The Kaʿba

The Kaʿba is the cube-shaped shrine at the centre of the Great Mosque in Mecca — the point toward which Muslims everywhere orient their prayer, and the physical focus of the pilgrimage.

At a glance

The building is plain to the point of severity: a stone and marble cube a little over thirteen metres high, its corners set roughly to the compass points, almost bare inside — three pillars carrying the roof, hanging lamps, and a stair to the roof. For most of the year it is draped in the kiswah, a black brocade covering renewed annually. Set into the eastern corner is the Black Stone (al-Ḥajar al-Aswad), long since broken and now held in a silver band; pious tradition traces it to Adam, and popular piety holds that it darkened by absorbing the sins of those who kissed it. Nothing in the structure is an image or an idol — the shrine's significance lies wholly in what it orients and gathers.

Its ritual functions are precise. It fixes the qibla: the five daily prayers are performed facing it, animals are slaughtered facing it, and the dead are laid in the grave turned toward it. Pilgrims on hajj or ʿumra circle it seven times counter-clockwise in the rite of ṭawāf, touching or kissing the Black Stone if the press of people allows, though this is encouraged rather than required. Because the direction of prayer is defined by the building rather than by any presence within it, the Kaʿba functions as a point of orientation for the whole community rather than as a place where God is thought to dwell.

Its early history is not well documented. Before Islam it was a sanctuary of Arabian polytheism and already a pilgrimage site drawing tribes from across the peninsula. The Qurʾān says of Abraham and Ishmael that they “raised the foundations” of the House, a phrase many Muslims have read to mean that they rebuilt a shrine first established by Adam. Reports differ on the earliest direction of prayer: the dominant tradition has the community facing Jerusalem until, some sixteen or seventeen months after the emigration to Medina, revelation turned the qibla to the Kaʿba, while other reports describe a Meccan practice already oriented to the House. When Muḥammad ﷺ entered Mecca in 630 he ordered the idols within the shrine destroyed and the building cleansed of every trace of polytheism.

The Kaʿba has been damaged and rebuilt repeatedly — by fire, by flood, and by war. In 930 the Black Stone was carried off by the Qarmaṭians and held for roughly two decades before its return. The enclosure around it grew from the walled precinct of the earliest caliphs into the vast Great Mosque of the present day, much of whose oldest standing fabric is Ottoman work of the sixteenth century and whose twentieth-century expansions under Saudi rule multiplied its area many times over to receive millions of pilgrims a year.

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Curated reference on Islamic belief and thought. On matters where traditions differ, positions are attributed rather than adjudicated; verify points of doctrine with qualified scholars.