So the Sovereign settled us in honor thereby—while it is with Allah alone that reward is sought.

We have already noted, in the section on how Allah protected the Messenger of Allah ﷺ from the impurities of the Age of Ignorance, that he and his uncle al-ʿAbbās were carrying stones. When the Prophet placed his waist-cloth beneath the stones on his shoulder, he was forbidden to remove his lower garment, so he put it back in its original position.

Section

Ibn Isḥāq records the practices Quraysh innovated under the name al-Hums—literally, extreme rigor and austerity in religion. Because of the excessive veneration they accorded the Sacred Precinct, they bound themselves never to leave it on the eve of ʿArafah, saying, “We are the children of the Sanctuary and the dwellers of Allah’s House.” For that reason they refused to stand at ʿArafāt, even though they knew it to be one of the rites of Abraham the Friend, peace be upon him, lest they abandon the pattern of their corrupt innovation.

While in the state of consecration they would store neither dried curd nor clarified butter, nor would they melt fat. They would not enter a tent woven of hair, and if they sought shade at all it had to be beneath a leather pavilion. They further forbade the pilgrims and those performing ʿumrah—so long as they were in ihrām—to eat anything other than Quraysh food, or to circumambulate the House except in garments supplied by Quraysh. If a pilgrim could not obtain such a garment from one of the Hums—namely Quraysh, their descendants, and those of Kinānah and Khuzaʿah who had joined them—he had to perform tawāf naked, even if the pilgrim was a woman.

Thus, when a woman had to circumambulate under those conditions, she would place her hand over her private parts and chant:

Today some of it—or even all—will show,
Yet what appears of me I grant no right to know.

If anyone who possessed a Hums garment insisted on making tawāf in his own clothes, then on finishing he was obliged to throw them away and derive no benefit from them thereafter; neither he nor anyone else was allowed to touch them. The Arabs called such discarded garments al-luqā.

One poet said:

Sorrow enough is my assault upon it, as though
It were cast-off robes—sacred—before the circling throng.