with sumptuous brocade vestments and has appointed caliphs and kings to serve her.

Mecca is the sanctuary for which Allah has reared offspring from among its pilgrims and residents. Everyone who ever sought to terrify or ravage her has been driven away, so she has remained exalted, honored, and inviolable. No human being has ever succeeded in humiliating her. When the People of the Elephant advanced against her, Allah afflicted them with the well-known punishment. From the time of Abraham, the Close Friend of Allah, she has never ceased to be thriving and thronged by pilgrims.

By contrast, Bayt al-Maqdis has been laid waste time after time, emptied of its inhabitants, and overrun by enemies along with its people. Likewise, His warning that all who oppose her will be disgraced applies to the Kaʿbah alone, not to Bayt al-Maqdis. The Exalted says: “Whoever intends within it deviation through wrongdoing—We shall make him taste a painful punishment” (al-Hajj 25).

Even al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf regarded the Kaʿbah with profound reverence;