Chapter One: The Sanctuary in the Desert
Arabia. The Sixth Century C.E
In the arid, desolate basin of Mecca, surrounded on all sides by the bare mountains of the Arabian Desert, stands a small, nondescript sanctuary that the ancient Arabs refer to as the Kaaba: the Cube. The Kaaba is a squat, roofless edifice made of unmortared stones and sunk into a valley of sand. Its four walls - so short it is said a young goat can leap over them - are swathed in strips of heavy cloth. At its base are two small doors chiseled into the gray stone, allowing entry into the inner sanctum. It is here, inside the cramped interior of the sanctuary, that the gods of pre-Islamic Arabia reside: Hubal, the Syrian god of the moon; al-Uzza, the powerful goddess the Egyptians knew as Isis and the Greeks called Aphrodite; al-Kutba, the Nabataean god of writing and divination; Jesus, the incarnate god of the Christians, and his holy mother, Mary.
In all, there are said to be three hundred and sixty idols housed in and around the Kaaba, representing every god recognized in the Arabian Peninsula, a region known to the Arabs as the Hijaz. During the holy months, when the desert fairs and the great markets envelop the city of Mecca, pilgrims from all over the Hijaz make their way to this barren land to visit their tribal deities. They sing songs of worship and dance in front of the gods; they make sacrifices and pray for health. Then, in a remarkable ritual - the origins of which are a mystery - the pilgrims gather as a group and rotate around the Kaaba seven times, some pausing momentarily to kiss each corner of the sanctuary before being captured and swept away again by the current of bodies.
The pagan Arabs gathered around the Kaaba believe their sanctuary to have been founded by Adam, the first man. They believe that Adam's original edifice was destroyed by the Great Flood, then rebuilt by Noah. They believe that, after Noah, the Kaaba was forgotten for centuries until Abraham rediscovered it while visiting his first-born son, Ishmael, and his concubine, Hagar, both of whom had been banished to this wilderness at the behest of Abraham's wife, Sarah. And they believe it was at this very spot that Abraham nearly sacrificed Ishmael before being stopped by the promise that, like his younger brother, Isaac, Ishmael would also sire a great nation, the descendents of whom now spin over the sandy Meccan valley like a desert whirlwind.
Of course, these are just stories intended to convey what the Kaaba means, not where it came from. The truth is no one knows who built the Kaaba, or how long it has been here. It is likely the sanctuary was not even the original reason for the sanctity of this place. Near the Kaaba is a well called Zamzam, fed by a bountiful underground spring, which tradition claims had been placed there to nourish Hagar and Ishmael. It requires no stretch of the imagination to recognize how a spring, situated in the middle of the desert, could become a sacred place for the wandering Bedouin tribes of Arabia. The Kaaba itself may have been erected many years later, not as some sort of Arab Pantheon, but as a secure place to store the consecrated objects used in the rituals that had evolved around Zamzam. Indeed, the earliest traditions concerning the Kaaba claim that inside its walls was a pit, dug into the sand, which contained "treasures" magically guarded by a snake.
It is also possible that the original sanctuary held some measure of cosmological significance for the ancient Arabs. Not only were many of the idols in the Kaaba associated with the planets and stars, but the legend that they totaled three hundred and sixty in number suggests astral connotations. The seven circumambulations around the Kaaba - called tawaf in Arabic and still the primary ritual of the annual Hajj pilgrimage - may have been intended to mimic the motion of the heavenly bodies. It was, after all, a common belief among ancient peoples that their temples and sanctuaries were terrestrial replicas of the cosmic mountain from which creation sprang. The Kaaba, like the Pyramids in Egypt or the Temple in Jerusalem, may have been constructed as an axis mundi, sometimes called a "navel spot:" a sacred space around which the universe revolves; the link between the earth and the solid dome of heaven. That would explain why there was once a nail attached to the floor of the Kaaba that the ancient Arabs referred to as "the navel of the world." As G.R. Hawting has shown, the ancient pilgrims would sometimes enter the sanctuary, tear off their clothes, and place their own navels over the nail, thereby merging with the cosmos.
Alas, as with so many things about the Kaaba, its origins are mere speculation. The only thing scholars can say with any certainty is that by the 6th century C.E., this small sanctuary made of mud and stone had become the center of religious life in pre-Islamic Arabia: that intriguing, yet ill-defined era of paganism that Muslims refer to as the Jahiliyyah - "the Time of Ignorance".