The walls of the ancient House had risen, course by course, from the foundations of Ibrahim (peace be upon him), and the whole city had watched them rise. It is important for the reader to see how the work had been ordered, for the order of the work was the seed of the quarrel that is the subject of this account. When Quraysh resolved to rebuild the Kaaba in the thirty-fifth year of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, about five years before the commencement of his prophethood, they divided the sacred building among the clans, so that each great house of the city should raise its own portion with its own hands and its own stones. Ibn Ishaq's account, as transmitted by Ibn Kathir, records the allotment: the side with the door was entrusted to the tribes of Abd Manaf and Zuhrah, that between the corner of the Black Stone and the Yemenite Corner to Banu Makhzum together with other clans of Quraysh, the back of the Kaaba to the tribes of Jumah and Sahm, the Hijr side to the tribes of Abd ad-Dar ibn Qusayy and Asad ibn Abd al-Uzza, while the Adi ibn Kab were assigned the enclosed slope around the walls. The work went forward in an unusual harmony, as al-Mubarakpuri records in his Sealed Nectar: each tribe was responsible for a part, the stones were gathered and laid, and the man who laid them was a Roman mason called Baqum, whose skill had come to Makkah by the strange road of a shipwreck. The son of Abdullah, the future Messenger of Allah ﷺ, now thirty-five years of age, carried stones for the work beside his uncle al-Abbas, as the received reports state; and so the walls climbed, clan upon clan, until the masonry reached the height at which the Black Stone must be built once more into its corner.
Then, at the very crown of their common labor, the unity of Quraysh broke upon the single question that every clan had been waiting to ask: who among them should have the honor of lifting the Sacred Stone into its place? Ibn Ishaq's words, as Ibn Kathir transmits them, are measured and terrible: they built it up until it reached the place for the Stone, but then fell into dispute about it, each tribe wanting to raise it into its position, regardless of the rest. Martin Lings, following the earliest sources, sets the moment in the same frame: they worked separately, clan by clan, until the walls were high enough for the Black Stone to be built once more into its corner, and then a violent disagreement broke out amongst them, for each clan wanted the honor of lifting it into its place. And al-Mubarakpuri adds the heat of the hour: the work had gone on in harmony until the time came to put the sacred Black Stone in its proper place, and then strife broke out among the chiefs, each contesting for the honor of placing the stone in its position.
Let the reader pause upon what the quarrel was actually about, for it was not the weight of a stone. The Black Stone, al-Hajar al-Aswad, is the corner stone of the eastern angle of the House, the Rukn at which the circumambulation begins and ends, the stone that the pilgrim kisses and the generations have reverenced since the rite was first taught. The report transmitted by al-Bayhaqi through Simak ibn Harb from Khalid ibn Arrah from Ali ibn Abi Talib (may Allah be pleased with him), set down by Ibn Kathir among the accounts of the rebuilding, preserves the ancient memory of its origin: when Ibrahim (peace be upon him) had built the House and reached the position for the stone, he sent his son to seek a stone, and Ismail returned to find the Black Stone already set in place, and his father told him that one had come who would not rely on the son's building, and that Gabriel had brought the stone from heaven. Whatever the exact strength of its chain, the belief of Quraysh in the heavenly origin of the Stone was part of the marrow of Makkah; and the writings that had been found in the corner of the House during the demolition, read to them by a Jew in Syriac, had only deepened the city's awe of the sanctuary and its Stone. To set that Stone with one's own hands was to be written into the holiest wall of the holiest house in Arabia; it was an honor that would be remembered as long as the House stood; and every clan of Quraysh had strength enough to covet it and pride enough not to yield it.
The honor itself must be understood in the coin of Makkah, which was not gold but precedence. The city lived upon the sanctuary: the pilgrims who came to the House fed the trade of the valley, and the offices of the sanctuary, the watering of the pilgrims and the feeding of them, the guardianship of the keys and the raising of the banner in war, had been the constitution of Quraysh since the days of Qusayy ibn Kilab, as the reader of this chronology has already been shown. A clan that could claim the setting of the Black Stone would carry from this day forward a title beside which the older offices were dim; the chiefs knew it, the poets would have versified it, and the generations of the schoolboys would have recited it. It is the way of the world that men will sooner die than concede a glory whose possession costs them nothing and whose loss costs them everything they imagine themselves to be; and so it stood among the sons of Quraysh, whose excellence was real, whose courage was real, and whose wisdom, in this hour, had no instrument adequate to the thing it was asked to decide.
The politics of the allotment made the deadlock perfect. The corner of the Black Stone stood at the junction where the sections of the great clans met; the wall between the Stone and the Yemenite Corner belonged to Makhzum and its allies, while the door side was the portion of Abd Manaf and Zuhrah, the houses that contained the Prophet's ﷺ own clan of Hashim. If the chiefs of Makhzum had suffered the elders of Abd Manaf to lift the Stone, they would have conceded precedence in the sanctuary to their rivals; and if Abd Manaf had stood aside for Makhzum, they would have surrendered it. Each of the other clans could frame the same arithmetic. Ibn Kathir's account of the allotment had made the divisions of the work plain, and now the divisions of the work became the map of the quarrel: every clan stood upon its own section of wall, and no clan would carry the Stone across another's masonry. Custom offered no exit, for the Arab code knew only two ways to settle a question of honor: the claim of lineage, which was disputed, and the arbitrament of the sword, which was ruin.
For four or five nights, by Ibn Ishaq's transmission as Ibn Kathir gives it, the confrontation stood; Lings renders the same account with days, and al-Mubarakpuri likewise, and the small difference of nights and days may safely be left as the sources give it. What matters is what filled those days and nights. The dispute did not cool; it organized. Ibn Ishaq's account continues: eventually they broke up, established alliances, and readied to do battle. Lings, in his rendering of the same received account, says that the tension had increased to the point of alliances being made and preparations for battle begun. Al-Mubarakpuri's words bring the reader to the edge of the abyss in a single line: daggers were on the point of being drawn and great bloodshed seemed imminent. Makkah, the city of the sanctuary, the city whose very name carried the blessing of the writings that had been found in its House, was standing over its own coffin, and the lid was the honor of a stone.
An episode preserved in the channel that rises through Mujahid from al-Saib ibn Abd Allah, a man who was himself one of the builders of the Kaaba in those days, allows the reader to hear the quarrel from inside the scaffolding. His account, which Ibn Kathir cites from the Musnad of Imam Ahmad, tells how the work went on until they reached the position for the Stone, and how the Stone itself was then seen among the rocks, looking, as he describes it, like a man's head with a face almost distinguishable; and how a leader of Quraysh said that his people would position it, and others said that they too would do it, the Messenger of Allah ﷺ not yet among them. There is something at once homely and terrible in the report: men who had labored side by side, passing the same stones up the same ladders, discovering in one instant that the crown of the work was a prize, and that a brother's hand upon it was a rival's hand. The account adds that it was the people who suggested that an arbitrator be appointed; and the reader will mark, for the event that follows this one, that the instinct of arbitration was already stirring in the body of the people even while their chiefs were reaching for their weapons.
Where was the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ while the valley filled with the noise of the quarrel? The received accounts do not say, save for one detail of Lings that belongs to the next page of this story: when the crisis broke, he had just returned to Makkah after an absence. In the earlier days of the work he had carried stones with his uncle al-Abbas, as the transmitted reports state; and the reader of the account of his protected youth has already met the strange moment, preserved in the two Sahihs, when his loincloth slipped as he carried the stones and he fell in a swoon, crying out for his garment, so that his loins were never seen again. But at the hour of the deadlock the son of Abdullah was not standing in the circle of the disputing chiefs; he was away, and the city that was tearing itself over the honor of the Stone had not yet remembered that it possessed the one man in whose hands every faction, had they but thought to name him, might have been content to see it laid. The believer who reads the chronology of these years is permitted to see the ordering of Allah's wisdom in that absence: the quarrel was permitted to reach its utmost extremity, until the assemblies of Quraysh had confessed their bankruptcy, so that the rescue, when it came, would be seen by the whole city to be not the contrivance of a faction but the gift of a providence that had made one man the trust of all.
Then the quarrel took the form darkest of all the forms the age knew: the pact of blood. Ibn Ishaq's account, transmitted by Ibn Kathir, preserves the scene in the plain words of the earliest sources: Banu Abd ad-Dar brought a bowl full of blood, and they and Banu Adi ibn Kab ibn Luayy made a pact to fight to the death, placing their hands into that bowl of blood; and so they were known as the blood-lickers. Let the believer mark the terrible symmetry of it. Some twenty years before this hour, as the reader of this chronology has already seen, the founders of the alliance of chivalry had sealed their pact at this same House by pouring water over the selfsame Black Stone, hallowing the water and drinking of it, and swearing to stand with the oppressed against the oppressor. Now the sons of the same city dipped their hands not in hallowed water but in drawn blood, and swore not to defend the wronged but to die for a claim of honor. The Stone that had witnessed the noblest oath Makkah ever swore was now asked to witness the vilest; and the city that had bound itself to protect the stranger was hours from slaughtering its own sons beside the sanctuary both sides professed to love.
The minds of the elders must be read honestly, for they were not wholly blind. To break the peace of the Haram and shed Qurashite blood over the placing of a stone would have been to profane the very House they were rebuilding, the House they had purposed to raise with none but lawful money, rejecting the gains of prostitution and usury and injustice, so that no impure thing should enter its walls. They had demolished with trembling and rebuilt with awe; they had halted at the green stones of the foundation when all Makkah quaked; they had set themselves to magnify the sanctuary. And now, within sight of completion, they stood ready to burn the whole work down for a precedence that would profit no one and cost everything. The memory of the sacrilegious war was still fresh in the generation that had fought it as youths, and its peace had been patched only twenty years before; the elders knew what a war between the clans of the valley would make of the city that the caravans trusted. Fear of that future, as much as the strength of any one faction, kept the daggers half-drawn and the blood in the bowl.
Consider, beside the standoff of the chiefs, what the ordinary people of Makkah were enduring in those days of the deadlock. The sanctuaries of the Arabs knew no police and no court; the word of the strong was the law of the weak, and the peace of the city was a web of alliances that a single broken pledge could unwind. If Quraysh fell upon itself beside the House, the pilgrim roads would learn of it within a season, and the reputation of the custodians of the sanctuary, upon which the whole prosperity of the valley rested, would bleed with the clans in the precinct. The orphan and the widow of the city, who had no alliance at all, had the most to lose in a war of the great houses and the least voice in its declaring; and it is one of the quiet mercies of the sirah that the crisis that brought Makkah to the brink was also the crisis through which Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, was preparing to teach the city, in the person of His Messenger ﷺ, a way of deciding its quarrels that would protect exactly those who had no sword to protect themselves. The justice that was being rehearsed at the Stone that day was the same justice that the Prophet ﷺ would carry, in the fullness of his prophethood, to every wronged man and woman who could claim no clan at all.
At length, after those four or five nights, the factions did what Arab custom prescribed for a quarrel that could not be fought and would not be yielded: they assembled to talk. Ibn Ishaq's account says that they met together in the mosque, debated one another, but divided into equal sides. Consider the scene that the received account asks the reader to imagine: the chiefs of Quraysh gathered in the precinct round the House, the same precinct that Lings reminds the reader was called a mosque, a masjid, a place of prostration, because the rite of bowing down in the direction of the Holy House had been performed there since the time of Ibrahim and Ismail (peace be upon them both); and in that place of prostration the two halves of the city's nobility sat facing one another, armed, allied, and immovable, each side equal to the other and neither side able to yield. The debate circled and found no door. The honors of the clans were absolute, the precedents of the sanctuary were empty, and the truce of the moment was held together by nothing but the fatigue of speech. The city had exhausted every human device it possessed, and the deadlock stood.
Here the account of this event must stop, for here the crisis itself stopped, at the brink, with the issue unresolved and the city's fate hanging on the next word to be spoken in that assembly. The believing reader, who knows what the following event of this chronology records, may already see the providence of Allah in the pause. The factions had spent their strength and found it insufficient; the ancient ways of lineage and force had both been weighed and both found wanting; and into that silence of exhausted policy there was about to step, through the gate of the mosque, a man who belonged to no faction and yet to all, whom the humble and the great of Makkah already called al-Amin, the Trustworthy. He was at that hour returning to the city after an absence, knowing nothing of the storm he was walking into, and the whole quarrel of Quraysh was about to be gathered up, by a wisdom that was not taught in the assemblies of the Arabs, into the folds of a single garment. What Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, had prepared for His Messenger ﷺ in that hour, and how the brink became a bridge, belongs to the next page of this story; this page closes where the sources close it, upon a city at the edge of bloodshed, a bowl of blood cooling in its midst, and a sanctuary waiting, as it were, for the hands that would settle its crown.