Well of Zamzam

The waterskin went empty somewhere in the heat of the afternoon. After that there was only the valley: bare grey stone, glare coming off it, nobody to call to, and a baby on the ground under a thorn tree working himself into the tight silent misery of real thirst. Hagar climbed Safa because it was the nearest high ground, looked out over the wash, and saw nothing moving. She came down, gathered her robe above her knees, and ran.

She ran the way people run when running is the only thing left to do. Safa to Marwa, then back, then again, seven crossings of a dry riverbed in a place that had no reason to hold water. On the last pass she heard a voice and hushed herself to be certain of it. Then she saw the angel standing where the well now stands, scraping at the ground with his heel, or with his wing, because the tellers could not settle it and the oldest surviving version of the account keeps both readings rather than choosing between them. Water came up out of the gravel. She began throwing sand into a bank around it to stop it running away, scooping what she could into the skin with her hands, and it kept welling up behind her fingers as fast as she took it.

Centuries later Muhammad told that story and added a line to it that has bothered people ever since. Had she left Zamzam alone, had she not scooped and dammed and hoarded, it would have been a stream flowing on the surface of the earth. The holiest water in Islam sits thirty metres underground because a frightened woman did the sensible thing.

The well is still there, about twenty metres east of the Kaaba, inside the Masjid al-Haram, in the floor of a valley the tradition calls Wadi Ibrahim. It runs some thirty metres deep and between 1.08 and 2.66 metres across, a shaft widened by hand across a very long time rather than bored in one go. The upper half passes through the sandy alluvium of the valley floor, lined with stone masonry and capped with a concrete collar at the top. The lower half is cut into bedrock. Between the two lies a band of weathered, broken rock barely half a metre thick, and almost all the water the well produces comes in through that one thin seam. The supply is rain: what soaks into the wadi floor, plus what runs off the hills on either side. As Mecca has been paved and built over, there is less ground left for rain to soak into.

The Qur’an never names the well. Nearly everything told about it comes from hadith, from the biographies of the Prophet, and from a body of Abbasid-era material that accumulated around the site once Mecca was firmly Muslim. The name itself resists explanation. The historian Jacqueline Chabbi reads it as onomatopoeia, a word for a low indistinct droning that attaches to water in the sense of an abundant supply, or a source that does not fail. Medieval Arabic writers heard something else in it. For al-Mas’udi, zamzama meant the murmured recitation of Zoroastrian priests, and he explained that Zoroastrians used to make pilgrimage to the well and pray over it on the strength of their descent from Abraham. Al-‘Ayni, later, claimed the name came from bridles donated by Sasan. Against all of that sits the homely version, in which Hagar said zamm, zamm, fill or stop, to a spring that would not behave.

Then the well vanished. The tribe of Jurhum, who had come up from Yemen and settled beside Hagar after their scouts noticed a bird circling water in a valley they knew to be dry, eventually held Mecca and the guardianship of its sanctuary. They lost both. In the standard account they were driven out for their misdeeds, and on the way their chief buried the treasures of the Kaaba in Zamzam, or buried Zamzam itself, depending on which telling you get. Either way the spring went under and the landmarks that would have found it went with it. Nobody in Mecca could say where the water had been.

There is a complication worth putting plainly, and it belongs to G. E. Hawting, who set it out in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1980. Muslim tradition knows of a second hole in the ground at the sanctuary: a dry pit inside the Kaaba itself, sometimes called the well of the Kaaba, used in pre-Islamic Mecca as a treasury and a place for offerings. Hawting argues that the stories about the two ran together, and that material which originally belonged to the pit was gradually retold as though it had happened at Zamzam. The buried gold is the clue.

Abd al-Muttalib, the Prophet’s grandfather, dreamed four times. The first three dreams named things he was to dig for and gave them names that meant nothing to him: Tayba, Barra, al-Madnuna. The fourth said Zamzam. He went to the place indicated and started digging with one son, al-Harith, for help, while the Quraysh stood round objecting to a man breaking ground between their idols. He came up with golden gazelle figurines, pieces of mail, and a number of Qala’i swords, and then with water. One of the gazelles was fixed above the door of the Kaaba. The versions do not agree on any of this either: Ibn Sa’d preserves two separate traditions, one about a well and a water dispute with the Quraysh, the other about the dreams and the buried treasure, and that second one mentions neither water nor the name Zamzam.

What Abd al-Muttalib gained was the siqaya, the right and duty of watering the pilgrims. It passed to his son Abu Talib, who sold it to his brother al-Abbas when money got tight, and al-Abbas promptly forbade anyone to use the water for washing. His descendants, the Abbasids, kept the office and eventually took the caliphate. Al-Azraqi, writing in the ninth century, describes the well still standing open to the sky, with two pools beside it: one between the well and the corner of the Kaaba for pilgrims to drink from, another behind it for ritual washing, with a covered channel carrying the dirty water out of the courtyard. Men worked the ropes and emptied the skins into one pool and then the other.

After that the well spent a thousand years being built over and knocked down. Al-Mansur paved the ground around it in marble in the 770s. A civil servant named Umar ibn Faraj ar-Rukhkhaji raised a mosaic dome over it in the mid ninth century and pulled down what had stood there before. In 930 the Qarmatians sacked Mecca, carried off the Black Stone for twenty-two years, destroyed the dome, and left Zamzam and every other well in the city full of the bodies of pilgrims. Qaitbay rebuilt the dome in the fifteenth century. Suleiman’s men tore the roof off in 1540 and finished a new one in 1542 after a flood interrupted them. Ahmed I put an iron cage around the well in 1621. The Wahhabis pulled the dome down again in 1803. In 1964 the Saudi authorities demolished the last structure standing over it and moved the wellhead down into a basement two and a half metres below the floor, to clear the crowding above.

For a long stretch the water reached pilgrims through a guild. The Zamzamis, still operating at the end of the nineteenth century, assigned themselves to arriving pilgrims and kept a jug with each man’s name on it, brought him water through his stay, poured it over him for his ablutions, and secured better bottles for the journey home in proportion to what he gave. A Zamzami with a thin week would lay out prayer mats in poor repair where his pilgrim could see them. The licence to trade cost a small fortune from the Sharif of Mecca.

What the water is held to do is unusually open-ended. The hadith most often quoted, from Jabir ibn Abdullah, says only that the water of Zamzam is for whatever it is drunk for, which makes the intention of the drinker the active ingredient. Ibn Abbas set out how to do it: face the qibla, say the name of God, take it in three breaths, drink your fill, give thanks at the end. Another tradition calls it the best water on the face of the earth, food for the hungry and cure for the sick. The running itself became a rite; the seven circuits pilgrims make between Safa and Marwa are Hagar’s crossings, and the Prophet said as much in the same telling that gave the angel his heel.

The limits are the limits of a well in a desert valley. Two electric pumps alternate, moving between 11 and 18.5 litres a second five kilometres south to a plant at Kudai where the water is filtered, treated with ultraviolet light, stored and sent out again by pipe and tanker. Three samples are taken daily for testing. The water is colourless and faintly alkaline at a pH of about 7.9, carries roughly 835 milligrams of dissolved solids per litre, and tastes strongly of it. The annual draw has been held near half a million cubic metres, and that ceiling rises and falls with the rain, because there is no other source. Nobody hauls it up in a bucket any more. The wellhead sits behind glass in a basement nobody is allowed into, and the water still comes in through the same half metre of broken rock.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Well of Zamzam?

The Well of Zamzam is a well inside the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, about twenty metres east of the Kaaba, and the holiest water source in Islam. Islamic tradition holds that it opened miraculously for Hagar and her infant son Ishmael when they were left in a waterless valley. It is roughly thirty metres deep and draws groundwater from the alluvium and bedrock of Wadi Ibrahim.

How did the Well of Zamzam appear?

According to the account preserved in Sahih al-Bukhari, Hagar ran seven times between the hills of Safa and Marwa searching for help after her waterskin ran dry. She then heard a voice and saw an angel at the site of Zamzam scraping the ground with his heel, or his wing, until water came up. She banked sand around the spring and scooped it into her waterskin, and the Prophet later said that had she left it alone it would have become a surface stream.

Who rediscovered the Well of Zamzam?

Abd al-Muttalib, the grandfather of the Prophet Muhammad, is credited with finding the well again in the sixth century after it had been buried and forgotten. Tradition says he was told where to dig in a series of dreams and uncovered golden gazelle figurines, mail and swords along with the water. The find gave his family the siqaya, the hereditary right of supplying water to pilgrims.

Why did the Well of Zamzam disappear?

The tribe of Jurhum, who controlled Mecca and its sanctuary after settling beside Hagar, were driven out for their misdeeds, and their chief is said to have buried the treasures of the Kaaba in the well, or buried the well itself. Its landmarks were lost with it and nobody could locate the water for generations. The historian G. E. Hawting has argued that these stories partly belong to a different feature, a dry pit inside the Kaaba used as a treasury, whose traditions merged with Zamzam’s.

What is Zamzam water believed to do?

A widely cited hadith states that the water of Zamzam is for whatever it is drunk for, making the drinker’s intention central rather than any fixed property. Another tradition calls it the best water on earth, food for the hungry and a cure for the sick. Pilgrims drink it during hajj and umrah, traditionally facing the qibla and drinking in three breaths, and carry sealed bottles of it home.

Related Entries

Gabriel, Allah, Adam, Noah, Moses, Jannah, Iram of the Pillars, Buraq (Burak), Dhul-Qarnayn, Manna, Al Rakim, Djinn, Connla’s Well, Castalian Spring