In the thirty-fifth year of the life of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, in about 605 of the Christian calendar, some five years before the first revelation, the Quraysh undertook the greatest public work of their generation: the rebuilding of the Kaaba, the Ancient House of Allah in Makkah. The event stands in the chronology as the threshold between the quiet decade of his married life and the approaching dawn of the prophethood, the last collective act of the city before heaven spoke, and the stage upon which, at its very end, the whole of Quraysh would be brought, by a crisis over a single stone, to call upon the judgment of al-Amin. This entry narrates the work itself: the damage that forced the decision, the fear that delayed it, the demolition and the rebuilding upon the foundations of Ibrahim (peace be upon him), the clans laboring wall by wall, until the structure rose to the height at which the Black Stone awaited its place. The dispute over that Stone, and the arbitration of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ that resolved it, the chronicle sets down in the entries that follow this one; and the completion of the building, with its raised door and its curtailed extent, belongs likewise to a later entry. Here is the story of the House renewed, told from inside the dust of the work.
What was this House, that its rebuilding should have been undertaken with such trembling? It was the first House appointed for mankind, as the Quran would later declare through the tongue of the very man who carried its stones, blessed and a guidance for the worlds; and the believing memory of the city, corrupted as its practice had become, still knew that its foundations had been laid by Ibrahim and his son Ismail (peace be upon them both), the father of prophets rebuilding, at the command of Allah, the sanctuary of the pure religion in a barren valley. A later scholar of the sirah has written of it as the vestige of the religion of Ibrahim which the Arabs of the jahiliyyah still respected: a great room built heavy of stones, its ceiling borne upon costly wooden pillars, erected for the worship of Allah and the mention of His name alone, though the age had ringed it with idols and buried its purpose under the customs of the ancestors. The structure as Quraysh inherited it, however, was no longer the equal of its sanctity. As it then stood, the walls were of loose stones piled just above the height of a man, and there was no roof, so that even when the door was locked access was easy; it had stood so from the days of Ismail (peace be upon him), as the received summary records, a low building of white stones, and the years had not been kind to it.
The damage that broke the city's hesitation came from more than one quarter, and the sources, read together, give the whole inventory. The Sealed Nectar records that a great flood swept through Makkah some five years before the prophethood and came near to demolishing the House, and that the wearing factors of nature, working upon an ancient building, had already weakened and cracked its walls; a similar account in the Fiqh as-Seerah records the vicissitudes of time, the cracked walls, and the heavy flood, and adds the fear of the Quraysh for the sanctity of the structure. The roofs and coverings had their own history of harm, for Ibn Kathir transmits, through Ibn Wahb from Yunus from Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri, the report that a woman kindled a fire by the Kaaba, and a spark from her fire caught the cloth covering of the House and burned it; the context of the report, Ibn Kathir observes, is good, being from the biographical writings of al-Zuhri, though he notes openly the strange wording of its opening, which says the occurrence was when the Messenger of Allah ﷺ reached puberty, while the rebuilding is established as occurring in his thirty-fifth year. And the House had suffered robbery as well as flood and fire. Some men had stolen its treasure, which was kept in a well dug in the middle of the building; the man found in possession of the stolen goods, Ibn Ishaq relates, was Duwayk, a freedman of the Mulayh clan, whose hand the Quraysh cut off, while the Quraysh themselves claimed that the real thieves had planted the treasure with him to divert suspicion; and Musa ibn Uqba's account adds that a man named Mulayh had stolen the Kaaba's incense. Roofless walls, cracked by flood and fire, robbed of treasure and incense, and held in contempt by the clever thieves of the valley: the House of Allah, in the custody of a people who still revered it, had been brought low by the neglect of the very reverence they professed.
Yet the decision to rebuild was not a mere repair; it was an aspiration, and the sources record what the Quraysh intended. They wished to reroof the House, for the roof of stones laid above the frame, as Ibn Ishaq describes it, threatened to collapse; they wished to make the building taller; and, as Musa ibn Uqba records, they wished to raise its door so that only those whom they wished could enter, a prudent ambition in a city whose House had just been robbed. And the material for the aspiration was gathered before the resolve was complete, by a providence the reader should mark. The sea had cast ashore at Jeddah a ship belonging to a Byzantine trader, broken beyond repair, and the Quraysh took its timbers to roof the Kaaba. The account of al-Umawi, which Ibn Kathir transmits, tells the fuller story: the ship belonged to the emperor of Byzantium and was carrying building materials, marble, wood, and metal, sent under the charge of Baqum for the church of the Abyssinians which the Persians had burned; and when it had reached its anchorage at Jeddah, Allah sent a gale against it and destroyed it. The sovereign of the greatest empire of the age had loaded a church's materials for a Christian sanctuary, and the storm of Allah had driven them to the shore of His own Ancient House, so that the timber of Caesar became the roof of Ibrahim (peace be upon him); and the emperor's own craftsman, as the same account indicates, was present in the city. For there was in Makkah at that time a Copt who was a skilled carpenter, as Ibn Ishaq states plainly; and the received summary of the tradition, following another line, names the man who laid the stones of the rebuilt House as Baqum, a mason the accounts describe as a Roman. The sources differ in their description of his origin, Copt or Byzantine, and the chronicle reports the difference rather than resolving it; what is agreed is the man and the fact, that when the House of Allah was rebuilt, the hands that shaped its timber and laid its stones belonged to a craftsman from the lands of the north, brought by shipwreck to the service of the first House of Allah on earth.
Then followed the delay that shows the whole temper of the work, the awe of the Quraysh before their own sanctuary. Such was their reverence, Lings writes, that they hesitated to lay hands on the Kaaba, though the walls were theirs to mend and the plan was agreed; their fear of incurring the guilt of sacrilege kept them from the work they knew was needful. And the fear was given a body. There was a serpent that would emerge from the well of the Kaaba, into which they would drop every day the offerings of the pilgrims, and sun itself upon the wall of the House; whenever anyone approached, it would raise its head, move its coils audibly, and open its mouth, and they were all afraid of it. Al-Suhayli, transmitting from Razin, preserves the tradition of the beast: it had dwelt in the well for five hundred years, its head as big as the head of a young goat, its belly white and its back black. Workmen brought to begin the demolition refused to set foot before the House while the serpent held it. Then came the sign that loosed their hands, in the accounts of Ibn Ishaq and Lings both: one day as it lay upon the wall as was its habit, Allah sent down a bird which snatched it up and flew away with it; and Musa ibn Uqba's account says the serpent vanished up into the sky, while some said a bird picked it up and tossed it away toward Ajyad, the mountain beside the sanctuary. Then Quraysh said among themselves the words the sources preserve: now we may hope that Allah is pleased with our intent; we have a craftsman, and we have wood, and Allah has rid us of the serpent. The believer reads the sequence with awe: the guardianship of the House was real, and when the Lord willed His House renewed, He cleared the guard He had set, that His worshippers might approach with clean intent and clean hands.
The first touch upon the wall the sources tell with a detail that belongs among the strange mercies of the story. A Makhzumite of the highest standing, Abu Wahb, the brother of Fatimah the grandmother of the Prophet ﷺ, went up to the House and removed a stone from its top; but no sooner was it lifted than the stone leapt from his hand and returned to its place, and the people drew back from the Kaaba, afraid to proceed with the work. It was upon that withdrawal, in the account Ibn Kathir transmits from Ibn Ishaq, that the voice of the assembly was raised in the resolution that sanctified the whole enterprise: O Quraysh, in rebuilding it use only money that you have fairly earned; nothing gained from prostitution, or usury, or injustice against any person must enter into it. Some attributed the words to al-Walid ibn al-Mughira, Ibn Kathir records, but Ibn Ishaq inclined to Abu Wahb, whom he identifies as the maternal uncle of the Prophet's ﷺ father, a highly regarded and honorable man; and the received summary of the tradition records the same covenant in its own words, that the chiefs of Quraysh resolved to use only licit money in the rebuilding, excluding all that derived from harlotry, usury, or unjust practices. The reader of the earlier entries of this chronicle, who has watched the young Muhammad ﷺ earn his reputation for honest scales through the trade years, will see what the city was reaching for: in the one great work of their common life, the Quraysh desired to build upon the one kind of wealth the coming Book would call goodly loan, wealth that is pure at its earning. How far the resolution was kept in every clan's accounting, the sources do not say; that it was made, and made at the moment of the leaping stone, is itself one of the standing miracles of the moral history of Makkah.
Then the demolition began in the manner of all brave beginnings, by one man taking the guilt upon himself. The first man to start the razing was al-Walid ibn al-Mughira, the chief of Makhzum, who took up a pickaxe and said, I will begin the razing for you; and going to the Kaaba he spoke to his Lord the words the tradition has kept, O Allah, it is not to be feared; O Allah, good is all we want; and with that he knocked down part of the wall between the Black Stone and the Yemenite corner. The rest of the people held back, saying: let us wait and see; if he be smitten, we will raze no more of it, but restore it even as it was; but if he be not smitten, then Allah is pleased with our work, and we will raze it all to the ground. The night passed over Walid without mishap, and early the next morning he was again at work, and the others joined him, and the demolition proceeded, until they had taken the walls down as far as the foundations established by Ibrahim (peace be upon him). There they came upon the base of the Father of the Prophets: large greenish cobble stones, interlocking, and of their shape the reports differ in a small way that Ibn Kathir preserves: the biography's wording said interlocking like teeth, while the Sahih of al-Bukhari, in the account of Yazid ibn Ruman, said interlocking like the humps of camels placed side by side; and al-Suhayli said of the wording like teeth that he considered it imaginary. And the Quraysh learned at those stones how far their commission reached and no further. A man of them put a crowbar between two of the stones to lever one out; but at the first movement of the stone a quaking shudder ran through the whole of Makkah, and they took it as a sign and left that foundation undisturbed. Musa ibn Uqba transmits a parallel from Ibn Abbas, that when a tribesman lifted a stone from the original foundation, not knowing it was such, the onlookers saw a light emit from beneath it that almost dazzled his sight, whereupon the stone leapt from his hand back into its place, and the builders said, do not move that stone, or any of those next to it. So the rebuilt House rose upon the very base that Ibrahim and Ismail (peace be upon them both) had set, the new work of the children resting upon the untouched work of the fathers, which is itself the whole parable of the prophethood that was coming: a revelation built upon the foundations of the earlier revelations, joining to them, disturbing them not at all.
As they came up from the foundations, the division of the labor was made, and the arrangement shows the whole political anatomy of Makkah, clan by clan. Ibn Ishaq's account, transmitted by Ibn Kathir, records the allotment: the side with the door was entrusted to the tribes of Abd Manaf and Zuhrah; the side between the corner of the Black Stone and the Yemenite corner to Banu Makhzum together with other tribes of the Quraysh; the back of the House to the tribes of Jumah and Sahm; the side of the Hijr to the tribes of Abd ad-Dar ibn Qusayy and Asad ibn Abd al-Uzza; and the rahw, the enclosed slope about the walls, to Adi ibn Ka'b. Lings adds the manner of the work: they gathered more stones, in addition to those they already had, so as to increase the height of the building, and worked separately, clan by clan, each section rising under the hands of its own people. And the Fiqh as-Seerah adds the principle that explains a scene the reader is about to witness: a structure whose foundations were laid by Ibrahim and Ismail (peace be upon them both) could not be entrusted to ordinary laborers, so that the leaders and the sheikhs of the tribes themselves took part in the work, carrying the stones with their own hands; and among them, the same account states, were the Messenger of Allah ﷺ and his uncles. Let the believer pause upon that sentence, for it is one of the quiet honors of the whole sirah: the Lord of the Ancient House had His final Messenger carry its stones upon his own shoulder in the years before the message, so that the man would be literally built into the rebuilding of the House he was sent to purify; and the believers of every generation, circling the Kaaba, walk around a House the hands of Muhammad ﷺ helped to raise.
Of his labor among the builders the tradition preserves a single incident, and it has been carried in the soundest collection. The account, transmitted from Jabir ibn Abdullah (may Allah be pleased with him) and carried in the Sahih collections, relates that while the people were rebuilding the House, the Messenger of Allah ﷺ went with al-Abbas to carry stones, and al-Abbas said to him: put your loincloth over your shoulder, that it may protect you from the stones. He did so; and this was before the prophethood; and he fell to the ground in a faint, and his eyes turned toward the heavens, and he cried, my loincloth, my loincloth; and he wrapped himself in it, and from that day his loins were never seen again. The scholars of the later tradition, transmitting the same report through Amr ibn Dinar, grade it sound in the collections of al-Bukhari, Muslim, and others; and the believer learns from it two things at once: the reality of the labor, that the noblest of creation worked at the wall of the Kaaba as a laborer works, half-clothed under the heat as the builders of Makkah worked, his uncle beside him; and the reality of the guarding, that even in the midst of that labor, when the garment of the workman threatened the modesty of the man, Allah drew him back from the exposure and settled the covering upon him, so that the dignity of the future Messenger was kept whole even in the dust and sweat of the scaffolding. What the Quraysh saw was a young kinsman fainting at the wall; what heaven saw was the sealing of a modesty that no labor would ever break.
From the foundations and the labor came also the findings that the sira has never tired of repeating, the writings hidden in the ancient masonry. In the corner of the Black Stone, Ibn Ishaq relates, they found a document with Syriac writing, and they did not know what it was until a Jew read it to them; and this is what it said: I am Allah, the Lord of Bakka; I created it the day I created the heavens and the earth and formed the sun and the moon; and I have set seven trusty angels around it; it will not cease to exist until its two mountains disappear, a blessing to its people in their water and their milk. And they found another writing, beneath the Station of Ibrahim (peace be upon him), the small rock bearing the print of his foot by the door of the House: Makkah is the holy house of Allah; her sustenance shall come to her from three directions; let not her people be the first to profane her. And a further channel, that of Sa'id ibn Yahya al-Umawi, transmits that three slates were found in the House, the first as above, and the second bearing the covenant of the kinship: I am Allah, the Lord of Bakka; I created ar-rahim, the bond of the womb, deriving it from My name; whoever acts kindly to his kin, so shall I act toward him; and whoever severs it, so shall I treat him; and the third: I am Allah, the Lord of Bakka; I created the good and the evil; joy shall be for those who bring good, and woe upon those who bring evil. The chronicle reports these writings as the tradition carries them, in the reports of the biographers, without pressing their letter beyond what the scholars have received; but the believer may be forgiven for seeing the design entire: when the Quraysh opened the walls of the House their fathers had filled with idols, the first things to come to light were the confession of the one Lord, the sanctity of His city, and the law of the womb, the very creed, and the sanctity, and the kinship that the coming revelation would rebuild in the same city, from the same foundations, within the lifetime of the very men who held the slates in their hands.
So the walls rose, clan by clan, and the years of the city's greatest labor moved toward the height at which every hand would have to stop. The Book of Allah, which was not yet revealed, already knew what they were reenacting, for the Quran would afterward say of the first building: and when Ibrahim was raising the foundations of the House, and with him Ismail, our Lord, accept this from us; indeed You are the Hearing, the Knowing. The Quraysh, in their jahiliyyah, were obeying without knowing it the pattern of the father of prophets: the pure funds for the work, the fear of sacrilege in the touching, the foundations left undisturbed, and now the walls ascending toward the place of the Stone. And when they had built it up, as Ibn Ishaq says, until they reached the place of the Black Stone, the work stopped of itself; for every clan knew what the placing of that Stone would mean, the honor of honors, the certificate before all Arabia of the house that had set the cornerstone of the sanctuary; and the peace of the worksite gathered itself into the storm that the next entry of this chronicle must narrate. Here the record of the rebuilding itself may close, at the height of the rising walls, with the House of Allah half-built and wholly blessed: its foundations Ibrahim's, its timbers from the sea by the gale of Allah, its serpent gone by a bird of Allah, its funds purified by its own covenant, its stones carried by the chiefs of Quraysh and by the shoulder of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, and above it all, unseen by the builders, the decree of the Lord of the House that in this work the last of the prophets should lay his hands before his Lord laid upon him the final message. What believer, standing today in the courtyard of that same House, does not look at its stones and remember that al-Amin once carried them; and what heart does not bow, knowing that the House was rebuilt five years before the revelation, as if the sanctuary itself were being prepared, stone by stone, for the light that was about to descend upon the city that sheltered it.