this dispute with his usual sagacity, placing the stone in a cloth with his own hands, and then asking a representative of each of the tribes to hold a corner of that cloth and lift the stone to its position, the Holy Prophet himself fixing it in position. The Ka‘bah remained as it was built by the Quraish until the time of ‘Abd Allāh ibn Zubair, when the building having been damaged by the Umayyad army which had besieged Makkah, ‘Abd Allāh decided to rebuild it, instead of repairing it, including the open space of Ḥijr in the building itself. But after the fall of ‘Abd Allāh, Ḥajjāj again rebuilt it on the foundations of the structure erected by the Quraish. And the building today rests on the same foundations.
The Ka‘bah stands in the centre of a parallelogram whose dimensions, as given in the Encyclopaedia of Islām, are as follows: N.-W. side 545 ft., S.-E. side 553 ft., N.-E. side 360 ft., S.W. side 364 ft. This area is known as al-Masjid al-Ḥarām or the Sacred Mosque, the famous mosque of Makkah. The name is met with in pre-Islamic literature (En. Is.). In the Holy Qur’ān this name occurs in revelations of the early Makkah period, as in 17:1. The area of the Sacred Mosque contains, besides the Ka‘bah, the Maqām Ibrāhīm and the building over the fountain of Zamzam. The Sacred Mosque was the centre of all administrative activities before Islām, as within it was situated the Makkan Council Hall (Dār al-Nadwah) where all important matters regarding the weal or woe of the people were settled. Since the advent of Islām, the Sacred Mosque has been the pivot of the intellectual activities of Makkah, and the whole Muslim world looks upon it as its central point.
The Holy Qur’ān claims the Ka‘bah as the first house of Divine worship on earth, and all available historical evidence upholds this claim. It is sufficient to quote Muir.7 “A very high antiquity must be assigned to the main features of the religion of Mecca … Diodorus Siculus, writing about half a century before our era, says of Arabia washed by the Red Sea, ‘there is, in this country, a temple greatly
7 Life of Mahomet. p. xc.