SUSAN TALLMAN

THE BLACK STONE

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



The Black Stone of the Kaba 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 lips
against its surface, continuing a tradition unbroken for at least 13 centuries. Five times
every day, around the world, perhaps a billion people
1
look to architecture, compass
needles, stars, or iPhone apps to point out its direction and pray.
The Black Stone is a rock (or more precisely, several fragments of rock) set
into the eastern corner of the Kaba, the cubical shrine around which the Great
Mosque in Mecca is built. According to the Keeper of the Kaba, 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 the
Swiss adventurer John Lewis Burckhardt reported it was an irregular oval, about
seven inches in diameter, with an undulating surface. (Non-Muslims are forbidden
entry 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 arolite,
The Power of Things: The Black Stone
2
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 its
survival 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 Kaba, and there to circle the building seven times in a ritual of prayer
and commemoration. The Black Stone marks the starting point of this
circumambulation (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 Black
Stone.
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, and
Islam Islam is the most vehement in its repudiation of idolatry, in its admonitions
against any kind of ecclesiastical accessory that might distract from God: it has no
jeweled crosses, gilded reliquaries or chalices, monstrances, tabernacles, thuribles, or
censors. This is a manifestation of Islams deepest directive, to maintain wholeness and
unity (tawhid), without divisions into this world and the hereafter, the natural and
supernatural, substance and meaning, body and spirit;
7
to inveigh against
disintegration; 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.
8

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 stuff
evidence to evoke ideas, knowledge, beauty, spirituality, God. It is a profound
embodiment 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 more
remarkable, 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 Stones cosmological importance within Islam, it is
necessary 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 the
Kaba, the building of which it is a part, and that the Kaba is older than Creation,
SUSAN TALLMAN

3
present in the mind of God before the sun and stars took shape. It is, in fact, often
difficult to tell when early Muslim writers were writing about the Stone, the Kaba 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 of
God.
9

... According to the Meccan historian Al-Azraqi, it was one of the stars of
Paradise, so dazzlingly bright that if God had not effaced it, it would have illuminated
everything 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 Gods 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 an
angel. In many stories it has the power to act: it is credited with swallowing the
document with which men swore their fealty to God,
11
and the Keeper of the Kaba
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 the
desert 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 always
have 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,
ahouse.
...
[Many generations later, Abraham and his son Ishmael return to the same
Valley of Adams exile] In the Quran Abraham himself describes it as a valley without
cultivation ... But it was here that God commanded Abraham to rebuild the Kaba as
a 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 Kaba.
13
And there, according to the traditions of Islam, it
has remained apart from one famous abduction ever since; a vital, physical link
from God to Adam to Abraham to the pilgrim whose lips are touching it as I write this
sentence.
...
By the time that Jesus of Nazareth was born some 800 miles to the north, the
desert 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 of
Ozza. Idols from other places were imported Hubal, the Mesopotamian moon god;
al-Uzza, an IsisAphrodite type; Manat, the Nabatean goddess of time; the Jewish
prophet Jesus and his mother Mary. They sacrificed animals to their idols and
smeared them with blood and offal. They asked advice of them, and solicited their
intersession 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 writers
describe this as the time of ignorance the Jahaliyya.
The Power of Things: The Black Stone
4
...
A sanctuary so rich in gods naturally attracted not only pilgrims but jealous
competition... 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 Abrahas 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 the
absolute singularity of God, and destroy the idols and the confusion they wrought. He
would also reaffirm the sanctity of the Kaba, its eastern corner, and the Black Stone
embedded there.
...
Muhammad was forty years old when he began to receive revelations from the
angel Gabriel, instructing him to reassert the religion of Abraham. This message was
perceived by the Quraysh as a threat to the Kaba 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 Islamic
calendar, Year One.
There is no telling exactly when the most important moment in the earthly
career 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 Quran says, O Muhammad, many a time We noticed you turning your
face 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 your
face in that direction,
16
it marks a newly assertive Arab identity. The Kaba may still
have been sullied with pagan idols, but it nonetheless represented a specifically Arab
holy 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 the
sanctuary and entered the Kaba.
18
Muhammad then rode around the Kaba seven
times on his camel, and each time he passed the Black Stone he cried out Allaahu
akbar (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 one
after the other.
19
From within the Kaba he carried the idols out before the assembled
crowd 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. The
Prophet 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
SUSAN TALLMAN

5
the bits as a doorstep to the newly sanctified Kaba. Finally, he stood at the door of the
Kaba and announced the fundamental truth of the new faith: There is no god but
God alone; He has no associates.
20

...
After Muhammads death the new Caliph, Umar, who had been one of the
Prophets 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 Allahs Apostle kissing you I would
not 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 had
sent those stones flying because, no matter what shape they were carved in, they were
only rocks. The Black Stone is also a rock, as Umars statement makes clear.
Whatever power passed through it to Muhammad is not its power, but Gods power.
It isnt a vessel, its 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 point
marking Gods link to the physical world of man, a tangible remnant of an intangible
heaven, 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 proof
more substantial than words. But only, of course, if we believe what is said about
them. Physical evidence doesnt lie, we are told. It may not lie, but it is frequently
mute. The task of the historian and the archaeologist is to find the words to wed to the
object. 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 Arabian
Peninsula is enormous larger than that of India or Europe and though the Hijaz
area in which Mecca lies was surrounded by the worlds densest network of literate
cultures Greeks, Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Jews, Romans, and Christians the
Hijaz itself remained something of a historical black hole. Yemen and Sheba to the
south, and Syria and Palestine to the north, figured in trade and in the imperial
ambitions of Persians, Romans, Abyssinians and Byzantines, but the Hijaz remained an
unwanted wilderness of sand, rock, and illiterate tribes. In an age of maritime empires
The Power of Things: The Black Stone
6
it had no useful anchorages and no cities. While some trade ran through it most
notably the trade in aromatics between Yemen and the Levant little trade stopped in
it. The wild nomads that occupied its interior were met occasionally at its periphery,
and looked upon with that mixture of terror and disdain with which civilized people
regard savages. Herodotus described it as a land of vipers and winged serpents. The
Alexandrian Periplus of the 1
st
century described the region as fearsome in every
respect. Standard historical sources tell us next to nothing about that narrow valley.
In 1911, the Encyclopedia Britannica could only say before the rise of Islam,
Mahomets native place, Mecca, appears to figure nowhere in historical records.
According to the contemporary scholar F.E. Peters, there are no non-Arab texts that
reasonably confirm anything about Mecca including its very existence, perhaps.
22

The only sources we have for the pre-Islamic history of the Kaba and the Black
Stone are Islamic traditions that, if read as historical fact, are both confusing and
contradictory. It is often unclear whether the subject is the Kaba, the Black Stone, or
other aspects of the sanctuary, such as the Maqam Ibrahim (another stone, upon which
Abraham is said to have stood), or even the Jewish foundation stone (eben shetiyah),
upon which the whole world is said to be balanced.
23
The story the traditions tell is a
good one, but it relies on forms of proof and logic not sanctioned by secular academic
thought, which argues there might have been no Adam, no Abraham, no Ishmael.
There might have been no ancient sanctuary to resurrect. There might have been no
idols to destroy. There is a prominent group of Anglo-American scholars who think it
possible that, prior to the triumph of Islam in the centuries after Muhammads death,
nothing worth mentioning happened in Mecca at all.
*

... ...
The upshot is a spectacular spread of opinion: at one end, historians such as
Patricia Crone have questioned the very existence of a person named Muhammad in
the town we now call Mecca in the 7
th
century, while at the other end the Saudi
Ministry of the Hajj website states flatly (in and around information on how to make
hotel reservations for your pilgrimage) that the stone was brought from Paradise by
the Archangel Gabriel and was set into one corner of the Kaaba. Other websites will
assure you, without qualm or caveat, that the Black Stone is an image of the goddess
as giver of life, an object of continuing pagan worship, the corner stone of the
Kingdom of God, and a meteor that fell at the feet of Adam and Eve.

There is also a secular version of the Black Stones story. It goes like this: at
some point in the distant but humanly populated past, a bit of interstellar flotsam was
hurled to Earth in an meteor storm and landed in the vast deserts of the Arabian
Peninsula. The spectacular fireball it caused was observed by the awestruck
inhabitants, who recognized the surviving stone as something extraordinary,
unworldly, divine... This particular stone became the center of a cult among the tribes
who roamed that part of Arabia, and eventually it formed the center of a religious
sanctuary.


SUSAN TALLMAN

7
...
Stones were often a focus of sanctuaries in Middle East, and... there are
multiple points of convergence between the Black Stone and the Judaic Foundation
Stone: both are blindingly bright; both carry tales of having been buried and
recovered; both can claim heavenly origin and super-lapidary powers.
24
... Finally, in
Islamic cosmology, the Kaba with Black Stone -- is the center of the world, the point
from 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 tribes
under 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 (a
souvenir of heaven) with scientific plausibility (a specimen from space.) And, as it
happens, one of the worlds major meteor impact sites, Wabar, is located in southwest
Arabia... But while fission-track analysis of Wabar fragments in early 1970s had
suggested an impact date some 6,400 years ago,.. more recent thermoluminescence
measurements 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 been
reports 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 the
Black Stone. Of the meteor theory one can say exactly what historians Patricia Crone
and Michael Cook said of Muslim tradition: while there are no cogent internal
grounds for rejecting it, there are equally no cogent external grounds for accepting
it.
25



Ultimately the Black Stone is a chunk of rock wrapped in a mantle of mystical
and 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 as
it 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 Kaba.
By this time, the revelations of the Prophet had been collected and committed to
writing, and the Quran had taken its fixed form -- not just as a revelation, but as an
object. Islam had spread from the rough desert tribes of its birthplace to the
sophisticated literary cultures of Persia and Mesopotamia.
...
The Power of Things: The Black Stone
8
The political center of Islamic power moved from Medina, to Kufa, to
Damascus to Baghdad. When Baghdad was sacked by the Mongols, it shifted to the
Mamluks in Egypt, until seized by the Ottomans in Turkey at the beginning of the
16th Century. The one thing that remained constant through all this was the Hajj the
occasion on which the Islamic world presents itself in person to a space seven inches in
diameter. Control of the Kaba gave Mecca a power no Islamic ruler could afford to
ignore,...
26

That said, Mecca was no Rome or Jerusalem. Sandwiched between the stifling
Red Sea Coast an ocean of sand, it had no natural beauty, no mighty rivers, no great
seat of learning. The first few Caliphs tried to improve the place -- Umar (634-44) and
Uthman (644-56) are reported to have razed houses adjoining the Kaba to clear a
small area for the tawaf,
27
and the Caliph Muawiya, (whose opposition to Ali laid the
ground for the Sunni / Shia split) made a big splash by building with baked bricks and
mortar for the first time but these stories only drive home what a primitive place
Mecca must have been.
28
Today we use the name Mecca metaphorically to designate
some 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 shots
square. 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 neither
grass 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 a
single man to be found who knows how to engrave an inscription, or any kind of
design upon a hewn stone... not a single gunsmith or cutler able to make a screw. Its
economy depended entirely on the Hajj. (Pilgrimage would remain Arabias 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 thoroughfare
in every part of the city, wrote John Keane. Nothing resembling a row or street
could 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 Shia sect in eastern Arabia called the
Qarmatians
29
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 Tahir
Sulayman 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, with
its long files of travelers crossing the desert between Mecca and Baghdad constituted a
particularly symbolic and vulnerable target (not unlike passenger jets today), and was
attacked repeatedly by the Qarmatians.
SUSAN TALLMAN

9
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 rode
into 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 door
of the Kaba, his head falling on its threshold.
The motivation for the attack was made clear to one victim who lay wounded
amidst the bodies when a Qarmathian fighter rode up and asked mockingly whether
the wounded hajji knew the Quranic 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, You
are asses. You worship rocks, you make processions around them, you kiss them and
dance 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 one
unforgivable sin...The Qarmathians had looked at the rites surrounding the Black
Stone and found, not a mystical paradox, a finite thing that connects us with the
infinite, but idolatry pure and simple.
When they had finished slaughtering the men and enslaving the women and
children, the Qarmathians looted the Kaba: they took the earrings of Mary, the rams
horn 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 drunken
Qarmatian rode up to the Kaba, 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 not
understand, Khrusaw explained, that it was actually not the Stone, but the nobility
and 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 the
distinction 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 Kaba,
whether historically accurate or not, is true: the religion of the One God swept aside
all the Al-Uzzas and Awks, and the conception of a God so incomprehensibly infinite
he 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, but
Islamic vigilance with regard to idolatry is nonetheless more rigorous and
straightforward than that of Christianity or Judaism. The Muslim Student Union at
the University of Southern California maintains a website that details the shirk implicit
in Christianity, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Yoruba religion, Zulu religion, Jainism,
The Power of Things: The Black Stone
10
Atheism, Anthropomorphism, and Einsteins Theory of Relativity.
35
Articulating and
defending the absolute Oneness of God is the very heart of Islam.
36
Muhammads
destruction 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 worshipped
idols, ate carrion, and committed shameful deeds,
37
into the pure light of strict
monotheism.
If Abu Tabirs 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 the
most severe tests of the faith, and though the absence of the stone caused peoples
hearts 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 and
kissing it, seeking blessings from its site.
38
Its absence was as physically palpable as
its 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 upper
surface 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 the
stone 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, the
Syrian monk who was Chief Counselor in the Umayyad Caliphate during Islams first
century, responded to Muslim accusations that Christians worshipped the cross by
pointing to the rites of the Kaba, which he claimed revolved around an idol carved in
the image of Aphrodite.
39
John acknowledged that the Quran dictated a rigid
monotheism, but saw the Black Stone as a remnant of ancient Arab paganism, never
entirely 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 the
Black Stone, the Greek goddess Aphrodite, and the worship of the morning star was
later elaborated full-throttle: Nicetas Byzantius wrote that Muhammad ordered his
followers to prostrate themselves before an idol of Aphrodite in the Kaba, 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 Kaba 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 altogether
more confusing.
41

SUSAN TALLMAN

11
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 Kaba, but
not 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 the
Kaba: a white one called Chamos, associated with Mars, and a black one called
Mercury, which he identified with Saturn. The idolatrous carving on the face of
stone, he said, had been turned into the wall to hide it. The great Maimonides
concluded, the Ishmaelite today is an idol worshipper although he is unaware that he
worships.
44

In Christian writing, even Muhammads 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 medieval
romances the Muslim god count climbed as high as thirty.
45
When Chaucers Parson
described 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 more
accurately on the rites surrounding the Black Stone. Finger-pointing at mawmets
decreased. Under the Ottoman Empire, Hajjis came and went in greater or lesser
numbers depending on prosperity, and Meccans continued to draw their livelihood
from the presence of the Stone and the Kaba. Islamic rulers spruced up and
aggrandized the mosque area around the Kaba, 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 the
city of Mecca and the artifacts of Islam. Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab taught that
God 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 Quarmatians, such veneration was simply a slippery slope
towards worship. He rejected it all. So much so that the first observer to describe the
sect to the West, the Danish Explorer Carsten Niebuhr, questioned whether a
religion so stripped of everything that might appeal to the senses could maintain its
ground among the Arabs.
48
Perhaps not. Wahhabism might well have petered out in
Najd had not Wahhab succeeded in making a convert of an ambitious local sheik
named Ibn Saud.
Ibn Saud 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 of
Mecca 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
The Power of Things: The Black Stone
12
companions in Medina as well as chapels and monuments dedicated to the Prophet
and 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 sanctuary
surrounding the Kaba and the Black Stone itself were respected and preserved
entire.
5152

...
Set up by the British, Mecca declared its independence in 1916 (in the ensuing
battle the Kaba 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 for
good luck. The luck didnt hold -- he was beheaded -- and the chip was reaffixed to
the stone with cement, musk and ambergris by King Abdul Aziz of the freshly minted
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
53

...
There is, within Islam, no real ambiguity about the proper role of the Black
Stone: 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 to
anyone.
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 the
tawaf, and it is has a spiritual function as a reference to God, but it does not look like
anything but a rock. Unlike the idols destroyed by Muhammad, it bears no
resemblance 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 do
not bow down before it, they touch it and literally move on.
...