Mecca, a city in western Saudi Arabia, was the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad and the site of the Kaaba (“House of God”), the most holy place in the world for Muslims. Muslims around the world face Mecca when they pray and are obliged to make a pilgrimage to the city at least once in their lives, if at all possible.
Islam had its beginning in Mecca. It was in a cave outside the city that Muhammad began to receive the revelations that became the Qur’an,
Islam’s holy book, and it was in Mecca that Muhammad first preached the truths that Allah (God) had confided in him. Muhammad’s eviction from Mecca in 622 is the event from which the Muslim calendar begins. He returned in 630 to establish monotheism, destroy the many deity statues and shrines that surrounded the Kaaba, and institute the Islamic practices relative to the Kaaba that give structure to Muslim prayer and worship to this day. Muhammad by then resided in Medina, but toward the end of his life he made a final trip to visit Mecca, one that is commemorated in the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.
Mecca was a holy site for centuries prior to Muhammad’s career. The Kaaba, an ancient stone building measuring 45 feet by 33 feet by 50 feet, is located within a masjid (mosque). The presentbuilding, not the original one, is made of granite. It has a single door and no windows. Inside are several gold and silver lamps suspended from the ceiling and three wooden pillars that support the ceiling. According to tradition, the Kaaba was originally built by Adam but was destroyed in the Noahic flood. It was rebuilt by Abraham and his son Ishmael (at this point the Qur’an builds on the Jewish Bible). Muslims trace their lineage to Ishmael rather than Isaac, Abraham’s other son.
Also located at the Kaaba is the large Black Stone. Arriving inside the mosque that contains the Kaaba, pilgrims are known to kiss the Black Stone, thought by many to have been a meteorite. Mythic accounts suggest that it fell from heaven or was brought to Earth by angels. Some stories suggest it was originally white, but turned black by taking in the impurities of the many human touches over the centuries. In the tenth century, it was carried away by some Islamic dissidents and held for ransom for some twenty years. Today the stone is built into the eastern wall of the Kaaba. It has broken into three large pieces and some smaller fragments and is now kept together with a silver band encased in a stone ring.
Control of the Kaaba was originally in the hands of Muhammad’s physical family, but it eventually fell under the hegemony of outsiders, including the ruler of Egypt and, beginning in 1517, the Ottomans. Modern Saudi Arabia was created in the 1920s and assumed control of Mecca as the Ottoman Empire was dissolved. In 1932 the government began to self-consciously support the Hajj and has steadily created structures to assist the annual pilgrimages. The number of pilgrims has grown exponentially through the last half of the twentieth century. During the Hajj, the population of Mecca increases from 200,000 to as much as two million.
a city in western Saudi Arabia and the administrative center of the Hejaz region. It is located 70 km from the Red Sea and is surrounded by hills and steep cliffs. The city is connected by highway with Riyadh, Medina, and Jidda. Population, about 185,000 (1965).
The principal sources of income are commerce, services for pilgrims, the production of rugs and perfumes in factories and domestic workshops, and the bottling of the “sacred water” of the Zamzam well. Such religious objects as coral and plastic prayer beads, special clothing for pilgrims (ihram), and sacred books are sold.
The date of Mecca’s founding is unknown. A settlement arose at the Zamzam well, first mentioned by Ptolemy as Macoraba. Before the rise of Islam in the seventh century it was an important intermediary in trade between the East and the Mediterranean countries, as well as a religious center for the pagan tribes of the Arabian Peninsula.
Muhammad, the founder of Islam, was born in Mecca. In the seventh century, Mecca, along with Medina, became a Muslim holy city and a place of pilgrimage, or hajj. After the disintegration of the Abbasid Caliphate in the tenth century, Mecca became a vassal of the dynasties that ruled in Egypt. When the Turks conquered Egypt in 1517, the rulers of Mecca, called sharifs, recognized the suzerainty of the Turkish sultans but remained relatively autonomous. Mecca was the capital of the Kingdom of the Hejaz from 1916 to 1924, when it was incorporated into Saudi Arabia (known as the Kingdom of the Hejaz and Nejd until 1932).
In the center of the city is the Great Mosque, or Haram, whose present buildings date mainly from the 16th and 17th centuries. Among its builders were the Turkish architects Sinan and Mehmed-Aga. The Haram has a vast courtyard surrounded by galleries with three or four rows of columns, numerous gates, and seven minarets. It was built around the ancient shrine of the Kaaba, erected in 608 and rebuilt in 1684 in the form of a stone cube. Houses are traditional buildings of one to five stories.