The Rest Is History - 265: Saudi Arabia: The Mystery of the Kaaba

Episode Date: November 27, 2022

Join Tom and Dominic for their World Cup episode on Saudi Arabia, where they discuss 'the most famous structure in global Islam' - the Kaaba in Mecca. Tune in to hear about the Prophet Mohammed, Abdul Malik, and the origins of the most sacred site in Islam. Join The Rest Is History Club (www.restishistorypod.com) for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello and welcome to The Rest Is History. Now we're in the middle of our great World Cup marathon, a podcast for every country that's qualified for the finals in Qatar. All kinds of weird and wonderful stories. And Tom, I believe we are now venturing to the sands of Saudi Arabia. Is that right? We are. We're actually venturing to Mecca, the holiest place in the holiest city in Islam,

and the holiest mosque in Mecca, the Majid al-Haram, the inviolable mosque, and the holiest spot within that mosque, which is the Kaaba. So that is the theme of today's episode. Brave choice, Tom. Well, it's the most famous structure within the limits of Saudi Arabia. It's the most famous structure within global Islam. And for Muslims, probably the single most holy structure in the whole world basically for two reasons um the first is that it it constitutes the qibla which is the direction that muslims um turn to when they pray so that's what they're praying to yeah um and the second is that it's the great object of muslim pilgrimage so you know you you can go anytime, but there is a particular time.

So it's a kind of, I think it's five, six day period in the last month of the Muslim calendar, which moves around because it's a lunar calendar. So you can't absolutely pin it down. And this is the Hajj, very famous pilgrimage. And it is one of the five pillars of Islam. So one of the things that's absolutely incumbent on Muslims, if they possibly can, is at least once in their lives to undertake the pilgrimage to Mecca and specifically to the Kaaba. And so in non-COVID periods, you get huge numbers. Yeah, millions of people. Millions. I think in 2012, it was over 3 million, the Saudi authorities said.

So it's a huge, huge thing. And so, Tom, just before you go into the history and you explain, because I've always been fascinated by what's in the Kaaba, and I'm hoping you're going to tell me but just for people who don't know so i'm looking at a picture of it right now and you have the mosque i mean you often see it packed with people all wearing white don't you you have the mosque and it's now nowadays it's surrounded by hotels and places where the pilgrims stay and then in the center it's a large black cube yeah and it derives from the arabic word from the root meaning cube so it's carba cube um it's built of stone it's covered

with uh a great black silk covering called the kizwa which is embroidered with with gold um and in the eastern corner of of the uh of the carver you have a mysterious black stone and this black stone is very important because it's the key for the ritual that's called the toaf and what you do as a pilgrim you're supposed to is you're supposed to go and kiss or touch the the black stone but generally this isn't possible because there are so many pilgrims there right um but you know that's the ideal. And then you go round the Kaaba in a kind of anti-clockwise motion. And as you do it, you recite the Bismillah, which is, in the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful, and the Takbir, which is Allahu Akbar. God is the greatest God.

And I think that I can only imagine that to be a part of that, I mean, it must be an extraordinary, extraordinary experience. Because if you've ever seen it, I mean, the sense of the vastness of it, the sense of being part of a kind of single community must be completely overwhelming. And very few or indeed no non-Muslims living today have presumably ever seen it because it's prohibited to enter the Holy See. It is prohibited. Yeah, it is prohibited. Yeah. Although people in the past, I think I'm right in saying, disguised themselves and did see it. Am I right?

Yes. So Richard Burton is the notorious one who, explorer, who went. There is a, you know, the obvious question then is well why what's why are they going why does the carver have this this central role within islam and this is where you have the sense that history as it would be understood say by a secular non-muslim and history as it has traditionally been understood uh within the kind of you know the the vast matrix of Islamic belief and faith and the way that the world is interpreted. They don't necessarily map onto one another. But I think it's impossible to understand the significance that the Kaaba has. Even if you're not a Muslim,

you look at the history as it has traditionally been understood by Muslims to explain its, dare I say, sacral significance. Because if you can't call the Kaaba sacral, then you can't really call anything sacral. Oh, Tom, this is your dream podcast. It absolutely is. So tell me, are you going to tell us first what Muslims believe the Kaaba to be? And then are you going to sort of deconstruct it? Is that your plan? Well, I'm going to give you what Muslims, what the traditional account is of the history of the Kaaba.

And then perhaps we can discuss what you make of it if you're not a Muslim. Entirely understanding that, you know, for a Muslim, it obviously has a different signification if you're not a Muslim. So for Muslims, the answer to what the Kaaba is, is in the Quran, which is what you'd expect. The Quran, the revelations of God given to Muhammad, he is the prophet who delivers these

revelations. And Muslim scholars have identified 18 references to the Kaaba in the Quran. And there are two mentions of the Kaaba itself, but Muslim scholars have argued that it's referred to in a variety of other ways as well. So it might be called the house, it might be called the sacred house, it might be called the ancient house. And there's one particular crucial section. And I will quote, surely the first house laid down for the people was indeed that at baka a blessed house and a guidance for the worlds in it are clear signs the standing place of abraham whoever enters it is secure i.e because um you can't have any bloodshed permitted in the in the area it's it's it's a sacred area right um pilgrimage to the house is an obligation on the people

to god for anyone who is able to make a way to it. So that's where you get the idea of this being one of the pillars of Islam and why people who can do it, people who are healthy enough, have to do it. Obviously, that raises some questions. So it's described as being at Baka, not Mecca not mecca or mecca and mecca is mentioned later in the quran um so it's not immediately obvious that they're the same and scholars have muslim scholars have recognized this and so there is a tradition that says that baka is um the the sacred site that surrounds the kaba and mecca is the city itself right um and it's And in the Quran, it's described also as the mother of cities, as the peaceful city. These are places that are also mentioned in the Quran. So, Tom, just to pause for a second to locate us for people who aren't massively familiar with the early history of Islam.

We're in what? The early 7th century? Yeah. So, Muhammad had his revelations, I think, when he was 40 years old. The first one, but they come throughout his life. Yeah. Meanwhile, the Eastern Romans and the Persians are kind of knocking seven bells out of each other to the north. And Muhammad is having his revelations in his cave.

That's the traditional account. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So that's the historical background. So Mecca and Baca, are they the same? Are they kind of, you know, they both refer to Mecca. So that's one assumption. The other is in that passage is why Abraham?

So Abraham is a biblical prophet. He appears in the Old Testament. He is the ancestor through Isaac of the Jews. And according to Muslim tradition, through his other son, Ishmael, by a concubine called Hagar. He's the ancestor of the Arabs. And so he's in that, you have this thing, the place of Abraham, that he is responsible in some way for the Kaaba. And he appears again and again throughout the Quran. He's a very significant figure within it and within the history that is as traditionally told about the Kaaba. But the thing that people will probably have picked up is that the Quran, I mean, it doesn't give you a kind of straight narrative

about this. The verses are quite elliptical. They're quite cryptic. They're quite enigmatic. And adding to the complication in terms of trying to make sense of this as history is the fact that there basically aren't any other references to the Kaaba or indeed Mecca prior to the Quran. And so the challenge of constructing its history is incredibly complex. Right. its history is incredibly complex. And a lot of what Muslim tradition says doesn't come from the Quran, but it comes from kind of elaborations about the Quran or various traditions that have emerged over the course of the decades and centuries that follow the time of Muhammad. So what I will do now is give you a kind of a synopsis of what Muslim tradition, and there are various variants of this but i'll give

you the kind of the the most orthodox tradition the standard tradition what it says about why the carver is as significant as it is so it's in the chronicles that it's as well as the carver it's called the first house and it's literally the first house because it's built by adam who is the first man right um and it is said to be an earthly replica of a kind of divine prototype that exists in heaven. And this is called the Ever-Inhabited House. And it is said, according to Muslim tradition, that every day you have angels, thousands upon thousands, 70,000 is the favorite number, who are going round and round it, singing songs of praise, prostrating themselves in prayer, praising God. And a vision of this is shown to Muhammad.

He journeys from Mecca to Jerusalem, and he then ascends on a kind of a magical horse, a heavenly horse called the Barak, up into the heavens. And in the seventh heaven, he sees all of this. He sees the angels going around the Kaaba. And this all happens in one night. So it's a spectacular miracle. So the Kaaba is, in a way, a kind of earthly image of this glorious prototype in heaven. And it plays an absolutely key role in the sacred history of the earth and of humanity.

Because it is, according to Muslim tradition, it's where the Garden of Eden stood. In Mecca. In Mecca. It's where Adam was created. So the very spot where Adam was created, it's where he names the animals. And he builds the Kaaba from stones that, again, according to tradition, are taken from the floor of paradise. So the original stones are from paradise.

And they're radiant. And this is a time of darkness. They illuminate the darkness. And you remember the black stone I mentioned? Yes. And you kind of touch it when you start your circumambulation. Yeah. One of the most popular traditions, one of the most kind of vital traditions is that the black stone is the only surviving remnant of these original heavenly stones.

So the rest of the Kaaba therefore has been renovated. It's been obliterated by the flood. i see so noah's flood yeah it obliterates it and people forget about it people forget that it was ever there and then abraham turns up and gabriel gibriel reveals to him the site and he rebuilds it with his son Ishmael. And again, in the verse that I quoted, it says there is this clear sign, the standing place of Abraham, which is Makham Ibrahim. And this is a stone that, according to Muslim tradition, is imprinted with his feet, and it's still adjacent to the Kaaba. And this is the black stone? No. tradition is imprinted with his feet and it's still adjacent to the carver and this is the black stone no the black stone is the black stone is embedded into uh the the fabric of the the

carver the the stone with the footprints of abraham yeah the the maham ibrahim is next to the next to the carver okay sorry so it's part of it's part i got confused yeah John. Well, as well you may, because there are an awful lot of stones in this story. And actually, the confusion in a way is part of the story, as we will see. So Abraham rebuilds the Kaaba, and he then, basically, he's the guy who initiates the hard rituals. So the circumcision. Yeah, the prayers, all this kind of stuff so he's he's going to going to the spot where the carbanhav stands he's he's rebuilding it he's doing the circumambulation this is the prototype for the hajj that muslims to this day

are doing um and of course abraham is a monotheist he he understands the oneness of God, which is the absolute foundational concept within Islam. And he teaches the Arabs of Mecca this kind of radiant truth. But over the course of the centuries and then the millennia that follow the time of Abraham, the Arabs start to forget this and they start to fill the Kaaba with idols. Yes. Yeah. One in particular in particular hubal which is a particularly popular god but there are lots and lots of different gods um and some of them go so far as to do the circumambulation naked that is not good form tom i think and there's there's one couple a guy called isaf and a woman called nailer who who go into the Kaaba and they have sex in the Kaaba.

And Dominic, you mentioned about being confused by the number of stones. They are turned into stone. So they become, you know, yet further stones. And the Meccans start worshipping them. Oh, no. And they start offering them sacrifice. So, I mean, it couldn't be more wicked. Yeah.

Because you only offer sacrifice to God. You certainly don't worship stones. You certainly don't worship stones that were originally people having sex. I mean, all of this is very, very bad. But it is all very lucrative. And it makes Mecca a place of pilgrimage for all the various pagan tribes who start to come around. This is where Muhammad comes in. He's born in Mecca, right? He's where Muhammad comes in. He's born in Mecca, right?

He's born in Mecca. He's born in Mecca. As you said, he has his revelation at 40. And basically, it's God, as Gabriel had come to Abraham, so now he comes to Muhammad and he says, you've got to sort this out. You've got to clean up this town. And so Muhammad demands the destruction of the idols.

He demands the end of idolatry. He preaches the truth, the demand for submission, Islam, to the one God. And this doesn't go down well with the guardians of the shrine because they can see that it's going to damage their income. And so basically they end up driving Muhammad out and his followers. And this is the Hijidra, the Exodus. He goes to Medina, to Yathrib, which becomes Medina, the city of the prophet in 622. But Muhammad is down, but he's not out. And he and his followers, they make themselves the bosses of Yathrib.

It becomes the city of the prophet Medina and at 6 30 he's able to come back in triumph into Mecca and he overthrows all the idols except for one which is an image of of the virgin and the baby Jesus that's that's allowed to stay and he burns the lot and he topples the stones within the Kaaba that they've been worshipping. And as he does so, a woman emerges from one of the stones. And she is a black woman with gray hair and she tears at her face with her nails. She's naked. She pulls at her hair and she cries out in woe. And this is Naila, who has been brought back to life to witness the destruction of the stone that she had been imprisoned in.

And the devil is watching this and he summons all his progeny around him and he cries out in woe, abandon all hope that the community of Mohammed will ever revert to idolatry after this day of theirs and uh and so it happens because the kaba is re-consecrated to um to the worship of the one god and it becomes the great center of monotheistic pilgrimage and the tradition of the hajj that had been established by abraham is re-established but right i wondered if there was going to be a but okay but there is there is a further cycle of destruction and renovation to come because uh muhammad dies his followers uh conquer a great empire and a particular family rises to the rule of this empire and this is the emmaids the dynasty the uh. The first of the Umayyad caliphs, the rulers of the Islamic world, is a man called Muawiyah.

And he's said to have gone on hard twice. And he's the man who first provides the Kaaba with the kiswap, which is the great black silk covering. He dies and he leaves behind a son called Yazid. And Yazid is a notorious playboy. So he's debauched, he's drunk. And the most sinister thing of all, he keeps a monkey as a pet. Very, very bad form. Yeah, it's bad form. devoted and austere followers of the teachings of Muhammad. And there's one in particular guy called Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr, who is very old. And he was a boy in Muhammad's lifetime, remembers him. So he's a kind of living link to the age of the prophet. And while Yazd is off conquering the fertile crescent and establishing his rule over the great cities of Mesopotamia

and Syria and so on, ibn al-Zubayr is retreating into the desert to the sacred house. Yazd's army lays siege to Ibn al-Zubayr. He bombards the Kaaba with catapults. He destroys it at the very moment when it looks as though the whole complex is going to fall, that Ibn al-Zubayr's resistance is doomed. News arrives that Yazd has died. And his army, with that news, gives up its siege and drifts back to Syria. With his death, you have massive Umayyad infighting.

And so Ibn al-Zubayr is able to kind of reestablish his authority and his control in the desert. Now, the problem that Ibn al-Zubayr faces is what to do about the Kaaba, because Yaz's men and their catapults have destroyed it. So there's a lot of debate among his followers. that they should leave it as it is. And this is argued particularly by a man called Abdullah ibn Abbas, who argues that it should not be rebuilt because he feared that destroying it would set a precedent to tear it down and rebuild it. So in other words, if you rebuild it, that suggests that you can just keep doing it and doing it and doing it. Ibn al-Zubayr himself responds to this, by God, is there no one among you who would not mend the house of his parents? So how would you wish me to do otherwise with the house of god when i watch it falling apart piece by piece and he consults and basically most people agree with him that it should be demolished completely

that the the ruins should be swept aside and it should be rebuilt from scratch not as it had been so not as it yeah you know the original but but it should be rebuilt as Muhammad had described seeing it in his vision of the original Kaaba, so the one in heaven. So it should be built to correspond to that as closely as possible. And all kinds of stories are told about this process. So we're in the 680s or so now, Tom, is that right? Exactly. Yeah. Exactly.

But we're also very much in a dimension of the supernatural yeah so various stories are told about the process of the rebuilding of the carver so it's said that um the original foundations had been laid down by abraham are miraculously rediscovered a mysterious text is found during the renovation work assuring um everyone who visits the sanctuary that they will receive divine favor and most sensationally of all the black stone is found it's dug up oh so the black stone until this point had been lost or according to according to this version right it's dug up the whole sanctuary begins to to um to tremble and on the stone it said is stamped the name and title of god i am ala the

lord of bakka so palpable signs that this project of renovation is blessed by god and is indeed taking the muslim people back to the primordial beginnings of the prophetic tradition so uh ibn aziz has clearly made the right decision. Meanwhile, however, the Umayyads have basically patched things up. And one of them has established his rule over the Fertile Crescent and the provinces beyond. And this is a man who very much featured in our episode on Muhammad, Abdul Malik. He's centered in syria um he he very much regards jerusalem as a holy city um he builds the dome of the rock so the great building on on the the ancient temple mount uh people you know if you think of jerusalem they the the great building

with the golden dome that's the dome of the rock um and it becomes an object of pilgrimage while people are unable to visit the Kaaba, the sacred house in the desert. But clearly, if Abdul Malik is going to claim the rule of the entire caliphate, the entire Muslim world, he cannot allow Ibn al-Zubayr to maintain his control over the Kaaba. So in 691, he sends an army against Ibn al-Zubayr. There's a six-month siege. The catapults are wheeled out. And once again, the entire structure is reduced to rubble. And the defenders are killed, Ibn al-Zubayr among them. And Abdul Malik takes control of the shattered sanctuary. And even though Abdul Malik is now, he has no rival as caliph, as the deputy of God, there are lots of Muslims who damn him as the man

who destroyed the sacred house of God. And there are, Ameer propagandists have to kind of deal with this. And so they say that actually the van the true vandal had been ibn el-zabaya and because he knocked it down because he knocked it down and the abdul malik in rebuilding it he is the one who's now restoring it to its pristine condition so that's what he does right and in 693 he goes on pilgrimage to the kaba uh he he rebuilds it yet again and basically this is the structure that that exists now um now. It's built either by Ibn Al-Zubayr or by Abdul Malik. There is debate about it. These stories are so complicated that

it's hard to be sure. But basically, that seems to be the kind of upshot. And Abdul Malik has control over the Dome of the Rock. So that's the house of, the revered house on the Mount of Jerusalem, as it's called. And he has the house of God. And so to us, a poet at his court says, talking about Abdul Malik, belong the two houses. And Abdul Malik is a tremendously impressive state builder, isn't he? I mean, he is the Umayyad caliph. Yes. Because he introduces the currency in an army and, you know, he sort of welds the whole thing into an empire. He also seems to be the one who really starts to hammer home the significance of Muhammad as the prophet of God.

So he puts Muhammad's name on his coins. He puts Muhammad's name on his coins. He puts Muhammad's name on the dome of the rock. And these are the first mentions of Muhammad that you get from a central imperial figure within the emergent caliphate. And in time, the role that Abdul Malik had described to Jerusalem as one of the great sacred centers comes to be downplayed. Jerusalem comes to slightly be put in the shadows. And it's put in the shadows by the rituals of the Hajj, by the sacred geography of Mecca. And absolutely by the 8th century, by the 9th century, the centrality of the Hajj and of Mecca and of the Kaaba is indisputable. Everybody knows where it

is. Everybody knows that it's a great central pilgrimage. It's still subject to occasional desecrations. So in 930, you have an army of militant Shiites. So Shiites are one of the, would be regarded by mainstream Muslim Sunnis as a kind of heretical sect. Any Shiite listeners, apologies for that description, but I'm adopting the perspective of the Sunni guardians of the Kaaba. So militant Shiites, they attack Mecca. And a bit like the Elamites making off with the statue of Marduk, they make off with the black stone, which is very bad form. And by this point, the Amayads have been toppled and replaced by the Abbasids,

who as the kind of the ruling dynasty, and the Abbasids have to ransom it back, which they do about kind of a couple of decades past. And they cough up and get the black stone back. And then in 1626, there were floods in Mecca and the walls of the Kaaba collapse and they're rebuilt with granite stone. And so that basically is a structure that is still standing there to this day. So the question is, if you're not a Muslim, what on earth are you to make of that story?

So maybe we should take a break and you can kind of gird your loins and then you can tell us what a non-Muslim would make of all this story after the break. So if you're a Muslim, I suppose you can stop listening now. Absolutely. You don't care. But if you're not, come back after the break and Tom will solve the mysteries. I won't solve the mystery, Dominic, because I think it's absolutely essential to say that I think the solution to this mystery is beyond the ability of secular historians to answer. Well, what a selling point. Come back after the break and Tom won't solve the mystery.

I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are talking about the Kaaba, the sacred site at the centre of Mecca. Tom Holland, in the first half, you explained the you're sort of balancing the desire to be,

as it were, respectful with the sort of the sceptical mindset that we bring to any other period of history. But I think it's also the problem is that essentially the Muslim account is the only account we have. So that's the problem. The explanation of why the Kaaba is sacred is rooted in a history that reaches back to the beginnings of the world and figures who will be entirely familiar to Christian or Jewish listeners, but who are not generally accepted by historians as having been historical. As in Adam. As in Adam, but also in Abraham. Abraham is, I think, not generally viewed as a historical figure. Yeah, because we have no archaeological evidence

that somebody called Abraham was strolling around, you know, the Levant or whatever. So that's an issue, but there's also a kind of additional problem. I mean, if Mecca is this great centre of pilgrimage and the Kaaba is, you know, is this incredibly sacred spot, even if it's become a pagan centre of ritual,

there doesn't seem to be any mention of it whatsoever outside the Muslim tradition. But where would such a mention, Eastern Roman, Persian accounts or something, that this is the thing that the Arabs do? Ever since the 17th century, there have been scholars who've argued that there are references to it in classical geographers. So there's a historian, Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century, who

writes about a temple much revered by the Arabs. And in the 17th century, this was argued by Christian scholars that this might be a reference to Mecca. But the problem is that Diodorus Siculus, when he's writing about this, he is clearly writing about Northwest Arabia, and Mecca is in the region called the Hejaz, which is kind of more central. So that doesn't seem to work. Ptolemy, the great geographer, he writes to a place called Macaraba. And there are still scholars who think that that might be a reference to Mecca, but the etymology doesn't really work. And I think, again, pretty much the consensus of secular academics is that this, again, is not a reference to Mecca. And in fact, the earliest unambiguous reference to Mecca

in ancient literature outside the Quran is 741 in something called the Byzantine Arab Chronicle. And then it's located in Mesopotamia and not in the Hejaz. So what you have the sense there is of a city that is kind of floating around, that it's a bit like Camelot. I think we talked about this in the episode on Muhammad. On Muhammad, yeah. So all of that is kind of tricky. And again, if you look at the Quran, which is in dispute of, you know,

this is the prime source. This is where ultimately the traditions about the Kaaba come from in Islam. Does Baka equal Mecca, i.e. Mecca? Again, I don't think it's entirely self-evident that it is. So one thing that slightly queers the pitch is that Baka is actually mentioned in the psalms so there's there's in psalm 84 you get blessed is the man whose strength is in the in whose heart are the ways of them those who passing through the valley of the baka they make it a spring but that could could be a coincidence though tom i mean it could it could absolutely be a coincidence but equally it might

not be okay uh and presumably if it's not then that is you know the psalmist is not going to be referring to somewhere in the middle of arabia so that's a that's a complication and then you have the the the kind of peculiar fact that the kaba is a cube and it's peculiar because cubes seem to have had a peculiarly and again i, I'm going to use the word, sacral hold on the Arabs for centuries before the coming of Muhammad. And it covers a huge geographical spread. So you have Christian writers who, you know, they're looking at Petra, regions like that in the northwest of Arabia. And they describe the Arabs worshipping cubes as incarnations of their gods.

Again, Christian writers, not necessarily very reliable. You know, they're projecting things onto the people that they're writing about. But it is a kind of intriguing coincidence and anyone who's been to petra will i'm sure have seen these kind of strange cuboid structures um raised up on rocks as you go down towards the uh the site of the city and in the south as well i mean there's an absolutely intriguing uh carver another carver which um appears in a place called nadran which in the early 6th century was the site of a massacre of christians by jewish king i mean again it's all kind of very weird there's a jewish king in the south of south of arabia and he massacres these christians and and they raise a huge um they raise a shrine in honor of these martyrs and they call it the carver so

what i think you're getting with this is a sense that cubes have some kind of significance for the Arabs in a way that we don't entirely understand. And then there's a third question, which is the Makam Ibrahim. So the place where the standing place of Abraham. And is that to be identified with the stone that stands next to the Kaaba in Mecca? And again, there's a kind of problem with that because in late antiquity, the period when the Quran seems to have been written, all the traditions about Abraham are associating him with the desert regions beyond the Holy Land. There are absolutely no traditions that link him to the Hejaz, to Mecca. It's all slightly tricky. But the idea that Bakr is Mecca, that Mecca stands in the Hejaz, that Abraham went there, these are all propositions that come to be completely taken for granted by the biographers of Muhammad, by commentators on the Quran, and so on. And essentially, that is the state of play. If you're a Muslim, you believe that. If you're not a Muslim, then I think you say, well, I don't know, case not proven. But Tom, in the 1970s, and then afterwards, there was a school, wasn't there, of kind of non-Muslim revisionist history, which sort of argued, I'm going to massively sort of simplify this, that they argued that a lot of what we think about Islam

was actually constructed much later, further west, after a lot of the conquest has happened, and then sort of retrofitted to create this new ideology that would bolster this new Arab empire. So if that's the case, then is it possible? I mean, I'm saying this with absolutely no knowledge at all, bar a week's study 30 years ago when I was an undergraduate. Is it possible that the Kaaba was constructed much later?

Let's say at the late 7th century when people were fighting over mecca um it could it all come from there could it have been basically as it were you know i don't want to use the word artificially but you know what i mean could it have all been invented as it were then people who listen to our episode on um roman holidays may remember that we talked about christian pilgrims in the fourth century going to the Holy Land. And basically people would say, oh, this is the house of Peter, or this is where such and such a miracle happened. And the sacred geography is basically invented. But I think the really key figure is Constantine and his mother Helena identifying the true cross of Christ, which enables them to work

out where the tomb of Jesus was, the site of Golgotha, the place where Christ is crucified, and to build the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. And because there had been presumably various shrines associated with that, but because Constantine brings the heft of a Christian empire to it, he can absolutely identify it. And you see this also with Zoroastrian shrines in the Persian empire, that emperors found Zoroastrian shrines from scratch, which they then claim are eternally ancient. So I think it's possible to imagine that the same thing is happening in arabia that out in the deserts presumably there are a lot of shrines that have a kind of holiness i would

guess any you know any oasis anywhere like that would have had a shrine a place of pilgrimage whatever yeah yeah so so gerald horting who uh is a brilliant scholar of this, he wrote, it seems likely that the Meccan sanctuary was chosen only after the elimination of other possibilities, that in the early Islamic period, a number of possible sanctuary sites gained adherence until finally Mecca became established as the Muslim sanctuary. And presumably what enables it to be established as the Muslim sanctuary is the fact that Abdul Malik has established his rule over the whole of the caliphate and has sufficient heft that he can say, this is where it is. And, you know, which in turn you say, well, why would he fix on Mecca? Presumably, Mecca absolutely has this kind of holy power. It must have been

one of the kind of ancient sanctuaries or one of the shrines that does have this kind of resonance, so that there are absolutely people who are ready to accept that it is indeed what Muslim tradition will come to say it is. I think also, it's telling that Abdul Malik's father had served as the governor of the region. And the general that Abdul Malik sends to defeat Ibn al-Zubayr, 90s? Yeah. Right. Yeah. Which is several decades later than the traditional Islamic historiography would attest. As I said before the second half, I don't think we'll ever know because there's no definitive proof. But I think that there are trace elements of this process, if that is what happened, that you can identify. And that is that there is this kind of enduring sense of resentment that people feel towards Abdul Malik.

He is damned as a man who sense that the house of God might not always have stood rooted to the spot in Mecca. So there's this scholar who writes at the time of the prophet, may God save him and give him peace. Our faces were all turned in one direction, but after the death of the prophet, we turned ourselves hither and thither. So, you know, who knows what that precisely is a memory of but i think also you get it in the sense of the strangeness that you picked up on do you know there are a lot of stones and that they all they're endlessly kind of shifting this way and that so the carver is it is endlessly being demolished and being rebuilt it's being you know demolished through all the stuff with the prophets, with Adam and Abraham

and so on, but also within historical time with all the various wars between Yazid and Ibn Azubayr and Abdul Malik. The mosque that encloses it, according to tradition, gets kind of destroyed and rebuilt. There's a sacred well there that gets lost twice and refound. The Mahkam Ibrahim, the stone with supposedly the imprint of Abraham's feet, that's always moving around all the time. It gets caught up in a flood. It gets transported by human hand. And then you have the black stone. And there are so many different contradictory stories told about that. So the prime story, I think, is the one that I mentioned at the beginning,

that it's one of the original stones that Adam used to build the shrine. But there is also a story that Adam had found it and transported it with Ishmael all the way, which again implies that perhaps the original shrine was somewhere else. There's others who claim that Ibn al-Zubayr had placed it in an ark of the kind that Moses used to transport the Torah around the desert. So the sheer multiplicity of stories suggest perhaps a certain sense that there's a strangeness to the process. But I think also, obviously, what they also suggest is a sense of awe before the potency of the Kaaba as an emblem of faith in the one God. So that if you're not a Muslim, if you're a skeptical cast of mind, you could say, well, this suggests that perhaps the Kaaba, you know, it doesn't have the kind of eternity that Muslims claim for it. But you could also say, if you're a Muslim, well, this is indicative of the sheer,

the strangeness of this is indicative of the mystery. If what Muslims believe about the Kaaba is true, then of course it's strange strange because it's the strangest, weirdest, most potent, most holy structure anywhere on the face of earth. So what would you expect? All religions have strange elements. What would seem strange, unearthly elements to outsiders, wouldn't they? I mean, that's almost by definition because they're dealing with the realm, as you would say, of the supernatural. So if you are of a sceptical frame of mind, you know, you're not a Muslim, what do you think it is, it physically is, Tom? A stone cube made in the 7th century, basically, late 7th century?

Yeah, I think so. But I think also clearly there was a process of destruction in the wars that convulsed the caliphate. And where exactly the house of God that Ibn al-Zubayr identified, I don't know. I mean, it may have been Mecca or it may have been somewhere completely different. And the shrine that stands there now may have been established by Abd al-Malik. But we just don't know. I mean, there's no way of knowing.

So basically, at the end of all this, you've left us none the wiser. I mean, that's the… I think wiser to the degree that if you are not a Muslim… Well, I think even if you are a Muslim, there's a strangeness to it and a weirdness to it that the sheer range of stories that are told about it hint at. think even if you are a muslim there's a strangeness to it and a weirdness to it that um you know the sheer range of stories that are told about it hint at if you're not a muslim then i think it perhaps complicates the history the traditional account it's a fascinating story isn't it i mean all this stuff about the early history of islam to an outsider to a non-muslim it is an absolutely

fascinating historical problem as we talked about when we did a podcast about the life of Muhammad, because there is so little that we know outside the Quran and the religious traditions. And there are so few other sources that we can use to cross-reference and all that sort of stuff. And it's complicated by the fact that it became identified so quickly with a kind of imperial ideology, I suppose. Is that fair, an imperial ideology?

I think so, yeah. I mean, Abdul Malik, I think in the episode of Muhammad, I said he's, in Christian terms, he's St. Paul and Constantine rolled into one, I think. And it's very difficult to get back beyond his reign to a sense of what might have been Mecca before his sort of possession of the holy places. And I think the 1920s, their control has been contested. There was the siege of the Great Mosque, wasn't there, in 1979,

when militants, Islamic militants who were fighting against the House of Saud took it over for, I think, a couple of weeks or something like that. But obviously it's a key part of their legitimacy, isn't it? That they control the holy places and they control the Kaaba. And they've actually knocked down a lot of the other kind of early Islamic buildings or pre-Islamic buildings, haven't they, to make hotels and things for people who want to go on the Hajj. I mean, we're never going to visit, are we?

No. So that on-location walking tour, Tom, it's never going to visit it are we no so that on location walking tour tom it's not going to happen unless something radically changes in our own religious sensibilities um but it is you know it's it's it's such it's a fascinating fascinating uh question i think not just for people interested in early islam but more generally um how how how do historians from a tradition you know stand outside a given religious or mythological or spiritual tradition, how do they engage with it? So I wrote a book on this in The Shadow of the Sword,

available from all good bookshops. Very good book. But one of the things that haunted me as I was writing that book, in which I came to feel more and more and more, was that any pretense I had that I was neutral, that I was objective, that I was objective wasn't the case because by not being a Muslim, that's not a position of objectivity and neutrality. That's a position as well. And if you stand outside it, how do you cope with it? And in a way, that's what kind of made me interested in the history of christianity as well um and more generally a sense that perhaps the very process of adopting a secular perspective alienates you from the very traditions that you're trying to write the history of if that makes sense

so tom what you've effectively done is you've plugged two books there shameless yeah so so you've taken a sacred subject and you've and you've ended with a plug for two of your own but do you not think i mean do you not think that is i think it's fascinating i think it's the i tom i think i mean we're not a historiography podcast by and large um but i think um uh it's a question it doesn't it's not just confined to studying religious history because i mean you're writing it writing about any subject you could be writing about 17th century england you could be writing about you know 1970s america i guess yeah 1970s america or indeed 1970s britain and you are you are trying you know you are you are trying you're pushing yourself um to enter the heads of people with completely different experiences from yours

you're writing about ideologies and mindsets that are not your own and you i mean it's the question that we're always asked isn't it by at book festivals and at talks and things how do you be objective and of course the truth is you're never objective because you're always standing somewhere you're always looking for somewhere and you're always you you're always trapped in your own head but there's something it's kind of like to understand the butterfly you stick a pin through it it's that kind of slight problem that by doing that i mean you may be able to kind of dissect it and open it up and look at it but something's gone right um the very skeptical the skeptical mindset means that you don't get the mystery and you don't get the the beauty or the

the power of the vision i suppose is that is that right i guess something like that yeah something like that all right well i didn't expect this podcast to end on such a sort of metaphysical mood no uh with this is not uh you know this will never happen again will it tom i mean i apologize for that this didn't happen with the podcast that we recorded about the Costa Rican Civil War. Put it that way. No, it didn't. No, it did not. But this is a topic that is luminously holy to millions and millions of people.

So I think it deserves that degree of acknowledgement. Excellent. Right. So we haven't solved the mystery, as as it were and we ended on a metaphysical note so everybody leaves with honor intact uh we will see you for more tom that was absolutely fascinating thank you well done but the next one will be less metaphysical okay that's jolly good so we will see you um tomorrow in fact for more world cup themed action. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

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