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 remainder at a walk; an act of greeting toward the Black Stone at the start of each round, 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. 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. 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.

What Muslims hold the act to mean is bound up with the place itself. The tradition teaches that the Kaaba was raised by Abraham 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. The Black Stone is honored, not worshipped; a saying attributed to the caliph Umar insists on exactly this distinction, that the stone can neither harm nor help and is kissed only because the Prophet kissed it. The direction of the circling, and the orientation of all Muslim prayer toward this point, make the Kaaba the fixed center about which the daily life of the religion is arranged.

Observers have long noted that ritual circumambulation of a holy object or place recurs widely — the pradakshina of Hindu and Buddhist practice, the circuits made around shrines and relics in other traditions. The resemblance is real, and the turning of bodies around a sacred center seems to answer some common human impulse. It is not the same act: each tradition reads its own meaning into the motion, and within Islam the rite draws its sense from the specific history claimed for that specific house. The circling continues, unbroken through the hours of pilgrimage, day and night.

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

→ Related: Mount Arafat