Black Stone

The Black Stone was originally a single piece of rock but today consists of several pieces that have been cemented together. They are surrounded by a silver frame which is fastened by silver nails to the Kaaba's outer wall. In the 10th century, an observer described the Black Stone as being one cubit () long. By the early 17th century, it was recorded as measuring . According to Ali Bey in the 18th century, it was described as high, and Muhammad Ali Pasha reported it as being long by wide. The choice of the east corner may have had ritual significance; it faces the rain-bringing east wind (al-qabul) and the direction from which Canopus rises. The silver frame around the Black Stone and the black kiswah or cloth enveloping the Kaaba were for centuries maintained by the Ottoman Sultans in their role as Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. The frames wore out over time due to the constant handling by pilgrims and were periodically replaced. Worn-out frames were brought back to Istanbul, where they are still kept as part of the sacred relics in the Topkapı Palace. Appearance of the Black Stone The Black Stone was described by European travellers to Arabia in the 19th- and early-20th centuries, who visited the Kaaba disguised as pilgrims. Swiss traveller Johann Ludwig Burckhardt visited Mecca in 1814, and provided a detailed description in his 1829 book Travels in Arabia: Visiting the Kaaba in 1853, Richard Francis Burton noted that: Ritter von Laurin, the Austrian consul-general in Egypt, was able to inspect a fragment of the Stone removed by the Ottoman ruler Muhammad Ali in 1817 and reported that it had a pitch-black exterior and a silver-grey, fine-grained interior in which tiny cubes of a bottle-green material were embedded. There are reportedly a few white or yellow spots on the face of the Stone, and it is officially described as being white with the exception of the face. == History and tradition ==

'' inspired by the sīrah story of Muhammad and the Meccan clan elders lifting the Black Stone into place. The Black Stone was held in reverence long before the advent of Islam. It had long been associated with the Kaaba, which was built in the pre-Islamic period and was a site of pilgrimage for the Nabataeans of northern Arabia and the southern Levant, who visited the shrine once a year to perform their pilgrimage. Idolatry is forbidden in the Hebrew Bible and the Quran. However, the use of aniconic stones, called baetyls, is known from the eastern Mediterranean; "baetyl" originates in the Bethel narrative of Jacob's Ladder. The Kaaba allegedly held 360 idols of the Meccan gods. The meteoritic origin theory of the Black Stone has seen it likened by some writers to the meteorite which was placed and worshipped in the Temple of Artemis. A "red stone" was associated with the deity of the South Arabian city of Ghaiman, and there was a "white stone" in the Kaaba of al-Abalat (near Tabala, south of Mecca). Worship at that time period was often associated with stone reverence, mountains, special rock formations, or distinctive trees. The Kaaba marked the location where the sacred world intersected with the profane, and the embedded Black Stone was a further symbol of this as an object as a link between heaven and earth. Aziz Al-Azmeh claims that the divine name ar-Rahman (one of the names of God in Islam and cognate to one of the Jewish names of God ''Ha'Rachaman'', both meaning "the Merciful One" or "the Gracious One") was used for astral gods in Mecca and might have been associated with the Black Stone. Muhammad is said to have called the stone "the right hand of al-Rahman". Muhammad According to Islamic belief, Muhammad is credited with setting the Black Stone in its current place in the wall of the Kaaba. A story found in ibn Ishaq's Al-Sirah al-Nabawiyyah tells how the clans of Mecca renovated the Kaaba following a major fire which had partly destroyed the structure. The Black Stone had been temporarily removed to facilitate the rebuilding work. The clans could not agree on which one of them should have the honour of setting the Black Stone back in its place. They decided to wait for the next man to come through the gate and ask him to make the decision. That person was 35-year-old Muhammad, five years before his prophethood. He asked the elders of the clans to bring him a cloth and place the Black Stone at its center. Each of the clan leaders held the corners of the cloth and carried the Black Stone to the right spot. Then, Muhammad set the stone in place, satisfying the honour of all of the clans. According to the historian al-Juwayni, the Stone was returned twenty-three years later, in 952. The Qarmatians held the Black Stone for ransom and attempted to force the Abbasids to pay a huge sum for its return. It was wrapped in a sack and thrown into the Great Mosque of Kufa, accompanied by a note saying "By command we took it, and by command we have brought it back." Its abduction and removal caused further damage, breaking the stone into seven pieces. Its abductor, Abu Tahir, is said to have met a terrible fate; according to Qutb al-Din, "the filthy Abu Tahir was afflicted with a gangrenous sore, his flesh was eaten away by worms, and he died a most terrible death." To protect the shattered stone, the custodians of the Kaaba commissioned a pair of Meccan goldsmiths to build a silver frame to surround it, and it has been enclosed in a similar frame ever since. by the accusation of one boy, the Persian of an unknown faith was suspected of sacrilege, where Sunnis of Mecca "have turned the circumstance to their own advantage" by assaulting, beating random Persians and forbidding them from Hajj until the ban was overturned by the order of Muhammad Ali. The explorer Richard Francis Burton pointed out on the alleged "excrement action" that "it is scarcely necessary to say that a Shi'a, as well as a Sunni, would look upon such an action with lively horror", and that the real culprit was "some Jew or Christian, who risked his life to gratify a furious bigotry". == Ritual role ==

kissing the Black Stone in 1972 The Black Stone plays a central role in the ritual of , when pilgrims kiss the Black Stone, touch it with their hands or raise their hands towards it while repeating the "God is Greatest". They perform this in the course of walking seven times around the Kaaba in a counterclockwise direction (), emulating the actions of Muhammad. At the end of each circuit, they perform and may approach the Black Stone to kiss it at the end of . In modern times, large crowds make it practically impossible for everyone to kiss the stone, so it is currently acceptable to point in the direction of the Stone on each of their seven circuits around the Kaaba. Some even say that the Stone is best considered simply as a marker, useful in keeping count of the ritual circumambulations that one has performed. Writing in ''Dawn in Madinah: A Pilgrim's Passage'', Muzaffar Iqbal described his experience of venerating the Black Stone during a pilgrimage to Mecca: The Black Stone and the Kaaba's opposite corner, , are both often perfumed by the mosque's custodians. This can cause problems for pilgrims in the state of ('consecration'), who are forbidden from using scented products and will require a (donation) as a penance if they touch either. == Meaning and symbolism ==

in Mecca. The Black Stone is set into the eastern corner of the building (bottom left). One tradition holds that the Black Stone was placed by Adam in the original Kaaba. Muslims believe that the stone was originally pure and dazzling white, but has since turned black because of the sins of the people who touch it. According to a prophetic tradition, "Touching them both (the Black Stone and ) is an expiation for sins." Adam's altar and the stone were said to have been lost during the Great Flood and forgotten. Abraham was said to have later found the Black Stone at the original site of Adam's altar when the angel Gabriel revealed it to him. Abraham ordered his son Ishmael, who in Muslim belief is an ancestor of Muhammad, to build a new temple, the Kaaba, into which the stone was to be embedded. Another tradition says that the Black Stone was originally an angel that had been placed by God in the Garden of Eden to guard Adam. The angel was absent when Adam ate the forbidden fruit and was punished by being turned into the Black Stone. God granted it the power of speech and placed it at the top of Abu Qubays, a mountain in the historic region of Khorasan, before moving the mountain to Mecca. When Abraham took the Black Stone from Abu Qubays to build the Kaaba, the mountain asked him to intercede with God so that it would not be returned to Khorasan but would stay in Mecca. Another tradition holds that it was brought down to Earth by "an angel from heaven". According to some scholars, the Black Stone was the same stone that Islamic tradition describes as greeting Muhammad before his prophethood. This led to a debate about whether the Black Stone's greeting comprised actual speech or merely a sound, and following that, whether the stone was a living creature or an inanimate object. Regardless of the case, the stone was regarded as a symbol of prophethood. In the hadith collection Kanz al-Ummal, it is recorded that Ali responded to Umar, saying, "This stone (Hajar Aswad) can indeed benefit and harm.[...] Allah says in Quran that he created human beings from the progeny of Adam and made them witness over themselves and asked them, 'Am I not your creator?' Upon this, all of them confirmed it. Thus Allah wrote this confirmation. And this stone has a pair of eyes, ears and a tongue and it opened its mouth upon the order of Allah, who put that confirmation in it and ordered to witness it to all those worshippers who come for Hajj." Muhammad Labib al-Batanuni, writing in 1911, commented on the practice that the pre-Islamic practice of venerating stones (including the Black Stone) arose not because such stones are "sacred for their own sake, but because of their relation to something holy and respected". The Indian Islamic scholar Muhammad Hamidullah summed up the meaning of the Black Stone: In recent years, several literalist views of the Black Stone have emerged. A small minority accepts as literally true a hadith, usually taken as allegorical, which asserts that "the Stone will appear on the Day of Judgement () with eyes to see and a tongue to speak, and give evidence in favour of all who kissed it in true devotion, but speak out against whoever indulged in gossip or profane conversations during his circumambulation of the Kaaba". == Scientific origins ==

The Black Stone has never been analysed with modern scientific techniques. Its nature and origin has been much debated but it remains the subject of scientific speculation. It has been described variously as basalt stone, an agate, a piece of natural glass or—most popularly—a stony meteorite or a result of a meteorite impact called tektite. Paul Partsch, the curator of the Austro-Hungarian imperial collection of minerals, published the first comprehensive analysis of the Black Stone in 1857, in which he favoured a meteoritic origin for the stone. Robert S. Dietz and John McHone proposed in 1974 that the Black Stone was actually an agate, judging from its physical attributes and a report by an Arab geologist that the stone contained clearly discernible diffusion banding characteristic of agates. Elsebeth Thomsen of the University of Copenhagen proposed a different hypothesis in 1980. She suggested that the Black Stone may be a glass fragment, or impactite, from the impact of a fragmented meteorite that fell 6000 years ago at Wabar, a site in the Rub' al Khali desert east of Mecca. A 2004 scientific analysis of the Wabar site suggests that the impact event occurred much more recently than previously thought and may have happened within the last 200–300 years. The meteoritic hypothesis is viewed by geologists as doubtful. The Natural History Museum, London suggests that it may be a pseudometeorite; in other words, a terrestrial rock mistakenly attributed to a meteoritic origin. == See also ==