Replies on X often say that Muslims kiss a black rock, and that the Black Stone of the Kaaba is an idol that survived from pagan Arabia. The objection deserves a direct answer, because the rite looks like stone veneration to an outside observer, and because the history of Mecca before Islam did include sacred stones.
Below are five points: what the stone is, what the rite involves, what Umar reportedly said about it, the strongest form of the pagan-survival argument with an honest reply, and what the Muslim definition of idolatry says about the practice. Muhammad (peace be upon him) is the Prophet whose conduct sets the rite.
The Black Stone is set in the eastern corner of the Kaaba, the cube-shaped house in Mecca towards which Muslims face in salah (the ritual prayer). It is held in a silver frame and now consists of several fragments joined together. Muslim tradition holds that it was placed there in the time of Abraham and Ishmael, and a hadith (a report of the words and deeds of the Prophet) in al-Tirmidhi says it came down whiter than milk and was darkened by the sins of people. Scholars have graded that report differently, so it is cited here as a tradition and not as a settled fact.[1]
The history is better documented after the Prophet’s time. Ibn Ishaq reports that before the Prophet’s mission the Quraysh rebuilt the Kaaba and quarrelled over who should lift the stone back into place. They accepted the suggestion that Muhammad, then a respected young man, should decide. He laid it on a cloak and had each clan hold an edge.[2] In 930 CE the Qarmatians, a breakaway movement, raided Mecca and carried the stone away. It was returned some twenty years later.[3] Nothing in these accounts suggests that the stone was ever treated as a source of power. It is a marker, and the fragments show how much has happened to it.
The rite is called istilām: a pilgrim circling the Kaaba during ṭawāf may touch the stone, kiss it, or touch it with a hand and kiss the hand. Where the crowd makes this impossible, the pilgrim points towards it from a distance and says Allāhu akbar, which means that God is greater. Al-Bukhari records that the Prophet did exactly this when he circled the Kaaba on his camel.[4]
The rite is not obligatory. A ṭawāf performed without any contact with the stone is valid, and the jurists advise against pushing through people to reach it, since harming a fellow pilgrim is a greater fault than missing the kiss. The act is therefore a recommended practice (sunna, the example of the Prophet) of the hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca), and millions of Muslims perform the pilgrimage without ever touching the stone. A critic may still say that even an optional kiss resembles veneration. The next two entries address that point.
The best-known comment on the rite is attributed to Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph. Al-Bukhari, in the Book of Hajj, reports that he approached the stone, kissed it and said that he knew it was a stone which could neither harm nor benefit, and that had he not seen the Prophet kiss it, he would not have kissed it.[5] The saying is also quoted in the classical commentaries as a statement of how the rite is to be understood.
Muslim worship is directed to God alone. The Quran describes the Kaaba as the first house established for people (3:96), a place of security where the Station of Abraham stands (3:97), and a house Abraham was told to keep free of any partner given to God and to purify for those who circle it (22:26). The same passage describes the call to pilgrimage (22:27) and the rites that follow (22:29). The Quran also tells believers to take the Station of Abraham as a place of prayer (2:125).[6] The house is the direction of prayer, and no verse asks for prayer to be addressed to the stone. Umar’s words assume this: the act is obedience to the Prophet, offered to God.
The strongest form of the objection runs as follows. Arabia before Islam knew sacred stones, and the sources on pre-Islamic religion, such as Ibn al-Kalbi’s Book of Idols, describe stone cults in the peninsula. Some historians of religion, among them Julius Wellhausen in the nineteenth century, treated the Black Stone as a survival of that older reverence, and later scholars such as Gerald Hawting have examined how early Muslims and their critics described idolatry and where its boundaries lay.[7] Reverence for this particular stone before the Prophet’s mission cannot be excluded on the available evidence, and no one should claim more certainty than the sources give.
The Muslim answer rests on what the Prophet did. At the conquest of Mecca, al-Bukhari reports, he removed the idols standing around the Kaaba, three hundred and sixty in number, reciting the verse that truth has come and falsehood has vanished (17:81).[8] He kept the stone. His companions understood the reason to be his command and practice, as Umar says, and not any quality of the object. Scholars such as Ibn Hajar, in his commentary on al-Bukhari, read Umar’s statement as a lesson that acts of worship are fixed by revelation. This reply does not prove that the stone had no earlier meaning. It shows that the meaning Islam gave it is the one the sources record.
Idolatry in Islam is shirk, the association of anything with God in worship, and its opposite is tawḥīd, the affirmation that God is one. The Quran condemns those who worship besides God what can neither harm nor benefit them (5:76). It also condemns those who say that their objects of worship are intercessors with God (10:18; 39:3).[9] On this definition the test is whether a person addresses prayer to the object, asks it for help or credits it with power.
None of that applies to the Black Stone. Pilgrims do not pray to it or ask it for anything, and it has no role of intercession in Muslim teaching. Umar’s saying denies that it has power, and the jurists treat the kiss as a rite of following the Prophet. A critic can still say that outsiders may misread the gesture, and that is fair. For this reason the sources emphasise the intention, summed up in the hadith that deeds are judged by intentions (al-Bukhari, Book of the Beginning of Revelation), together with the pointing gesture and the takbīr that make the direction of devotion plain.[10]
A comparison helps here, offered with respect to the traditions concerned. Jews who pray at the Western Wall, the surviving retaining wall of the Herodian enclosure of the Second Temple, touch and kiss its stones and push written prayers into the gaps between them, and Jewish tradition holds that the divine presence has never left it.[11] Christian pilgrims touch and kiss the Stone of Anointing in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and many Christians kiss crosses and icons. Nobody describes a person praying at the Western Wall as worshipping a wall, because the test is where the prayer is addressed, and the worshippers say it is addressed to God. Applied evenly, the same test clears the pilgrim at the Kaaba. The comparison does not prove the Muslim rite right, and the practices differ in detail, since the Wall is the remnant of a sanctuary built for worship while the Black Stone is no object of prayer in Islam. It shows that a gesture of reverence toward a sacred object is not what the charge of idolatry names.
The bottom line
The Black Stone is a physical marker set in the Kaaba, damaged and reframed over the centuries. Muslims touch, kiss or point to it because the Prophet did so, and Umar said as much when he declared that the stone has no power of its own. The rite is optional, and the prayer of the pilgrim goes to God. The same test of where a prayer is addressed clears the Jews who kiss the stones of the Western Wall and the Christians who kiss the Stone of Anointing.
The historical question about older Arabian reverence for stones remains open, and an honest reader may hold that the evidence is not decisive. The Muslim case does not need it to be: the Prophet removed the idols, kept this one practice, and the sources define idolatry in terms the rite does not meet.
Notes
- Al-Tirmidhi, Book of Hajj, on the Black Stone; gradings of the report differ among hadith scholars. Jami al-Tirmidhi 877 (Book of Hajj), report of Ibn Abbas, which sunnah.com shows al-Tirmidhi calling hasan sahih and Darussalam grading hasan, checked there.
- Ibn Ishaq, Sirat Rasul Allah, on the rebuilding of the Kaaba by Quraysh, as transmitted by Ibn Hisham.
- Ibn al-Athir, al-Kamil fi al-tarikh, on the Qarmatian raid on Mecca and the return of the stone; the dates given here are the traditional ones.
- Al-Bukhari, Book of Hajj, chapter on pointing to the corner when unable to reach it. Sahih al-Bukhari 1613 (Book of Hajj, “To say takbir at the Corner”), report of Ibn Abbas, checked on sunnah.com; Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (Salafiyya edition), vol. 3, p. 476 (Shamela text).
- Al-Bukhari, Book of Hajj, chapter on kissing the Black Stone.
- Quran 3:96–97; 22:26–29; 2:125.
- Ibn al-Kalbi, Kitab al-Asnam (Book of Idols); Julius Wellhausen, Reste arabischen Heidentums (1887); Gerald Hawting, The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam (1999).
- Al-Bukhari, Book of Military Expeditions (Maghazi), on the conquest of Mecca; Quran 17:81; Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari, on the chapter on kissing the Black Stone. Sahih al-Bukhari 4287 (Book of Military Expeditions), report of Abdullah ibn Masud, who gives the number as 360 idols, checked on sunnah.com; Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (Salafiyya edition), vol. 8, p. 15 (Shamela text).
- Quran 5:76; 10:18; 39:3.
- Al-Bukhari, Book of the Beginning of Revelation, the hadith of intentions; Quran 22:31 on shirk.
- Exodus Rabbah 2:2, the traditional statement that the Divine Presence has never departed from the Western Wall. The kissing of the stones and the placing of written prayers is documented in descriptions of Jewish pilgrimage to Jerusalem; the veneration of the Stone of Anointing is a long-standing pilgrim practice described in guides to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.