station of Abraham, the spot where tradition places the stone on which the patriarch stood to raise the walls, and there prays two cycles of prostration before going on to drink of the well of Zamzam. Around the Kaaba the masses of pilgrims form a slow turning ring, and the rite has become one of the most recognizable images of Islam.

The forms of the turning

The single gesture admits several occasions. The pilgrim arriving in Mecca performs the tawaf al-qudum, the circling of arrival, as the first act on entering the sanctuary. Within the Hajj proper, the binding circuit is the tawaf al-ifada, made after the standing at Mount Arafat and the descent through Muzdalifa — the rite without which the pilgrimage is not complete. A tawaf al-wada, the circling of farewell, marks departure, the pilgrim’s last sight of the house before turning homeward. The Umrah carries its own circling, the tawaf al-umra, which together with the running between the hills of Safa and Marwa constitutes the lesser pilgrimage in full. The form does not change across these occasions; what changes is the moment in the longer choreography of pilgrimage at which the seven rounds fall, and the obligation or merit attached to each. To the circling belongs the running, the saʿy, the seven passages between Safa and Marwa that retrace Hagar’s search for water for the infant Ishmael, and the standing on Arafat that is the Hajj’s own climactic station — the rite of place rather than the rite of motion.

The house at the center

What the act is held to mean is bound up with the place itself. The tradition teaches that the Kaaba was raised by Abraham — the Ibrahim of the Quran — and his son Ishmael as the first house built for the worship of the one God, and that the circling reenacts a devotion older than the Prophet Muhammad, recovered and purified at the founding of Islam. Before Islam the Kaaba already stood at the center of a Meccan sanctuary, the haram, into which the tribes of Arabia came on pilgrimage during four sacred months when the feuds were laid down and the roads made safe; within and around the house stood the idols of those tribes, and before the chief of them, the carnelian figure of Hubal, lay the divining arrows by which questions of paternity, blood-price, and travel were put to the lot. The custody of this sanctuary and its pilgrimage rites belonged hereditarily to the tribe of Quraysh. When Muhammad took the city near the end of his life, the building was cleared of its images and rededicated to God alone; the rite of circling survived the clearing, reframed as the act of Abraham restored to its first object. What the house was before Abraham, and how the rite came to it, the surviving sources — all of them later than the events and internal to the tradition that recounts them — do not fix; the documentary record establishes a pre-Islamic pilgrimage center of long standing, and rather less besides.

The Black Stone set into the eastern corner is honored, not worshipped, and the tradition is emphatic on the point. A saying carried down from the caliph Umar holds that, kissing the stone, he declared plainly that he knew it to be a stone that could neither harm nor help, and that he kissed it only because he had seen the Prophet kiss it. The stone is a marker, the point at which the count of seven begins and ends; the devotion runs past it to God. The Kaaba is not entered in worship and holds nothing meant to be venerated within. The building is the fixed point that gathers the act, not its object — a distinction the rite carries in its very form, since the pilgrim faces not the house but the motion around it, and salutes the corner without halting before it.

The fixed direction

The circling fixes a center; the center fixes a direction. The orientation of all Muslim prayer toward the Kaaba — the qibla — makes this point the axis about which the daily life of the religion is arranged. The qibla was not always Mecca. The first Muslims, in Mecca and through the early months at Medina, prayed toward Jerusalem — toward the Temple Mount, the platform that would later carry the Aqsa Mosque, remembered in tradition as the first of the two qiblas. In the second year after the emigration, around 624, the direction was turned to the Kaaba, a change the Quran records in the verses of the second sura that command the believers to turn their faces toward the Sacred Mosque (Quran 2:142–150). A mosque in Medina preserved the memory of the moment in its very fabric, keeping two prayer-niches, the older facing Jerusalem and the newer Mecca; it is known as the Mosque of the Two Qiblas. From that turning, five times a day, the lines of a fifth of humanity converge on a single set of coordinates, and the circling of the pilgrim at the Kaaba is the bodily form of what the distant worshipper performs by facing: an orientation made absolute, a single point that organizes a world of prayer.

The inner pilgrimage

Within the Sufi tradition the rite carries a second reading laid over the first, not against it. The pilgrimage is understood as an outward act that figures an inward one — the journey to the house of stone as a figure of the journey to the house of the heart, and the circling as a discipline whose true end is the contemplation of God rather than the sight of the Kaaba. The earliest Persian treatise on Sufism, the Kashf al-Mahjub of al-Hujwiri, devotes a chapter to this reading. There Abraham is given two stations: the station of his body, which is Mecca, and the station of his soul, which is friendship with God; the pilgrim who seeks the bodily station puts on the pilgrim’s garb and performs the rites, while the pilgrim who seeks the spiritual station must send the heart to circumambulate, in the chapter’s phrase, “the temple of Divine purification,” and sacrifice the lower soul on the altar of mortification. The chapter preserves the saying of an early master, Muhammad ibn al-Fadl, who marveled at those who seek God’s temple in the world and not the contemplation of God in their own hearts: the temple of stone, he held, is reached once a year and as often missed, while the temple of the heart may be visited three hundred and sixty times in a day and a night. It records too the dialogue in which the master Junayd, told by a returning pilgrim that he has been on the Hajj, asks at each stage whether the man also made the inner journey — whether, putting on the garb, he discarded the attributes of humanity; whether, circling the house, he beheld the immaterial beauty of God in the abode of purification — and, hearing no at each, tells him he has not yet performed the pilgrimage. The conclusion is unsparing: anyone absent from God at Mecca is no better than one absent from God at home, and anyone present with God at home is as one present with God at Mecca. The same insistence — that the rite is a means to an inward end and not the end itself — runs through the classical Arabic manual of al-Qushayri, the Risala, which sets the stations and states of the traveler in order and reads the outward observances of the law as the discipline within which the inner work is done. The frame does not loosen the obligation of the rite; it deepens its object. The circling of the feet is the visible sign of a circling of the heart, and the value, in al-Hujwiri’s reckoning, lies not in the Kaaba but in the contemplation of which the sight of the Kaaba is, at one remove, a cause.

The scholarship and the texts

The reconstruction of the rite’s pre-Islamic setting rests on a thin and difficult source base. The Arabic literary tradition that describes the jahiliyya — the age of ignorance before Islam — was redacted two and three centuries after the period it portrays, and within a frame that read that age polemically; the foundational study of how that polemic shaped the picture is G. R. Hawting’s The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam (Cambridge University Press, 1999), which argues that the Quran’s attack on idolatry is better read as directed against rival monotheists than against literal idol-worshippers. Robert Hoyland’s Arabia and the Arabs: From the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam (Routledge, 2001) furnishes the standard one-volume synthesis of the religious landscape into which the Meccan sanctuary fits, drawing the literary record together with the rapidly expanding epigraphic one. The unique surviving Arabic “Book of Idols,” the Kitab al-Asnam of Hisham ibn al-Kalbi (d. c. 819), records the idols of the haram and the divination before Hubal; its first printed Arabic edition (Cairo, 1914) is in the public domain. The Sufi meaning-frame is preserved verbatim in Reynold Nicholson’s 1911 English translation of the Kashf al-Mahjub, whose chapter on the pilgrimage is held in full at the Kashf al-Mahjub, chapter on the Pilgrimage. The classical orientalist treatments of the sanctuary and its rites — A. J. Wensinck’s article on the Kaaba in the first Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1913–1936) and Julius Wellhausen’s Reste arabischen Heidentums (2nd ed., Berlin, 1897, full facsimile at the Heidelberg University digital library edition) — remain points of departure, read now against the modern epigraphic turn and with their nineteenth-century survivals framework set aside.

A wider gesture

Circumambulation of a holy object or place is no Arabian peculiarity. The clockwise pradakshina of the Hindu and Buddhist worlds turns the worshipper about a shrine, an image, or a relic with the sacred object kept to the right; pilgrims walk the kora around the slopes of Mount Kailash, circle the Mahabodhi temple at the place of the Buddha’s awakening, ascend the terraces of Borobudur in a rising spiral, and walk the platform of the Shwedagon pagoda about its enshrined relics. The motion is shared; its sense is not. Within Islam the direction is reversed — the house kept to the left, not the right — and the rite draws its meaning from the particular history claimed for that particular house: Abraham’s building, the recovery at Islam’s founding, the orientation of the world’s prayer to this point and no other. To set the gesture beside its analogues is to see how thoroughly form is filled by story, the same walking made into different acts by the different centers it encircles.

The turning has a logic of its own, independent of what it resembles elsewhere. A center is fixed — a cube that holds nothing, raised by a patriarch, cleared of its idols, set at the convergence of the world’s prayer — and the body moves about it without arriving, the count of seven beginning and ending always at the same corner. What the pilgrim performs with the feet, the absent worshipper performs by facing, and the Sufi by sending the heart on the same round; the rite is the enacted form of the qibla, the standing orientation of the religion translated into motion. To circle the house is to make the gesture that the whole of the daily prayer presupposes — the turning of the self toward a point it does not reach and does not leave, the fixed center about which an entire devotion is ordered.

→ In the library: al-Hujwiri — Kashf al-Mahjub (1911), on the Pilgrimage

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