from India. At that time it was a white jewel—a gleaming ruby the color of the thaghāmah blossom. Adam had brought it down from Paradise, but it turned black because of the sins of humankind. While Ishmael was away looking for a stone, he returned to find it already set in the corner. “Father,” he asked, “who brought this to you?” Abraham replied, “Someone more energetic than you.” So the two of them raised the walls, praying as they worked: “Our Lord, accept this from us; indeed, You alone are the All-Hearing, the All-Knowing” (al-Baqarah 127).
Ibn Abī Ḥātim reports that Abraham built the House with stones taken from five mountains. Dhū al-Qarnayn—who then ruled the earth—passed by them while they were building and asked, “Who ordered you to do this?” Abraham answered, “Allah commanded us.” He said, “How am I to know that what you say is true?” Five rams thereupon attested that Allah had so commanded him, and Dhū al-Qarnayn believed and affirmed the truth. Al-Azraqī further relates that he circumambulated the House together with the Friend.
The Kaʿbah stood on the foundations laid by the Friend for a very long time. Later, the Quraysh rebuilt it but left it short of Abraham’s original foundations on the northern side, toward Syria, and it remains in that form today.
Both Ṣaḥīḥs record—through the chain of Mālik, Ibn Shihāb, and Sālim, from ʿAbd Allāh ibn Muḥammad ibn Abī Bakr, from Ibn ʿUmar, from ʿĀʾishah—that the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said: “Have you not seen that when your people rebuilt the Kaʿbah they fell short of Abraham’s foundations?” I asked, “O Messenger of Allah, why do you not restore it to Abraham’s foundations?” He replied, “Were it not that your people have only recently abandoned disbelief, I would certainly do so.” In another wording he said, “Were it not that your people have but lately emerged from the Age of Ignorance—or, he said, from disbelief—I would spend the Kaʿbah’s treasure in the path of Allah, bring its door down to ground level, and include the Ḥijr within it.”
In his own time Ibn al-Zubayr—may Allah have mercy on him—rebuilt the Kaʿbah exactly as the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, had indicated, following what his aunt ʿĀʾishah, Mother of the Believers, had conveyed to him. When al-Ḥajjāj killed him in 73 AH he wrote to the caliph, ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān, who assumed that Ibn al-Zubayr had acted on his own initiative. He therefore ordered that the building be returned to its former state. The northern wall was demolished, the Ḥijr removed, the wall closed up, and stones were packed into the interior. Thus the eastern door was left high above ground level and the western door was sealed completely—as one sees to this day.
Later, when they learned that Ibn al-Zubayr had acted on the basis of ʿĀʾishah’s report, they regretted what they had done and wished they had left the matter as he had arranged it. During the reign of al-Mahdī ibn al-Manṣūr, the caliph consulted Imām Mālik ibn Anas about restoring it to the form built by Ibn al-Zubayr. Mālik replied, “I fear it would become a plaything in the hands of rulers—each new king would rebuild it as he pleased.” Hence it has remained as it is to the present day.