The morning after the reconciliation, Makkah woke into a peace that no one had foreseen and everyone could feel. The chiefs who had lifted the edges of the cloak had lifted something else besides the Stone: the whole city had seen its own nobility, divided for five nights to the point of blood, close its quarrel in a single coordinated act, and no assembly was needed to announce what had happened, for the walls themselves announced it. The hands that had gripped sword-hilts and cloak-borders went back to the masonry; the alliances that had been formed for war dissolved unused; and the bowl of blood was remembered only with shame. This event records the fruit of that day: the completion of the rebuilding of the Kaaba in a preserved peace, the building decisions the peace made possible, and the long blessing that the completed House carried into the world. The arbitration itself, the proposal of the elder and the garment of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, belongs to the page before this one; what belongs here is the harvest.
The peace, once begun, fed upon itself in the way that shared labor feeds every peace. The clans that lifted the cloak together returned to sections that touched one another at every corner; the wall of Makhzum had to meet the wall of Abd Manaf at a true line, and the mason Baqum set his courses across the boundary stones without asking which clan's stones they were. Al-Mubarakpuri's summary of the division of the work, that each tribe was responsible for rebuilding a part of it, had been the map of the quarrel when the parts were prizes; now, with the crown of the work set by the hands of all, the same division became a lattice of small daily cooperations, messengers sent between clans for timber and mortar, the borrowing of sledges and ropes, the settling of accounts without a quarrel, for the chiefs had learned in one hour what the assemblies of a century had not taught them: that the honor of the House was a garment that could be held by every hand at once, and that no clan was poorer for another clan's grip upon the border. The elders who had prepared for battle found themselves, within a season, partners in the most pious enterprise their city had undertaken in living memory; and the believing reader may see in that conversion of enemies into fellow workmen the oldest of Allah's methods, by which He turns the hands that were opened against one another to the raising of a single wall.
The work resumed as it had been ordered at the beginning, clan upon clan, each house raising its own section, the Roman mason Baqum laying the stones, and the walls climbed above the corner of the Black Stone that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ had set with his own hands. Lings closes his account of the arbitration with a single quiet sentence that opens this one: the building was continued and completed above it. Ibn Kathir's transmitted account ends on the same note: then they built above it. Consider what that plainness contains. The most dangerous hour in the recent memory of Quraysh had passed without a wound; the clans who could not agree upon the lifting of one stone now agreed, day after day, upon the raising of an entire House; and the work that had begun in a vow of lawful money and nearly foundered in a bowl of blood was finished in a harmony that the city itself regarded as a wonder. Al-Mubarakpuri, surveying the whole enterprise, records that the work went on in harmony until the time came to put the sacred Black Stone in its place, and the reader who knows what happened at that hour reads the rest of his sentence with a smile of the heart: the strife came, and it was resolved, and the harmony returned, and the building rose.
It is at this point that the sources deliver one of the most instructive facts of the whole pre-prophetic story: the rebuilding fell short of its ambition, and it fell short because of the standard of purity the builders had set for themselves at the start. The chiefs of Quraysh, as the received accounts state, had purposed to use only licit money in the rebuilding, excluding everything derived from prostitution, usury, or unjust dealing; the vow was the vow of Abu Wahb at the demolition of the walls, as the reader of the preceding events of this chronology has already been shown. And when the lawful funds were counted against the cost of the full design, they were found wanting. Al-Mubarakpuri says it in a sentence: Quraysh ran short of the licit money they had collected. Ibn Kathir, in his own comment upon the completed building, sets down the consequence: they left out of it the Hijr area, that was six or seven cubits long in the direction of Syria; they had insufficient funds for it, that is, they were not able to rebuild it on the foundations of Abraham. Here is a decision that deserves the believer's pause. Faced with a shortfall, the custodians of the sanctuary did not quietly admit the tainted money that every Arabian market could have supplied; they reduced the House instead, and kept the building pure, judging that a smaller House of lawful stones stood higher in the sight of Allah than a greater House partly raised on wrong. The Quran had not yet been revealed to teach that Allah accepts only the pure; the pure-heartedness of the builders had reached the same conclusion by conscience alone.
What they left outside must be described, for it is one of the holiest places on earth. On the northwest side of the Kaaba there is a precinct enclosed by a low semicircular wall, whose two ends stop short of the north and west corners of the House, leaving a passage for the pilgrims; the space within it is named the Hijr of Ismail, and Lings, in his account of the sacred geography of the sanctuary, preserves the ancient tradition of what lies beneath it: the tombs of Ismail and his mother Hagar. In the reduction of the rebuild, this ground, which the foundations of Ibrahim had encompassed, was left outside the new walls; al-Mubarakpuri reckons the eliminated area at some six yards on the northern side, and records the other name of the place, calling it al-Hijr or al-Hateem. The reader should hold the geography in mind, for the Prophet ﷺ himself would teach it to the Ummah, and his teaching belongs to the close of this account.
The second great decision of the completion concerned the door. Ibn Kathir's comment records it: they constructed one door for the Kaaba on the east side, placing it high up, so that not everyone could get inside; this allowed them to permit inside only those they wished. Al-Mubarakpuri measures the raising of the door at some two metres from the level of the ground. The motive, said plainly, was custodial: the treasures of the House had already been stolen once from a low and roofless building, and the elders did not intend that the new House should be as accessible as the old. But the believer may read the decision also as a quiet emblem of the age: the door of the House of Allah set beyond the reach of the common worshipper, a staircase of privilege before the presence of the Lord; and it is one of the gentle ironies of the sirah that the Prophet ﷺ who helped build those high walls would one day wish the door lowered and doubled, a door for entering and a door for leaving, open to every pilgrim of the earth.
The roof and the finished form completed the work. Al-Mubarakpuri preserves the architecture in detail: when the structure was some fifteen yards high, they erected the roof, which rested upon six columns; and when the building was finished, it stood in a square form, the side with the Black Stone and the side opposite it each some ten metres long, the two other sides some twelve metres, the Black Stone set a metre and a half above the level of the circumambulation ground, and the door two metres above the ground. The timbers of the roof were the same salvaged beams whose shipwreck at Jeddah had first made the rebuilding possible, and the skill was the same Copt's carpentry the city had found ready to hand. Ibn Kathir adds the later record of the covering: at the time of the Prophet ﷺ the Kaaba measured eighteen cubits and was covered by an Egyptian-woven cloth, the qibti. And around the base of the House the builders raised the low sloping structure that al-Mubarakpuri names ash-Shadherwan, a band of masonry a quarter-metre high and a third of a metre wide, which he records was originally an integral part of the Sacred Sanctuary but was left out of the new build by Quraysh, standing thereafter as a mark of the foundations they could not afford to raise. The House that Ibrahim (peace be upon him) had raised with his son was now smaller in stone than it had been at its first founding; in sanctity it had lost nothing, and in the sight of the believers, who know what the Prophet ﷺ was taught concerning it, it had even gained a lesson.
That lesson was delivered by the Prophet ﷺ himself, in the fullness of his prophethood, to the wife whose report has carried it to every generation of the Ummah. Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her) relates that she asked the Messenger of Allah ﷺ about the wall, the low enclosure of the Hijr, and whether it was part of the House; and the answer, as Ibn Kathir transmits the agreed report of the two Sahihs, was that it was not of the House; and when she asked why the House had not been built upon its foundations, he told her: your people ran short of the expenses; and he added the words that belong among the most tender of his sayings: if it were not for the fact that your people were only recently unbelievers, I would have torn down the Kaaba and made for it one door on the east and another on the west, and I would have included the Hijr area within it. No hadith number is attached to this report in the present account, for its numbering varies across the editions and locations of the two collections, in the chapters of the pilgrimage and the exegesis of the Quran alike; but its content is among the most certainly transmitted of the Prophet's ﷺ sayings, agreed upon by al-Bukhari and Muslim, and this project cites it, by the established standard, by its books and chapters. Let the believer read what the saying contains. The Messenger of Allah ﷺ, who had carried stones for the Quraysh build and set its Sacred Stone with his own hands, looked upon the reduced House of his youth with the eye of a prophet, and his prophetic will was the fullness of the Abrahamic plan; and yet he withheld his hand, rather than freshly wound the young faith of a people only lately come out of idolatry, for whom the demolition of the House their fathers had built might have been a trial beyond their strength. The mercy of the Messenger ﷺ weighed more with him than the architecture of the sanctuary; and Allah, who had commanded that His House be purified, accepted from His Prophet the patience that let a holy imperfection stand for the sake of weak hearts.
The afterlife of that decision ran through the whole of the first century of Islam, and the sources trace it for the reader. Abdullah ibn az-Zubayr (may Allah be pleased with him), in whose days Makkah was besieged and the Kaaba was burned by a catapulted fireball, rebuilt the House precisely as the Prophet ﷺ had indicated: on the foundations of Ibrahim, with the Hijr enclosed within it, and two doors at ground level, one on the east and one on the west, by which the people would enter through one and leave through the other; Ibn Kathir records that it was executed in the utmost splendor and beauty, one complete whole upon the foundations of the Friend of Allah. When al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf had killed Ibn az-Zubayr, he wrote to the caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan of what had been done, and the building was restored to its former Quraysh shape: the Syrian wall torn down, the Hijr excluded again, the western door blocked and the one door raised high. And when the ruler of a later generation, al-Mahdi or his son, consulted Imam Malik (may Allah have mercy on him) about rebuilding the House upon the fuller plan, the Imam answered with the sentence that has governed the building ever since: I hate for the rulers to treat it like a plaything. And so it remained; and the Kaaba that the pilgrims circle today is, in its Quraysh outline, the very building whose completion is recorded in this event, with the Hijr lying outside its walls as the visible memorial of a vow of lawful money and a prophet's mercy upon new believers.
There remains one more fruit of the peace to be named, and it is the quietest: the bond between the Prophet ﷺ and the completed House itself. He had carried its stones; he had set its Sacred Stone; and when the walls were roofed and the door hung high, the House stood as the first great public work of his life, the sanctuary of his forefather Ibrahim (peace be upon him) renewed under his own hands. The years that follow this event in the chronology will show him walking in the precinct of that House in worship and long reflection, and the inward signs that prepared him for prophethood would begin, as the sources state, not long after this outward sign of his authority among his people; those years of devotion are the subject of the next events of this account. It is enough for this page to record that the peace of the clans and the completion of the House were one event in the sight of the city: the building was finished because the peace held, and the peace held because the building gave every clan a stone in the common wall; and at the center of both stood the young man whom the whole Quraysh had trusted with their most contested honor, and who walked away from the finished work with no title claimed, no wage taken, and no faction advanced, asking of the sanctuary only what the poorest pilgrim asked of it, which is the right to draw near.
What the completed peace meant to Makkah, the reader may measure by what had nearly been lost. The clans had stood at the edge of a war that would have burned the sanctuary's prestige, emptied the caravan roads, and taught the tribes of Arabia that the custodians of the House could not keep peace in their own precinct; instead, the city emerged with the one story that all Arabia loved to tell, of the quarrel of the clans dissolved by the wisdom of one man in one garment, and with a completed House whose walls had been raised in the rarest of all materials, concord. Ibn Kathir preserves, from Ibn Ishaq, the verses which al-Zubayr ibn Abdul-Muttalib, the uncle of the Prophet ﷺ, spoke upon the completion of the work, rejoicing over the serpent whose removal had permitted the rebuild and praising the ennobling of the sons of Luayy through the building; the poem belongs in its setting among the events of the reconstruction, and is cited there in this chronology, but its very existence is evidence for this event's fruit: the elders of the clans were composing, not mourning; the city had come through its trial with songs. And the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ himself walked in that peace with a standing the city had never given any man of his years, for every soul in Makkah had seen the trust of the whole Quraysh placed in the son of Abdullah, and honored.
Thus the restoration of peace among the clans was not an interlude in the story of the House; it was the House's own signature upon the city. The Book that would descend within five years would speak of the covenant of Ibrahim and Ismail (peace be upon them both) at this place: that they should purify the House for those who circle it, and those who abide in devotion, and those who bow and prostrate; and the men who completed the walls in that peace, not knowing what the Book would say, had built according to its spirit, refusing impure money, reducing rather than defiling, and standing together at the end with every clan's honor intact. What believer's heart does not see, in the finished form of that House, the pattern of everything Allah would build through the Prophet ﷺ in the years to come: a structure short of its full dimensions by the poverty of the age, pure in every stone it possessed, standing upon the foundations of Ibrahim, awaiting the day of completion; and the Muslims themselves, the scholars of this Ummah have said, are the building of which the Kaaba is the parable, reduced in no sanctity by every weakness of the age, held at the edges by every clan of mankind, and waiting upon the hand of no chief, for the completion of the House has always belonged to Allah alone, who accepted the intent of the builders and perfected, in His own time, what their funds could not finish.