Sheba

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THE ARK OF THE COVENANT AND ISRAELITE INFLUENCES
dunghill and in doing so incurred divine wrath that annihilated 200,000
Meccans, sparing only about 40 citizens who had opposed the desecration.
There are other sacred stones in Islam’s most venerated shrine at the
Ka’bah in Mecca. The Ka’bah is the site where Muslims believe Abraham
stood in the presence of God and built a simple shrine. As time passed it
became a center for pagan beliefs, a practice the rise of Islam eventually
terminated. When Muhammad began preaching for a return to the One True
Faith, revulsion grew against Meccan pagan practices. Consequently,
venerating stones and images was condemned as idol worship; but when the
Ka’bah shrine was restored and purified as the center of the One True Faith
of Abraham, two stones were nevertheless allowed to remain. The first
stone was known as the Station of Abraham and marked the spot where
Abraham had stood in God’s presence. This stone was kept in a box and
shone with an ethereal light. In the tenth century A.D. it was reported that it
bore ancient inscriptions, testifying that there was only One True God, and
that this place was His House. The second stone, originally brilliant white
but eventually stained by blood sacrifices, is known as the Black Stone.
This is the stone that Muslims kiss during the rites of pilgrimage.
In A.D. 925 the Qarmatians, an Ismaili Shiite sect, captured Mecca and
removed the Black Stone, intending to use it to divert the pilgrim caravans
to their center at Hajar near the border of modern Iraq. Twenty years later,
when the Qarmatian leader died horribly from internal flesh-eating worms,
his followers returned the stone to Mecca.
Bedouin Arabs have traditions extremely similar to the Ark of the
Covenant’s nomadic days. Portable and permanent shrines were a common
feature of pre-Islamic Arabia and echo early Hebrew history, that is, noting
where the Levites carried the Ark and placing it in a tent wherever they
stopped. The Hebrew Ark contained sacred tablets, and this finds parallels
throughout pre-Islamic Arabia, where tribes venerated unusual stones. The
Bedouin had a special red leather tent, kubbe, to house tribal deities.
Women played a major role in caring for the kubbe, which was considered
too sacred to accompany troops except in extremely important engagements.
The Prophet Muhammad possessed a kubbe that stood empty, and
Abraham’s original shrine in Mecca was little more than a tent, a low stone
structure with a cloth roof.
In A.D. 685 when the military commander al Muktar ibn Ubaid Allah
exhorted his troops to avenge the death of the Prophet’s grandson Hussein,
he showed them a throne that he said would be for them what the Ark of the
Covenant had been for the Israelites. After the rise of Islam the Bedouin