The Rebuilding of the Kaʻah
storyWhen the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم was thirty-five years old, as Ibn Isḥāq records, the Kaʻah was damaged by two disasters in the same year: first fire, then flood. A woman had been cooking near the Kaʻah, in those days the houses of the people were literally five or ten feet from the Kaʻah, not the open esplanade we see today, and an ember sparked and set the covering cloth (ġhilāf) of the Kaʻah ablaze. By the time the fire was put out, the structure was weakened but not destroyed. Then a massive flood came through the valley of Makkah, such floods, which gather from all the surrounding mountains, still happen in our time, and the water caved in the roof and collapsed parts of the walls. The Kaʻah was left in a state of partial ruin.
Now Allah willed an extraordinary provision. The Caesar of Rome had commissioned a ship to carry the finest marble, the grandest wood, and a master craftsman to Yemen, to rebuild a church that the Persians had destroyed in their wars with Byzantium. But the ship was struck by a storm off the coast of Juddah, what we now call Jeddah, and barely made it to shore, unable to continue. All the cargo, the choicest materials from the workshops of Rome, was set out for sale so the crew could fund their passage home. The Quraysh, hearing of it, pooled their wealth, went to Juddah, and bought everything, the marble, the wood, and they hired the Roman craftsman as well. It was this material, intended for a church in Yemen, diverted by a storm, sold in Juddah, that Allah had decreed would rebuild His House.
Before beginning the demolition, the Quraysh were afraid. Who would dare tear down the Kaʻah? They stood hesitating. Ibn Isḥāq mentions that a large snake had been living in the well of Zamzam and would come out to sun itself in the courtyard; whenever anyone approached it would raise its head and hiss. While the Quraysh debated what to do, Allah sent a great bird that snatched up the snake and carried it away beyond the mountains of Makkah. They took this as a sign that the way was clear. But still no one moved.
Finally, al-Walīd ibn al-Mughīrah, a nobleman of Quraysh, a poet and chieftain, the man whom Allah would later describe in Sūrat al-Muddaththir: “ذَرْنِي وَمَنْ خَلَقْتُ وَحِيدًا, Leave Me with the one I created alone”, said: enough. He took an axe and marched to one of the walls of the Kaʻah. As he lifted the axe he said, in the way of his Jāhilī understanding: “O Allah, do not get alarmed; we only mean to improve things.” Nobody helped him that day. Instead the Quraysh agreed to watch: if he survived the night unharmed, they would join him. The next morning al-Walīd was well, and so the whole of Quraysh took up the work together.
They divided the Quraysh sub-tribes into four groups, one for each wall of the Kaʻah. The Banu ʿAbd Manāf, the branch of the Prophet’s صلى الله عليه وسلم own clan, within which the Banu Hāshim sit, received the most prestigious assignment, the wall that faces the Black Stone. The Banu Makhzūm, second in status, the tribe of Abū Jahl, received the section from the Rukn Yamānī to the Black Stone corner. The other tribes received the remaining two walls.
Construction went well until they reached the level of the Black Stone. Then work stopped. For five days the Quraysh did not lay a single stone, consumed by a dispute that had turned dangerous: who would have the honour of lifting the Black Stone and setting it in place? Each tribe considered it the most sacred act the rebuilding would entail, and none would yield. The Banu Makhzūm went so far as to form a secret pact: they gathered some of the other sub-tribes, brought a vessel of camel’s blood, for the Arabs signed pacts by dipping their hands in blood when they wanted to mark the gravity of an oath, and they swore they would fight to the last man rather than let anyone else place the Black Stone. It was Jāhiliyyah at its most senseless: men who were all cousins, all children of the Quraysh, ready to kill each other for the honor of placing a stone.
On the fifth day, the oldest man in Makkah at that time, Abū Umayyah ibn al-Mughīrah, spoke. He said: There will be no bloodshed over this. Let us all agree: whoever next enters through the main entrance of the sanctuary, let him be our judge. It will be the luck of the draw; whoever it is will decide, and we all accept it. They all agreed, their thinking was that it would be a man from one of the tribes, who would of course choose his own people. It was simply a lottery.
Then the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم walked in. And a remarkable thing happened: every tribe was pleased. The Banu Makhzūm thought he would choose them. The Banu ʿAbd Manāf thought he would choose them. Every faction thought, “He loves us; he will choose us.” This is a measure of what he was صلى الله عليه وسلم: fifty years later, ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAṣ, who accepted Islam only in the eighth year of the Hijra, would say the same thing, “I knew he loved me the most of all people.” Every person who encountered him felt singularly beloved.
They told him the situation. He said: Bring me a garment, an izār, an upper cloth. It was brought. He placed the Black Stone in the center of the cloth himself, then said: Let every sub-tribe send its chieftain, and all of you hold the edges together. And so they did, the leaders of all the clans of Quraysh lifted the cloth together, carrying the Black Stone to the height of its place. Then the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم took it from the cloth and placed it in position with his own hands. Every tribe had shared in the honor. The Banu Makhzūm had kept their oath, they had been part of the lifting. There was no bloodshed. And the one whom every tribe thought loved them most had, in truth, loved them enough to give the glory to all of them.
The Kaʻah they rebuilt differed from the Kaʻah of Ibrāhīm in four ways. First, the foundation: they lacked enough of the expensive Roman marble and wood to cover the original rectangular footprint, for the original Kaʻah of Ibrāhīm عليه السلام was a rectangle, longer than it was wide. So they built a square instead, leaving the extra section walled off as the Ḥaṭim that you see today, with its low curved wall. Second, they doubled the height of the Kaʻah; in the Prophet’s صلى الله عليه وسلم youth it had been roughly the height of a seated camel. Third, the Banu ʿAbd Manāf raised the door well off the ground, accessible only by a ladder, so that they could control who entered; this is why the door is still high today. Fourth, they added a water spout to the roof, so that future floods would drain rather than pool and collapse the structure.
Years later, after the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم conquered Makkah, he said to ʿAisha: “Were it not that your people are still new to Islam, I would tear down this Kaʻah and rebuild it on the original pillars of Ibrāhīm, and make the door accessible at ground level for all.” This ḥadīth is in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī. He did not do it so as not to cause confusion among those newly entering the faith. Decades later, the companion ʿAbdullāh ibn al-Zubayr, who ruled Makkah as a counter-caliph during the time of the Umayyads, tore down the Kaʻah and rebuilt it as a rectangle, with the door at ground level, following this ḥadīth. Then al-Ḥajjāj ibn Yūsuf, the most tyrannical ruler the Ummah has known, besieged Makkah, throwing catapults against the sanctuary until the Kaʻah itself was struck, then killed ʿAbdullāh ibn al-Zubayr and crucified him before the Kaʻah, this was a man who was a companion’s son, and whose mother was a companion. Hajjāj then rebuilt the Kaʻah in the Jāhilī square, as the Quraysh had left it. When the Khalifah later asked Imām Mālik whether it should be rebuilt on Ibn al-Zubayr’s foundations, i.e., as the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم had wished, Imām Mālik said: no. “I do not want the Kaʻah to become a plaything for kings.” That is fiqh, deep understanding. And so it has remained, from the time of Hajjāj to this day, on those Jāhilī foundations.