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The Kaaba, [b] sometimes referred to as al-Ka'ba al-Musharrafa, [d] is a stone building at the center of Islam's most important mosque and holiest site, the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] It is considered by Muslims to be the Baytullah (Arabic: بَيْت ٱللَّٰه , lit.
After nearby Medina, the other holy city of Islam, also rebelled against Yazid, the Umayyad ruler sent an army to subdue Arabia. The Umayyad army defeated the Medinans and took the city, but Mecca held out in a month-long siege, during which the Kaaba was damaged by fire. [1] The siege ended when news came of Yazid's sudden death.
A typical Kaaba building is shaped like a cube or block and functions as a place for the devotees of a particular god or goddess to worship in. [1] [2] The name "Kaaba" was used by ancient Arabians to describe and label these sites because of their resemblance to the Kaaba at Mecca and the purpose of doing pilgrimage to them.
The Black Stone was held in reverence well before Islam. It had long been associated with the Kaaba, which was built in the pre-Islamic period and was a site of pilgrimage of Nabataeans who visited the shrine once a year to perform their pilgrimage. The Kaaba held 360 idols of the Meccan gods.
The earliest Islamic reference to Abraha's attack on Mecca is found in the Al-Fil (Quran 105), which describes a divine intervention against the "People of the Elephant". God was said to have thwarted their wicked scheme, sending flocks of birds to rain down stones upon them, reducing them to "straw eaten up".
The Book of Idols (Kitāb al-ʾAṣnām), written by the Arab scholar Hisham ibn al-Kalbi (737–819), is the most popular of the Islamic-era works about the gods and rites of pre-Islamic Arab religions. [1] The book portrays pre-Islamic Arabian religion as predominantly polytheistic and guilty of idol worship (idolatry) before the coming of ...
A camel caravan traveling to Mecca for the annual pilgrimage, c. 1910. The pilgrimage to Mecca is attested in some pre-Islamic Arabic poetry.Compared to Islamic-era poetry where the Hajj appears ubiquitously, only a small number of references are found to it in pre-Islamic poetry, indicating that its Arabian centrality was a development of Islamic times. [5]
Islamic tradition identifies Bakkah as the ancient name for the site of Mecca. [1] [6] [7] [8] An Arabic word, its etymology, like that of Mecca, is obscure.[3]One meaning ascribed to it is "narrow", seen as descriptive of the area in which the valley of the holy places and the city of Mecca are located, pressed in upon as they are by mountains. [6]