The Black Stone Web Excerpt

8/11/2019 The Black Stone Web Excerpt

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S USAN T ALLMAN

T HE B LACK S TONE

[This is an excerpt from the first chapter of a forthcoming book about the power of certainindividual objects in the human mind and human history.-ST]

The Black Stone of the Ka‘ba in Mecca has probably been touched, caressed,kissed, by more people than any other object in the history of the planet. In the 21 st century more than two million people converge every year to brush their fingers or lipsagainst its surface, continuing a tradition unbroken for at least 13 centuries. Five timesevery day, around the world, perhaps a billion people 1 look to architecture, compassneedles, stars, or iPhone apps to point out its direction and pray.

The Black Stone is a rock (or more precisely, several fragments of rock) setinto the eastern corner of the Ka‘ba, the cubical shrine around which the GreatMosque in Mecca is built. According to the Keeper of the Ka‘ba, the Black Stone is“the holiest place in this great house of God… the right hand of God on Earth.” 2 Touching it negates the past, and affirms a new submission to God. It marks the point

toward which Muslim corpses face on burial.Precisely what type of rock it is, geologically, is impossible to know: the

guardians of Mecca are not about to drill samples. It has been described as smooth,“hummocky,” reddish black in color, and flecked with yellow particles. In 1814 theSwiss adventurer John Lewis Burckhardt reported it was “an irregular oval, aboutseven inches in diameter, with an undulating surface.” (Non-Muslims are forbiddenentry to Mecca, but Burckhardt was one of many who sneaked in disguised as

pilgrims.) 3 Observers have identified it as lava, basalt, 4 agate, or “a common aërolite,



The Power of Things: The Black Stone

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covered with a thick, slaggy coating, glossy and pitch-like, worn and polished.”5

Modern geologists have theorized that its hardness is probably Moh 7 given itssurvival of all that stroking.

6 Muslim accounts take a different tone: “the stone, when

one kisses it, has a softness and moistness which so enchant the mouth that he who puts his lips to it would wish them never to be removed,” wrote Ibn Jubayr, a 12 th

century pilgrim from Valencia.Over the dramatic course of its history, the Black Stone has been buried,

burned, kidnapped, smashed, bathed in perfumes and wrapped in brocade and gold. ...It may be only a few inches in diameter but it serves a critical public function: one of

the acts of faith required of every Muslim who is fit and wealthy enough is to make the journey to the Ka‘ba, and there to circle the building seven times in a ritual of prayerand commemoration. The Black Stone marks the starting point of thiscircumambulation ( tawaf .) Thus it denotes the center point of pilgrimage in a religion

that makes pilgrimage central to religious life. The masses that swirl like a human vortex on the bright marble plain of the Great Mosque are set swirling by the BlackStone.

The Black Stone can be seen, in quite a literal way, as the cornerstone of Islam.But here is the odd thing: of all the “religions of the book” – Judaism, Christianity, andIslam – Islam is the most vehement in its repudiation of idolatry, in its admonitionsagainst any kind of ecclesiastical accessory that might distract from God: it has no

jeweled crosses, gilded reliquaries or chalices, monstrances, tabernacles, thuribles, orcensors. This is a manifestation of Islam’s deepest directive, to maintain wholeness andunity ( tawhid), without divisions into “this world and the hereafter, the natural andsupernatural, substance and meaning, body and spirit;” 7 to inveigh againstdisintegration; to repudiate shirk, a term that means associating things that ought not to

be associated, in particular, associating the creations of God with the power that is God.

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The Black Stone -- a physical thing at the center of a religion that repudiates the worship of physical things -- illuminates our paradoxical need for material things to provide proof of a world beyond material things, our reliance on physical stuffevidence to evoke ideas, knowledge, beauty, spirituality, God. It is a profoundembodiment of our aspirations to understand the universe, and of our ultimately

limited capacity to respond to abstractions. ...

The reverence and passions expended on the Black Stone are all the moreremarkable, at least from a Western perspective, because it is nothing much to look at.It is not a work of art, not a glittering jewel. To most eyes it would appear to be just

what its name declares – a black stone. A non-Muslim cannot help but to wonder: why this rock rather than any other? Why a rock at all, for that matter?

... To understand the Stone’s cosmological importance within Islam, it isnecessary to look, not at the rock, but at the stories told about it.

Islamic traditions tell us that the stone was, from the first, inseparable from theKa‘ba, the building of which it is a part, and that the Ka‘ba is older than Creation,



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present in the mind of God before the sun and stars took shape. It is, in fact, oftendifficult to tell when early Muslim writers were writing about the Stone, the Ka’ba as a

building, the place where the two stand, or the spiritual reality that underlay them. ...

Adam, expelled from Paradise and clinging, as exiles do, to the totems of home,asked God if he might have the Stone. In the pitiless desert of his new life he wished

to imitate the angels on high circling round the throne of the Almighty, and he wanted the Stone so that he might circle round this remnant of Heaven, this touchstone ofGod. 9

... According to the Meccan historian Al-Azraqi, it was one of the stars ofParadise, so dazzlingly bright that “if God had not effaced it, it would have illuminatedeverything between east and west.” The Stone was black by the time Al-Azraqi was

writing in the 9 th century, but its blackness was not God’s doing alone, for he also said that it had “shone like the moon for the people of Mecca until the pollution of impure people caused it to go black.” 10 Other accounts suggest that it had once been itself anangel. In many stories it has the power to act: it is credited with swallowing thedocument with which men swore their fealty to God,

11 and the Keeper of the Ka’ba

tells us that “on the Day of Judgment, it will bear witness for those who surrendered to the truth and touched it.” 12 The stone, the angels, the building, and the spot in thedesert that echoes Heaven above all run together in the different tellings of the tale.Perhaps they are the same thing, or were at some point, or will be again, or alwayshave been. Mythology and deep history are like that. However the stories are

braided, two facts remain: there is a stone, and there is a sanctuary, a building,a“house.”

...

[Many generations later, Abraham and his son Ishmael return to the same Valley of Adam’s exile] In the Quran Abraham himself describes it as a “valley withoutcultivation ... But it was here that God commanded Abraham to rebuild the Ka‘ba asa sanctuary for men and an abode for the One God; and it was here that Ishmael,guided by the angel Gabriel, unearthed the Black Stone and replaced it in its proper

location in the corner of the Ka‘ba. 13 And there, according to the traditions of Islam, ithas remained – apart from one famous abduction – ever since; a vital, physical linkfrom God to Adam to Abraham to the pilgrim whose lips are touching it as I write thissentence.

...

By the time that Jesus of Nazareth was born some 800 miles to the north, thedesert children of Ishmael had filled their sanctuaries with a variety of figures that they

took for gods. They worshipped stones and statues and a date-tree by the name ofOzza. Idols from other places were imported – Hubal, the Mesopotamian moon god;al-Uzza, an Isis–Aphrodite type; Manat, the Nabatean goddess of time; the Jewish

prophet Jesus and his mother Mary. They sacrificed animals to their idols andsmeared them with blood and offal. They asked advice of them, and solicited theirintersession with gods more powerful still. The descendents of Ishmael thus fell into

the sin of shirk, associating with God things that were not God. 14 Muslim writersdescribe this as “the time of ignorance” – the Jahaliyya .




4

...

A sanctuary so rich in gods naturally attracted not only pilgrims but jealouscompetition... Abraha marched on Mecca with 40,000 men and battle elephants. (Or

perhaps battle elephant; but even one rampaging elephant would instill justifiable terror in a hamlet of mud huts.) ... as Abraha’s army approached, the sky blackened with birds carrying stones that rained down on the attackers, forcing their retreat...

Later it would be said that two momentous things happened in Mecca in the Year of the Elephant: armed birds defeated pachyderms, and the Prophet Muhammad was born. 15 Muhammad would resurrect the religion of Abraham, reassert theabsolute singularity of God, and destroy the idols and the confusion they wrought. He

would also reaffirm the sanctity of the Ka‘ba, its eastern corner, and the Black Stoneembedded there.

...

Muhammad was forty years old when he began to receive revelations from theangel Gabriel, instructing him to reassert the religion of Abraham. This message was

perceived by the Quraysh as a threat to the Ka‘ba and to the income derived from it. After years of persecution, Muhammad fled the city with a band of followers and in the oasis settlement of Medina he set up his Ummah, a utopian community dedicated to the worship of the one God. This move was the Hijra, the beginning of the Islamiccalendar, Year One.

There is no telling exactly when the most important moment in the earthlycareer of the Black Stone occurred, but sometime during these years in Medina,Muhammad changed the direction of Muslim prayer from Jerusalem to Mecca. ...

When the Qur’an says, “O Muhammad, many a time We noticed you turning yourface towards heaven; now We will make you turn towards a Qiblah that will please you.

Turn your face during Salah towards the Sacred Mosque; wherever you are turn yourface in that direction,”16

it marks a newly assertive Arab identity. The Ka‘ba may stillhave been sullied with pagan idols, but it nonetheless represented a specifically Arabholy site.

... some eight years after leaving Mecca, Muhammad returned as its conquerer,and master of a large part of the Arabian Peninsula. 17

Once in Mecca, Muhammad and his cousin and son-in-law Ali went to thesanctuary and entered the Ka‘ba.

18 Muhammad then rode around the Ka‘ba seven

times on his camel, and each time he passed the Black Stone he cried out “Allaahuakbar” (God is great), touched the Stone with a crooked staff, and kissed the staff that

had touched the stone. Then he addressed himself to the 360 idols of the place, saying,“the truth has come and falsehood has passed away.” When he pointed at them with the stick that had touched the Black Stone, the idols “collapsed on their backs oneafter the other.” 19 From within the Ka‘ba “he carried the idols out before the assembledcrowd and, raising them over his head, smashed them to the ground.” The idols were

then washed away with Zamzam water; all that is, except Jesus and Mary. TheProphet covered those two with his hands and said, “wash out all except what is

beneath my hands.” He took the idol of Hubal, hacked it up with his sword, and used



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the bits as a doorstep to the newly sanctified Ka‘ba. Finally, he stood at the door of theKa‘ba and announced the fundamental truth of the new faith: “There is no god butGod alone; He has no associates.” 20

...

After Muhammad’s death the new Caliph, Umar, who had been one of theProphet’s earliest companions, returned to Mecca. Standing before the Black Stone,Umar spoke to it, saying, “no doubt, I know that you are a stone and can neither

benefit anyone nor harm anyone. Had I not seen Allah’s Apostle kissing you I wouldnot have kissed you.” 21 Then he touched it with his hand, and kissed his hand,establishing in clear terms both the ritual and its justification, and setting a precedent

that would be followed by hundreds of millions of pilgrims from that day down to the present.

The Black Stone had helped to cast out the idols: the staff that touched it hadsent those stones flying because, no matter what shape they were carved in, they wereonly rocks. The Black Stone is also a rock, as Umar’s statement makes clear.

Whatever power passed through it to Muhammad is not its power, but God’s power.It isn’t a vessel, it’s a conduit; not a text, but a telephone. From two thousand years

before the creation of the world, the Black Stone had served as a punctuation pointmarking God’s link to the physical world of man, a tangible remnant of an intangibleheaven, a promise of the special destiny of one place and one people.

Of course, it might not have happened like that at all.

Like exhibits offered in a court of law, objects are often taken as a form of proofmore substantial than words. But only, of course, if we believe what is said about them. Physical evidence doesn’t lie, we are told. It may not lie, but it is frequentlymute. The task of the historian and the archaeologist is to find the words to wed to theobject. Without the stories of Adam and Abraham and Muhammad, the rock really is

just a rock. And this is where things become confusing.

Any encyclopedia will tell you that Muhammad lived between 570 and 632 CE,in the towns of Mecca and Medina, but there are no contemporary documents or

physical artifacts to corroborate this fact. We have no eyewitness accounts written at the time, little material evidence, no external reports. The nomadic inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula left few monuments for archaeologists to discover, even if the Saudi

government were keen on archaeology, which it is not. The landmass of the ArabianPeninsula is enormous – larger than that of India or Europe – and though the Hijaz area in which Mecca lies was surrounded by the world’s densest network of literatecultures – Greeks, Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Jews, Romans, and Christians – the Hijaz itself remained something of a historical black hole. Yemen and Sheba to thesouth, and Syria and Palestine to the north, figured in trade and in the imperialambitions of Persians, Romans, Abyssinians and Byzantines, but the Hijaz remained anunwanted wilderness of sand, rock, and illiterate tribes. In an age of maritime empires





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...

Stones were often a focus of sanctuaries in Middle East, and... there aremultiple points of convergence between the Black Stone and the Judaic “FoundationStone:” both are blindingly bright; both carry tales of having been buried andrecovered; both can claim heavenly origin and super-lapidary powers. 24 ... Finally, inIslamic cosmology, the Ka’ba – with Black Stone -- is the center of the world, the pointfrom which the winds originate.

Mixing and mingling with representatives of adjacent cultures this meteor-owning tribe would have absorbed bits of Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism.The story of their stone became linked with other stories: Adam, Abraham, Abraha.Finally a charismatic religious reformer came along who sought to unite these tribesunder One God, and did so by grafting a Jewish history onto an Arab site, its rituals,and its stone. A book was written, and the message spread.

... The meteor idea has obvious appeal: it niftily links religious narrative (asouvenir of heaven) with scientific plausibility (a specimen from space.) And, as it

happens, one of the world’s major meteor impact sites, Wabar, is located in southwest Arabia... But while fission-track analysis of Wabar fragments in early 1970s hadsuggested an impact date some 6,400 years ago,.. more recent thermoluminescencemeasurements indicated an event “less than 450 years ago.” There are precious few

people in the Empty Quarter to make note of anything, but there had actually beenreports of a great fireball seen over the desert in 1863...

The meteor explanation appeals to the secular-minded population as strongly as the Abrahamic explanation appeals to the religiously-minded, but it is equally short on proof. The observation that the existence of meteors in general can be proved, while that of angels cannot, hardly demonstrates anything specific about the origins of theBlack Stone. Of the meteor theory one can say exactly what historians Patricia Croneand Michael Cook said of Muslim tradition: “while there are no cogent internalgrounds for rejecting it, there are equally no cogent external grounds for acceptingit.”25

Ultimately the Black Stone is a chunk of rock wrapped in a mantle of mysticaland hypothetical narratives. The absence of a clear history allows it to shift shape, to

be this and that: the meteor and the ruby, the angel and the agate, the proof and the paradox. In a sense it does not matter. The Black Stone is what it is, and functions asit does, because of what people believe about it.

By the time of the earliest explicit accounts of the Black Stone were written, in the 8 th and 9 th century, the Stone was essential to the rites connected with the Ka‘ba.By this time, the revelations of the Prophet had been collected and committed to

writing, and the Qur’an had taken its fixed form -- not just as a revelation, but as anobject. Islam had spread from the rough desert tribes of its birthplace to thesophisticated literary cultures of Persia and Mesopotamia.

...




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The political center of Islamic power moved from Medina, to Kufa, toDamascus to Baghdad. When Baghdad was sacked by the Mongols, it shifted to theMamluks in Egypt, until seized by the Ottomans in Turkey at the beginning of the16th Century. The one thing that remained constant through all this was the Hajj – theoccasion on which the Islamic world presents itself in person to a space seven inches in

diameter. Control of the Ka‘ba gave Mecca a power no Islamic ruler could afford toignore,...” 26

That said, Mecca was no Rome or Jerusalem. Sandwiched between the stiflingRed Sea Coast an ocean of sand, it had no natural beauty, no mighty rivers, no greatseat of learning. The first few Caliphs tried to improve the place -- Umar (634-44) andUthman (644-56) are reported to have razed houses adjoining the Ka‘ba to clear asmall area for the tawaf ,27 and the Caliph Mu’awiya, (whose opposition to Ali laid theground for the Sunni / Shi’a split) made a big splash by building with baked bricks andmortar for the first time – but these stories only drive home what a primitive placeMecca must have been. 28 Today we use the name Mecca metaphorically to designatesome magnetic locus of desire, but the actual place was, by all description, small,cramped, blisteringly hot, dusty and shabby. In the 11th century, when the Persian

writer Nasir Khusraw went on a pilgrimage, the town measured “only two arrow shotssquare.” At the beginning of the 16 th century, when we begin to get accounts of non-Muslims who sneaked into Mecca, Ludovico de Varthema expressed his opinion that“the curse of God has been laid upon the said city, for the country produces neithergrass nor trees.” It had no agriculture, no industry, and no crafts to speak of. Ali Bey(an incognito Catalan spy operating under a nom de plume) complained, “there is not asingle man to be found who knows how to engrave an inscription, or any kind ofdesign upon a hewn stone... not a single gunsmith or cutler able to make a screw.” Itseconomy depended entirely on the Hajj. (Pilgrimage would remain Arabia’s biggest

business until the discovery of oil in the 20 th century.) And yet little was done to make the hajjis visits pleasurable: Joseph Pitts, an Englishman who was captured by Algerian pirates in 1678, sold into slavery and subsequently converted to Islam, wrote that Mecca “affords little or nothing of comfortable provisions,” and the fleecing of pious pilgrims provoked constant outrage. Nothing much had improved by the 19 th century: “Tottering ruins may be found by the sides of the most thronged thoroughfarein every part of the city,” wrote John Keane. “Nothing resembling a row or streetcould by any stretch of the imagination be extricated from such a chaos of masonry.”

And, as the spiritual center of a mighty empire, it was subject to periodic bloodbaths...

In 928, the leader of a breakaway Shi’a sect in eastern Arabia called the

Qarmatians29

perceived the astrological conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn as a sign of the end of the Islamic era. In the tradition of apocalyptic religious leaders, Abu TahirSulayman predicted the immanent appearance of the Mahdi or Messiah, and set out to

prove the point by laying waste to much of what is now Southern Iraq. The Hajj , withits long files of travelers crossing the desert between Mecca and Baghdad constituted a

particularly symbolic and vulnerable target (not unlike passenger jets today), and wasattacked repeatedly by the Qarmatians.



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Then, on the opening day of the Hajj in January 930, when the sanctuary was thronged with pilgrims, Abu Tabir attacked Mecca itself. The Qarmatian army rodeinto the unarmed, circumambulating crowds, swords swinging. Estimates of the death

toll vary, but the most cited figure is 30,000. “The well of Zamzam and all the other wells and pits of Mecca were filled to overflowing with the remains of the martyrs,”

according to the Ottoman historian Qutb al-Din. “Such a catastrophe had never previously been inflicted on Islam.” 30 The ruler of Mecca was killed clutching the doorof the Ka‘ba, his head falling on its threshold.

The motivation for the attack was made clear to one victim who lay woundedamidst the bodies when a Qarmathian fighter rode up and asked mockingly whether

the wounded hajji knew the Qur’anic verse about the Year of the Elephant, and if so, just where did he think that miraculous flock of stone-carrying birds was now?“Where God wishes them,” the hajji answered piously. The Qarmatian retorted, “Youare asses. You worship rocks, you make processions around them, you kiss them anddance in their honor... only a force of arms can bring a stop to this idiocy.” 31

Worshipping rocks was not just a sign of idiocy – it was shirk, the oneunforgivable sin...The Qarmathians had looked at the rites surrounding the BlackStone and found, not a mystical paradox, a finite thing that connects us with theinfinite, but idolatry pure and simple.

When they had finished slaughtering the men and enslaving the women andchildren, the Qarmathians looted the Ka‘ba: they took the earrings of Mary, the ram’shorn of Abraham, and the rod of Moses, covered in gold and jewels. It took 50 camels

to transport the booty from the sanctuary back across the desert. 32 Finally, “a drunkenQarmatian” rode up to the Ka’ba, and, “dealing a heavy blow with a hammer, knocked

the [Black] Stone down from its setting and took it away.”... 33

Nasir Khrusaw, writing shortly after these events, said the Qarmatians believed that “the Stone was a ‘human magnet’ that attracted people.” They did notunderstand, Khrusaw explained, that it was actually not the Stone, but “the nobilityand magnificence of Muhammad (peace be on him) that drew people [to Mecca], for

the Stone had laid there for long ages without anyone paying any particular attention to it.”34

People had, of course, paid attention to it. But Khrusaw was drawing thedistinction made again and again in the history of ritual: the difference between a tool

that launches one toward the godhead, and a totem thought to contain the godhead.Islam is a religion predicated on the expulsion of false gods – specifically false gods in

the form of objects. The story of Muhammad destroying the 360 idols of the Ka’ba,

whether historically accurate or not, is true: the religion of the One God swept asideall the Al-Uzzas and Awks, and the conception of a God so incomprehensibly infinitehe could not be contained, or even represented, in stone wholly overpowered the

limited magic of Hubal. Islam does not, as is often stated, forbid all images, butIslamic vigilance with regard to idolatry is nonetheless more rigorous andstraightforward than that of Christianity or Judaism. The Muslim Student Union at

the University of Southern California maintains a website that details the shirk implicitin Christianity, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Yoruba religion, Zulu religion, Jainism,




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Atheism, Anthropomorphism, and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. 35 Articulating anddefending the absolute Oneness of God is the very heart of Islam. 36 Muhammad’sdestruction of the idols in the sanctuary marked the deliverance of his people from the

Age of Ignorance, when “we [the Arabs] were a barbarous people who worshippedidols, ate carrion, and committed shameful deeds,” 37 into the pure light of strict

monotheism.If Abu Tabir’s aim had been to put an end to the Hajj , like the Grinch stealing

presents to put an end to Christmas, he (like the Grinch) did not succeed. Though the theft of the stone was “one of the greatest catastrophes ever to strike Islam and themost severe tests of the faith,” and though the absence of the stone “caused people’shearts to dissolve,” pilgrims continued to come to Mecca, and they continued to

venerate the stone in its absence, putting their hands into the hole it left behind andkissing it, “seeking blessings from its site.” 38 Its absence was as physically palpable asits presence.

...

Finally, twenty-two years after the massacre in Mecca, the Qarmatians agreed to return the stone, reportedly in exchange for a large sum of money. A Meccan who was present at the return of the Stone confirmed ancient reports that only the uppersurface of the stone was black while the remainder was white, and that it could float...

Periodically, then, the Black Stone was the target of iconoclastic rage –sometimes political, sometimes religious in origin. But the Qarmathian charge that thestone was worshipped as an idol seems never to have had much traction within Islam

itself. For medieval Christians and Jews, however, it was an essential prop in the portrayal of Islam as a religion steeped in idolatry, a kind of gussied up paganism in which benighted pilgrims bow down before a magic rock. John of Damascus, theSyrian monk who was Chief Counselor in the Umayyad Caliphate during Islam’s firstcentury, responded to Muslim accusations that Christians “worshipped” the cross by

pointing to the rites of the Ka‘ba, which he claimed revolved around an idol carved in the image of Aphrodite. 39 John acknowledged that the Qur’an dictated a rigidmonotheism, but saw the Black Stone as a remnant of ancient Arab paganism, neverentirely eradicated. (Islam, of course, concurs that the rites are a continuation of those

performed during the Age of Ignorance; but ascribes the origin of those rites to the pre-pagan religion of Abraham.) The bizarre link that John established between theBlack Stone, the Greek goddess Aphrodite, and the worship of the morning star was

later elaborated full-throttle: Nicetas Byzantius wrote that Muhammad ordered hisfollowers to prostrate themselves before an idol of Aphrodite in the Ka‘ba, inclining

their heads while holding their ears, turning round and round until they fell down. 40 The notion that Muslims worshiped a statue of Aphrodite at the Ka’ba served a clear

polemic function: a hunk of stone carved in the image of a beautiful woman and given the name of a goddess is a pretty clear-cut thing. A rock that is just a rock is altogethermore confusing. 41



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By medieval times the image of Muslims as rock-worshippers, idolaters and planet-gazers was well established in Europe among both Christians and Jews. 42 Judah Halevi observed that Muhammad had eliminated the idols from the Ka‘ba, butnot the idolatrous practices that surrounded them. 43 His contemporary, Petrus

Alfonsi, a Sephardic convert to Christianity who provided medieval Europe with much

of its dodgy knowledge of Islam, thought that Muslims worshipped two stones in theKa‘ba: a white one called Chamos, associated with Mars, and a black one calledMercury, which he identified with Saturn. The idolatrous carving on the face ofstone, he said, had been turned into the wall to hide it. The great Maimonidesconcluded, “the Ishmaelite today is an idol worshipper although he is unaware that he

worships.” 44

In Christian writing, even Muhammad’s monotheism was called into question through idolatry. The medieval French romance, Song of Roland , depicts Muslims as pagans worshiping the gods “Mahum, Apolin, and Tervagent.” In other medievalromances the Muslim god count climbed as high as thirty. 45 When Chaucer’s Parsondescribed the gold-worshipping sinner for whom “every floryn in his cofre is his

Mawmet,” he used a word for ‘idol’ derived from the very name of Muhammad. 46

By the 16 th century, Christians were mired in their own battles over idolatry,and iconoclastic riots raged through the churches of Northern Europe. At the same

time, more Europeans traveled to Mecca (by hook or by crook) and reported moreaccurately on the rites surrounding the Black Stone. Finger-pointing at “mawmets”decreased. Under the Ottoman Empire, H ajjis came and went in greater or lessernumbers depending on prosperity, and Meccans continued to draw their livelihoodfrom the presence of the Stone and the Ka‘ba. Islamic rulers spruced up andaggrandized the mosque area around the Ka‘ba, adding marble pavements and covered

porticos, vaulted arcades, mosaic gates, and minarets, 47

...Meanwhile, in the desert wastes of Najd, hundreds of miles east of Mecca, a

puritan reform of Islam was taking hold that would have dramatic implications for thecity of Mecca and the artifacts of Islam. Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab taught thatGod and God only was worthy of worship, and he saw the veneration of saints, angels,and prophets – including Muhammad -- as smacking of idolatry. ... For Ibn Wahhab,however, as for the Quarmatian’s, such “veneration” was simply a slippery slope

towards worship. He rejected it all. So much so that the first observer to describe thesect to the West, the Danish Explorer Carsten Niebuhr, questioned whether “areligion so stripped of everything that might appeal to the senses could maintain itsground among the Arabs.” 48 Perhaps not. Wahhabism might well have petered out inNajd had not Wahhab succeeded in making a convert of an ambitious local sheiknamed Ibn Sa’ud.

Ibn Sa’ud combined religious zeal with political aspirations and liberal use of the sword. By the beginning of the 19 th century Saudi armies had wrested most of the Arabian Peninsula from Ottoman control, 49 and set their sights on the holy cities ofMecca and Medina, with their wealth of relics from the time of Muhammad . In 1802

Wahhabi warriors sacked both cities, 50 destroying the tombs of the Prophet and his




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companions in Medina as well as chapels and monuments dedicated to the Prophetand his family in Mecca. Their aim was to root out all temptation to idolatry. Unlike

the Qarmathians, however, they did not go after the Stone. The sanctuarysurrounding the Ka‘ba and the Black Stone itself were “respected and preservedentire.” 5152

...Set up by the British, Mecca declared its independence in 1916 (in the ensuing

battle the Ka’ba was hit with a shell, but the Stone escaped damage,) but independence was short lived. In 1932 a “wretched” Afghani nicked a piece of the Black Stone forgood luck. The luck didn’t hold -- he was beheaded -- and the chip was reaffixed to

the stone with cement, musk and ambergris by King Abdul Aziz of the freshly mintedKingdom of Saudi Arabia. 53

...

There is, within Islam, no real ambiguity about the proper role of the BlackStone: “the Stone is not to be worshipped or regarded as anything but a marker;” 54 the“‘Black Stone’ is just that, a stone that has no power, no blessings and no benefit toanyone.” 55 The stone is protected from external threat by Saudi security, and from the

possibility of Saudi iconoclasm by its traditional history. It may, perhaps, also be protected by its peculiar opacity. The Stone has a terrestial job to do, directing thetawaf , and it is has a spiritual function as a reference to God, but it does not look likeanything but a rock. Unlike the idols destroyed by Muhammad, it bears noresemblance to what it represents; one cannot confuse image and substance. Its job is

to set into motion prayers that are not addressed to, or even through, it. Pilgrims donot bow down before it, they touch it and – literally – move on.

...

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The Black Stone Web Excerpt