Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

38 t CHAPTER TWO
together by a silver band. The building is draped with a black brocade
cloth embroidered in gold with quranic texts; the bottom
edge can be raised or lowered by a series of cords and rings.
The Kaaba stands in the midst of an open space enclosed by
porticoes. This is the Haram, the “sanctuary,” and there are some
other constructions in it. Facing the northeastern facade wall of
the Kaaba is a small domed building called the Station of Abraham,
a title that applies equally to another stone it enshrines and in
which human footprints are impressed. Behind this building is a
colonnaded wellhead called Zamzam and next to that a pulpit.
For hundreds of millions of Muslims the Kaaba is the holiest
building in the world, and its holiness—like that of the Zamzam
and the Station, and, indeed, of the entire sequence of pilgrimage
rituals that surround them and the environs of Mecca—derives, as
we have already seen, from their connection with Abraham, the
biblical patriarch. But it is the shrine in Muhammad’s day that
interests us here, before its conversion, or, as Muslims would contend,
its reconversion, to Islam.
Not much history can be concluded from the present Kaaba in
Mecca, which substantially dates from a ground-up rebuilding in
1629. But from the many literary descriptions we possess, the seventeenth-century
reconstruction seems to have differed little from
the building that stood there all through the medieval era and back
to the late seventh century. In 683 c.e., however, the Kaaba had
been rebuilt on ideological grounds. The rebel Ibn al-Zubayr (d.
692), who then held Mecca against the reigning caliph in Damascus,
reconstructed it, we are informed, as it was in Abraham’s day.
The original building was joined to the shoulder-high semicircular
wall, the hijr, at the northwest face—how or to what purpose we
are not told, though there is plentiful evidence that this, and the
space between it and the Kaaba, was a taboo area. Hagar and
Ishmael were purported to have been buried there and there too
Muhammad was sleeping when he was carried off on his famous
“Night Journey” (see chapter 3). The Kaaba had two ground-level
doors, “one toward the east for people to enter and one toward
the west for people to exit.” This tradition goes back to Muhammad,
on the authority of his wife Aisha. The Prophet was recalling