The Enduring Call of Islam's Holiest City
Mecca, Saudi Arabia
The birthplace of the prophet Muhammad, Mecca is the destination for some 3 million Muslims who each year undertake the pilgrimage known as the hajj. Beyond Mecca's iconic imagery—tens of thousands of white-robed pilgrims swirling around the sacred Kaaba, a cubical shrine covered in thick black silk hand-embroidered with Koranic verses in golden thread—lies a spiritual power deeply rooted in the city's history.
While Mecca today is the holiest city to Muslims, it was an oasis town and major crossroads on Arab trade routes long before Muhammad's birth in the year 570. Governed by merchants, it witnessed constant blood feuding among nomadic, kinship-based tribes that roamed the surrounding desert. Yet Mecca was also a thriving religious center full of shrines, says F. E. Peters, author of The Hajj: The Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places. "How far back it goes, we don't know."
But for a month every year, desert clans declared a moratorium on fighting and embarked on a pilgrimage, descending on Mecca to trade and worship at the shrines of 360 polytheistic idols. The city's religious focal point was a hollow stone temple, the Kaaba, surrounded by effigies but devoted to the powerful pre-Islamic god Allah (which in Arabic means "the god").
After Muhammad rose to power, he swept the idols from around the Kaaba and dedicated its space, and the hajj, to Allah, now God, the only recognized deity for Islam's monotheistic believers. The hajj is the once-in-a-lifetime obligation of all Muslims. The journey serves to remind them of their mortality, to foster spiritual unity, and to commemorate Islam's beginnings.
Those beginnings lie in the ancient story of Abraham and his first son, Ishmael. Banished by Abraham's jealous wife, Sarah, Ishmael and his mother, Hagar, wandered the desert in exile, searching for water. Eventually, God commanded a spring to appear, saving the two from death. According to Islamic tradition, Abraham later visited the spot and erected a temple to serve as God's house on Earth: the Kaaba. Today, the Kaaba stands empty, save for lamps to illuminate its interior.
The modern-day hajj consists of rituals re-enacting the stories of Ishmael, Hagar, and Abraham, as well as visits to sites central to Muhammad's life. Pilgrims circumambulate the Kaaba, walk between two nearby hills to commemorate Ishmael and Hagar's wandering, and dip their shawls, future burial shrouds, in the Well of Zamzam, which channels water from Mecca's holy spring.
Surrounding the well and the Kaaba is the Great Mosque, now an air-conditioned supercomplex. Yet Mecca's ancient spiritual power endures, manifest in the Kaaba—rebuilt at various points because of flooding, political strife, and the wearing of time. At one corner of the Kaaba is the revered Black Stone, said to be from God (some say it is a meteorite). Pilgrims able to get close pause to touch or kiss it. It exists in pieces, supposedly darkened by contact with millions of sinners.
Reader Comments
I was in Arabia 1970's
I was in Riyadh in the 1970's. A Muslim Turkish woman took her U.S. husband--a convert to Islam -- and they circled the Kaaba as she had done before. The crush was so great that he almost had his face pushed into he depression that holds the holy stone, a meteorite, but it was a thrilling experience. Many elderly people were carried to touch it. She said many wait to the end of life to have all their sins forgiven. It seems like a charming idea, a universal longing to die with no regrets. Religion seems to invite people to want a "forgiving presence" in their lives and to be rewarded for good deeds. i prefer to honor people like James Smithson, the English atheist who gave us the Smithsonian for the advance of knowledge. And atheist Edison whose electricity lights most churches. And atheists Morse and his telegraph, and Burbank for plant genetics. We could have stem cell research now, replacing even teeth, eyes, fingers and hearts, if we had a majority of freethinker lawmakers.
Stones revered in many faiths and monarchies
Stones are part of many religious rites. The meteorite at Mecca came "from another world," as if "From God." The Stone of Scone is under the throne of the early British Empire. Stones are equated with testes, which leads to the idea that this is "a man's world." The Old Testament is based on the rite of taking an oath and if the oath is broken, the man will lose his testes by castration. The Apostles "testify" that Jesus appointed them to be his successor and keep all the money and food they managed to collect by begging. Peter means "stone," as does the world petrification, "turned to stone." The Ten Commandments were supposedly carved on stone by God, although at the same time he is said to have no physical body and is a "spirit." Women do not have testes, so a testes-based church says the man is the head of the female. It is interesting to read tithe-inviting religious literature and wonder why any female would be attracted to it.
Mecca in Saudi Arabia
Is it the same place referred to in the Bible as Becca!???
advertisement
