Black Stone

The Black Stone (Arabic: ٱلْحَجَرُ ٱلْأَسْوَد, romanized: al-Ḥajar al-Aswad) is a rock set into the eastern corner of the Kaaba, the ancient building in the center of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

Its original size is unclear and the recorded dimensions have changed considerably over time, as the pieces have been rearranged in their cement matrix on several occasions.

[8] 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: It is an irregular oval, about seven inches [18 cm] in diameter, with an undulated surface, composed of about a dozen smaller stones of different sizes and shapes, well joined together with a small quantity of cement, and perfectly well smoothed; it looks as if the whole had been broken into as many pieces by a violent blow, and then united again.

It is very difficult to determine accurately the quality of this stone which has been worn to its present surface by the millions of touches and kisses it has received.

It is surrounded on all sides by a border composed of a substance which I took to be a close cement of pitch and gravel of a similar, but not quite the same, brownish colour.

[10]Ritter von Laurin, the Austrian consul-general in Egypt, was able to inspect a fragment of the Stone removed by 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.

[15][16][17][18][19][20] The meteorite-origin theory of the Black Stone has seen it likened by some writers to the meteorite which was placed and worshipped in the Greek Temple of Artemis.

[24][25][failed verification] Some New Age writers remark on the apparent similarity of the Black Stone and its frame to the external female genitalia.

[31] 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.

[35] According to Islamic belief, Muhammad is credited with setting the Black Stone in the current place in the wall of the Kaaba.

A story found in Ibn Ishaq's Sirah Rasul Allah tells how the clans of Mecca renovated the Kaaba following a major fire which had partly destroyed the structure.

[36][37] After his Conquest of Mecca in 630, Muhammad is said to have ridden round the Kaaba seven times on his camel, touching the Black Stone with his stick in a gesture of reverence.

[36] In January 930, it was stolen by the Qarmatians, who carried the Black Stone away to their base in Hajar (modern Eastern Arabia).

According to Ottoman historian Qutb al-Din, writing in 1857, the Qarmatian leader Abu Tahir al-Jannabi set the Black Stone up in his own mosque, the Masjid al-Dirar, with the intention of redirecting the hajj away from Mecca.

[38] In the 11th century, a man allegedly sent by the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah attempted to smash the Black Stone but was killed on the spot, having caused only slight damage.

[38] In 1674, according to Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, someone allegedly smeared the Black Stone with excrement so that "every one who kissed it retired with a sullied beard".

As I approached the Corner the large crowd was suddenly pushed back by a strong man who had just kissed the Black Stone.

This can cause problems for pilgrims in the state of ihram ('consecration'), who are forbidden from using scented products and will require a kaffara (donation) as a penance if they touch either.

Ibrahim (Abraham) was said to have later found the Black Stone at the original site of Adam's altar when the angel Jibrail revealed it to him.

[39] Ibrahim ordered his son Ismael – 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 a jewel – the Black Stone.

"[54] 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. [...]

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 (Qiyamah) 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".

A 2004 scientific analysis of the Wabar site suggests that the impact event happened much more recently than first thought and might have occurred within the last 200–300 years.

The British Natural History Museum suggests that it may be a pseudometeorite; in other words, a terrestrial rock mistakenly attributed to a meteoritic origin.