The Black Stone

Also Known As: Arabic al-Hajar al-Aswad, “the black stone”; set in al-Rukn al-Aswad, the Black Corner of the Kaaba; often called the Black Stone of Mecca
Region/Culture: West Asia/Middle East
Mythos: Islamic Mythology, Arabic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: Tradition holds that it fell from Paradise whiter than milk and darkened as it absorbed human sin, and that it will speak at the Judgement for everyone who greeted it in sincerity.
Role in Mythos: It marks the starting point of the seven circuits of the Kaaba and is greeted at each one, making it the fixed hinge of the central ritual of the hajj and the umrah.
Relation to Humans: Pilgrims kiss it, touch it, or raise a hand toward it while saying the takbir, and the traditions treat that gesture as the sealing of an oath of allegiance rather than an act of worship. Muslim theologians have insisted for fourteen centuries that the stone has no power of its own, and the caliph Umar said so out loud at the corner itself.

The perfume hits first. The custodians of the Kaaba scent the two corners that pilgrims touch, so the air around the eastern angle of the building carries a thick sweetness that has nothing to do with stone. Inside a band of hammered silver, set at about chest height, sit the fragments of the oldest thing in Mecca. The surface has been worn into shallow hollows and rests a couple of inches below the metal rim. It is not quite black. Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, who got close enough to look properly in 1814, settled on a deep reddish brown.

A pilgrim in the two white cloths of ihram comes round the building for the fourth time, counterclockwise, shoulder to shoulder in a river of people moving at the pace of the slowest. At the corner the crowd thickens and stalls. Most will never get near the silver; they lift a hand toward it instead, say Allahu akbar, and are carried on by the press behind them. That raised hand is the whole rite, and it counts. The few who do reach the stone kiss it, and the guards have them moving again within seconds.

What they kiss is a ruin, carefully kept. The stone was once a single piece. It is now several, bedded in a reddish cement and pinned under the silver, and the sources cannot even agree how many: Britannica counts three large pieces and some odd fragments, while the common account gives seven or eight. The exposed face measures roughly twenty centimetres by sixteen, though the recorded dimensions have swung absurdly across the centuries, from a single cubit in the tenth century to well over a metre in the early seventeenth, because the pieces have been rearranged in their matrix more than once. Richard Burton, visiting in disguise in 1853, found the colour black and metallic. The Austrian consul-general in Egypt got hold of a chip that Muhammad Ali had prised out in 1817 and reported a pitch-black skin over a silver-grey, fine-grained interior studded with tiny cubes of something bottle-green.

The traditions that explain it are older than any of those measurements and considerably stranger. In the version most often repeated, the stone came down from Paradise whiter than milk and was turned black by the sins of the sons of Adam. Adam’s altar and the stone were lost in the flood and forgotten until Gabriel showed Abraham where they lay, and Abraham set his son to build the Kaaba around them. A second line, gathered out of the tafsir and hadith literature by M. J. Kister, goes further. There the stone was an angel, posted in Eden to guard Adam and absent at the exact moment Adam ate. For that lapse it was turned to stone and given the power of speech, and set on the mountain of Abu Qubays, which later begged Abraham to intercede so that it would not be sent back where it came from.

Underneath all of it lies a plainer history. The stone was venerated at the Kaaba long before Islam, on a peninsula where sacred stones were unremarkable. There was a red stone at Ghaiman in the south and a white one at the shrine of al-Abalat, and the Kaaba itself is said to have held hundreds of idols. Aziz Al-Azmeh points out that the eastern corner was not an arbitrary place to set it: that angle faces al-qabul, the rain-bringing east wind, and the point on the horizon where Canopus rises.

The best story attached to the stone is not a miracle. In 605 the Quraysh pulled down the fire-damaged Kaaba and rebuilt it, using timber salvaged from a Greek ship wrecked down the coast at Shu’ayba and a Coptic carpenter named Baqum. The stone had been lifted out for the work. When the moment came to put it back, the clans fell into a furious deadlock over which of them would have the honour, and for four or five days nobody laid a course. Someone proposed they let the next man through the gate decide it. The next man was Muhammad, then thirty-five and five years from his first revelation. He called for a cloak, laid the stone in the centre of it, and had a man from each clan take hold of a corner and lift. They carried it to the wall together, and he set it into place himself.

Reverence has not spared it since. After the conquest of Mecca in 630 he circled the building seven times on camelback and touched the stone with his staff; during the Umayyad siege of 683 a catapult shot struck the Kaaba and shattered it, and Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr bound the pieces back together with silver. In the eleventh century a man sent by the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim came at it meaning to destroy it and was killed where he stood, having managed little more than a scratch.

The worst came in January 930. Qarmatian raiders out of Bahrayn, convinced their mahdi had arrived, sacked Mecca in the middle of the hajj, killed pilgrims inside the sanctuary and left the bodies unburied, stripped the Kaaba and carried the Black Stone home. Their leader Abu Tahir al-Jannabi installed it in a mosque of his own and expected the pilgrimage to follow it there. It did not. Pilgrims kept arriving at Mecca and kept honouring an empty corner, which says a good deal about what the stone actually is to them.

It came back in 951 or 952, depending on the chronicler, wrapped in a sack and thrown into the Great Mosque of Kufa with a note saying that its captors had taken it by command and were returning it by command. The journey broke it further, into seven pieces by most accounts, and the custodians commissioned two Meccan goldsmiths to build the silver frame that has held it ever since. Worn frames were replaced over the centuries and the old ones shipped to Istanbul, where they sit among the sacred relics at Topkapi. One detail from the recovery has kept geologists interested ever since: the returned stone was reportedly authenticated because it floated.

None of which makes it powerful, and the tradition has never pretended otherwise. Umar, standing at the corner as caliph, announced in front of a crowd that he knew perfectly well he was kissing a stone that could neither harm nor benefit anyone, and that he did it only because he had seen the Prophet do it. The stone is not worshipped. The hadith that calls it the right hand of God carries the sense Muhammad Hamidullah gave it, of a subject placing his hand in the king’s to seal an oath of loyalty, and some scholars go further still and treat the stone chiefly as a counter, the fixed mark that tells a pilgrim where each of the seven circuits begins and ends.

Its physical nature is the one question nobody has been permitted to settle. The Black Stone has never been examined with modern instruments. Paul Partsch, curator of the imperial mineral collection in Vienna, published the first serious study in 1857 and came down for a meteorite. Robert Dietz and John McHone argued in 1974 for agate, on the strength of a report of visible banding. Elsebeth Thomsen proposed in 1980 that it is impact glass flung out of the Wabar craters in the Rub’ al Khali, which would at least account for the floating, since glass of that kind can be riddled with bubbles. Luminescence dating of Wabar in 2004 then suggested the impact occurred within the last few centuries, which leaves Thomsen’s fragment arriving in Mecca several thousand years after it was wanted. The Natural History Museum in London files it among the pseudometeorites. In 2021 the Saudi authorities released a focus-stacked photograph of the stone built from 1,050 exposures, seven hours of shooting and fifty hours of processing, at a resolution of 49,000 megapixels. It shows the texture in astonishing detail and settles nothing whatsoever.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Black Stone of the Kaaba?

The Black Stone, al-Hajar al-Aswad, is a dark stone set into the eastern corner of the Kaaba in Mecca. It was originally one piece but is now several fragments held in reddish cement inside a silver frame, with an exposed face roughly twenty centimetres across. It was venerated at the Kaaba before the rise of Islam and remains the fixed point from which pilgrims count their circuits.

Do Muslims worship the Black Stone?

No. Muslim theologians hold that the stone has no power of its own and that its importance is historical and commemorative. The caliph Umar is recorded saying at the corner itself that he knew the stone could neither harm nor benefit anyone, and that he kissed it only because he had seen Muhammad do so.

Why is the Black Stone black?

Islamic tradition says the stone descended from Paradise whiter than milk and darkened because it absorbed the sins of those who touched it. Its physical composition has never been tested with modern instruments, so the cause of its colour is unresolved. Observers who examined broken pieces reported a pitch-black outer skin over a silver-grey interior.

Who stole the Black Stone?

Qarmatian raiders from Bahrayn, led by Abu Tahir al-Jannabi, sacked Mecca during the hajj in January 930 and carried the Black Stone away. Abu Tahir set it up in a mosque of his own hoping to redirect the pilgrimage, and it failed; pilgrims continued to come to Mecca and honour the empty corner. The stone was returned to Mecca in 951 or 952, broken into further pieces by the journey.

How did Muhammad settle the argument over the Black Stone?

When the Quraysh rebuilt the fire-damaged Kaaba in 605, the clans deadlocked for days over which of them would replace the stone in the wall. Muhammad, then thirty-five, was chosen to decide because he was the next man to walk through the gate. He laid the stone on a cloak and had a man from each clan lift a corner, so that all of them carried it together, then set it in place with his own hands.