The Stone Snatched from the Kaaba: Twenty-One Years of Absence

Bölüm metni

One morning, in the very middle of the most crowded act of worship on earth, a group of men who called themselves pilgrims drew their swords. When they left, they left behind a Kaaba with its door torn off, a well stuffed with corpses, and an empty hollow in a wall. That stone, from the heart of the Islamic world, would stand for twenty-one years in the wall of another mosque, a thousand kilometres away.

The coastline of eastern Arabia — that thin band of the Persian Gulf wedged between sand and salt — is a place that has rarely attracted the interest of great empires. Date groves, springs of fresh water, a few harbours where pearl divers lived, and beyond them, emptiness stretching inland. At the end of the ninth century, something took shape in that emptiness that the caliphal court in Baghdad never saw coming: a state that minted its own coinage, enforced its own law, and carried its own calendar and its own expectation of a saviour.

The roots of the story reach back to the barren villages around Kufa. In the eight seventies, travelling missionaries of the Ismaili call were moving through this region. What they preached was profoundly appealing to peasants crushed under heavy taxes and to the bedouin at the desert's edge: the present order is temporary, oppression will not last forever, the awaited imam is near, and when he comes, everything will be turned upside down. The man who organised this call in the region was named Hamdan Qarmat. The movement took its name from his: they came to be called the Qarmatians. Hamdan Qarmat vanished from the historical record around nine oh six, but the network he built lived on.

The furthest and most durable branch of that network took root in Bahrayn. This Bahrayn is not today's island state; it is the broad coastal region stretching from Qatif to al-Ahsa, which the Arabs of that age called Bahrayn. The missionary sent to the region was named Abu Sa'id al-Jannabi. His title came from the town of Jannaba in Iran, where his family originated. Abu Sa'id began his work disguised as a flour merchant, won over the tribes one by one, and in eight ninety-nine seized al-Ahsa and made it his capital. That same year, a great rupture tore through the movement: the leadership in Syria proclaimed that the awaited imam had now appeared — and that this man was Ubayd Allah al-Mahdi, who would later found the Fatimid dynasty in North Africa. The Qarmatians of Bahrayn refused to accept the claim. As far as they were concerned, the awaited saviour had still not come, and come he would. That refusal was a fracture that would determine a great deal in the years ahead: they now owed allegiance neither to the Sunni caliphate in Baghdad nor to the Ismaili caliphate in North Africa. To no one.

Abu Sa'id was assassinated in nine thirteen; the sources report that he died in his bathhouse, at the hand of a servant. Rule passed to his sons.

What made this state truly extraordinary was less its capacity for war than its internal order. A century later, in ten fifty-one, the Persian traveller Nasir-i Khusraw passed through al-Ahsa and described what he saw with astonishment. No taxes were levied on the people of the city. Anyone in difficulty was given an interest-free loan. Local trade was conducted not in gold or silver but with tokens made of lead; these tokens were valid only inside the city, which meant that wealth could not seep out. The state's mills ground the people's grain free of charge. Houses that fell into ruin were repaired at public expense. Government did not rest in the hands of a single ruler: a council of six, drawn from the descendants of Abu Sa'id, took the decisions, and in disputes an advisory assembly stepped in. There was no mosque in the city where the Friday prayer was held; the call to prayer was not sounded. The saviour had not come, and so, in their view, the older forms of worship were suspended.

It is easy to read this picture as a medieval utopia, but the foundation beneath it was far darker. According to the same account by Nasir-i Khusraw, those vast date and grain estates around al-Ahsa and Qatif were worked by the labour of some thirty thousand Black slaves. The absence of taxes, the interest-free credit, the free milling — all of it belonged to the community of property owners; the hands that filled that community's common treasury owned nothing at all. This state built in the desert was an egalitarian machine for its own members and a merciless one for everyone outside.

And there was a second source of revenue: the raid. Because the Qarmatians regarded themselves as standing outside the existing order, they treated that order's caravans, cities and pilgrims as legitimate targets. The storehouses of al-Ahsa were also filled with plunder taken on the roads of Iraq. And in time, these raids would move far beyond an ordinary economy of pillage.

To think of the Qarmatians merely as a desert state of brigands is not enough to explain what happened in nine thirty. What brought them to that point was a belief about time itself. This belief held that history moved in closed cycles. Every great prophet had his era, and every era had its end. The order Muhammad had brought would one day run out its term as well; then the awaited redeemer would come, what was sealed would be opened, and outward law would give way to inner truth. With the break of eight ninety-nine, the community in Bahrayn had chosen to keep that expectation alive. For them, in other words, the question was not whether to obey religious law, but whether that law still held at all. According to the sources, this reckoning drew support from the heavens as well: the great conjunction of stars that astrologers placed at the turn of the century was read as the date when the age of Islam would close and a new age would open.

The man who showed how destructive that expectation could be is Abu Tahir Sulayman al-Jannabi, who took power in nine twenty-three. He was one of the sons of Abu Sa'id; he pushed his elder brother aside, seized the leadership, and entered Basra that same year. In nine twenty-seven he sacked Kufa and routed the caliphal army sent against him. In nine twenty-eight he advanced to the very threshold of Baghdad; he could not enter the capital, but he ranged across most of Iraq and plundered it. Before all these raids, back in nine hundred and six, the pilgrim caravan returning from Mecca had been ambushed, and by the figure the sources give, close to twenty thousand pilgrims were put to the sword. The Qarmatians, then, were not a community that shrank from laying hands on the sacred roads; on the contrary, laying hands on those roads was itself their message.

To grasp where this mindset could lead, we need to look one year ahead of Mecca, to nine thirty-one. Because that was the year the Qarmatian state came face to face with the logical conclusion of its own faith.

In nine thirty-one Abu Tahir gave his allegiance, as to the awaited redeemer, to a young man from Isfahan — Abu'l-Fadl al-Isfahani, who counted himself a descendant of the Sasanian kings — and handed the government over to him. The one who for long years had been called "the one who is to come" had come. The result was a devastation that not even the community's own leaders had reckoned with. The new mahdi abolished the whole of religious law. The obligations of prayer and fasting fell away. Books were burned. The prophets were openly cursed — not Muhammad alone, but an entire line stretching from Abraham to Jesus. The man rejected the supremacy of the Arabs, began to exalt the legacy of the Persian kings, and had a number of the Qarmatian notables executed. This was an age of salvation that began with the blood of its own leaders.

Abu Tahir endured it for eighty days. Then he declared that the mahdi he had raised to the throne with his own hands was an impostor, and had him killed. The Qarmatian state never fully recovered from those eighty days; Abu Tahir's spiritual authority within the community was gravely wounded, and the movement's branches in other regions lost their trust in the center at Bahrayn.

This episode shows the mental climate in which what happened at Mecca a year earlier was possible. Because for someone who genuinely believes the old order has run out its term, the holiest object of that order is no longer untouchable. It is a portable thing. It can be bargained over. It can even be prised from its place and set in the mosque of another city, with the expectation that people will turn toward it there.

That is precisely what Abu Tahir attempted. And the day he attempted it was the most shattering morning in the tenth-century Islamic world.

The eighth day of Dhu al-Hijjah in the year three hundred and seventeen — the eleventh of January, nine thirty. It was the most crowded moment of the pilgrimage season. The pilgrims were in a state of ritual consecration; they wore nothing but two seamless pieces of white cloth, and they were forbidden to carry weapons. Most were preparing to set out for Mina the next day. The city was filled with people who had come from every corner of the world: from Khurasan, from Egypt, from al-Andalus, from Yemen.

When Abu Tahir arrived at the city gate with his horsemen, he did not force his way in. He said that every Muslim had the right to enter this city, and gave his assurance that he would harm no one. Mecca's resistance was fragile, the assurance was accepted, and the gates were opened.

Then the swords were drawn.

The sources recount the days that followed with differing details, but with the same horror. Qarmatian cavalry rode through the courtyard of the Sacred Mosque, into the consecrated and defenseless crowd. It is reported that as they killed, they recited verses of the Qur'an, mocking their victims with the words of their own scripture. At night they left the city for their camps outside, and in the morning they came back in. This went on for eight days; in some accounts, eleven. The sources do not agree on the number of the dead; some say thousands within the bounds of the sanctuary, others put the total as high as thirty thousand. This much is certain: the bodies went unburied for days, left lying in the streets and in the courtyard.

Then something heavier still was done. Some of the dead were thrown into the well of Zamzam. Mecca's lifeblood, the well whose water pilgrims drank as a healing, was filled with corpses. This was not a military act; it was a message. A message that said: nothing here is sacred. The Kaaba itself became a target. Its covering was pulled down, cut into pieces and divided up as spoils. Its door was torn from its frame. It is recorded that the Kaaba was stained with the blood of slaughtered pilgrims, and that the building was set alight. The scale of the plunder is described in such terms that more than fifty camels were said to be needed to carry it away; modern historians regard that figure as an exaggeration. The governor of Mecca, Muhammad ibn Isma'il, was killed while trying to defend the city. A few things were saved: the Station of Abraham was smuggled out of the city, and the golden waterspout on the roof remained in place.

But what Abu Tahir really wanted was something else.

In the eastern corner of the Kaaba, set into the wall at a height just below that of a man, was a dark-coloured stone. The Black Stone. In Islamic tradition it is held to have been placed there from the time the Kaaba was built; it marks the starting point of each circuit during the circumambulation, and it is customary to kiss it, or to salute it from a distance. The one physical object believed to have been touched by the Prophet's hand. According to the account, when the people of Mecca invoked the sanctity of the Kaaba against him, Abu Tahir answered that this house did not belong to God, and that God would not choose a house for Himself.

As the stone was prised from the wall with pick and iron, it broke. The piece was already cracked, and under this assault it came apart into several fragments; the sources speak of seven pieces. The fragments were gathered up, loaded onto camels, and the caravan set out eastward, towards Hajar.

What was left behind was an empty hollow. In the corner of the Kaaba, where the stone had been torn out, a cavity opening into the wall. The point where, eight days earlier, people from the four corners of the world had queued and reached out to touch, was now a wound.

Abu Tahir's plan was plain. He installed the stone in the mosque of his own country. His intention was to redirect the pilgrimage, to tear people away from Mecca and draw them to Hajar. He believed that as long as he held the stone, he would hold its sanctity too.

This was the beginning of a delusion that would last twenty-one years.

When the news reached Baghdad, al-Muqtadir sat on the caliph's throne. Raised to it in the year nine hundred and eight, while still a child, he was a caliph tossed about throughout his reign among commanders, viziers and palace factions. The treasury was empty, the army preoccupied with mutinies over pay. One of the caliph's official titles was guardian of the Sanctuary and of the pilgrimage road. After the morning of the year nine hundred and thirty, that title rang hollow wherever it was spoken.

There was little that could be done. To mount a military campaign meant hunting the Qarmatians down in their own desert, and armies that had tried this before had been routed. So what remained was diplomacy and money. Envoys were sent to secure the stone's return; vast sums were offered. Abu Tahir refused them all. What he held in his hands was worth more than any amount of gold that could be offered, because the legitimacy of the side offering that gold rested on precisely that corner where the stone had sat.

The outrage did not come from Baghdad alone. The event provoked fury throughout the Islamic world, across sectarian lines. In North Africa, the Fatimid caliph Ubayd Allah al-Mahdi wrote letters full of reproach to the Qarmatians of Bahrain, demanding the stone's return. This detail matters: the Qarmatians are often lumped together with the Fatimids, yet the raid on Mecca was a catastrophe for the Fatimids too. A dynasty trying to present itself as the rightful leadership of Islam gained nothing whatever from being charged with the plundering of the Kaaba by a movement sprung from the same root as itself.

The gravest consequence, though, was felt on the roads. For years, the pilgrimage could not be made. The great caravans setting out from Iraq, those crowded convoys travelling by way of Kufa and Medina, came to a halt. To send out a pilgrim caravan meant putting thousands of people within range of Qarmatian cavalry, and no one wanted to take that responsibility. For years, only small groups reached Mecca, those willing to accept the risk themselves. Finally, in the year nine hundred and thirty-nine, an agreement was struck: the Qarmatians would permit the pilgrim caravans to pass in return for a payment made to them. The road to the holy city was reopened by a toll paid to the very people who had plundered it. That cut deeper into Baghdad's prestige than the loss of the stone.

Al-Muqtadir never saw this solution. In the year nine hundred and thirty-two he was killed in a clash with his own soldiers. He went to his grave as a man who had held the caliphate for twenty-five years and had been unable to withstand the greatest humiliation of his age.

Meanwhile, in Mecca, life went on in a strange way. After the agreement, the pilgrims returned. The circuits were performed. But in the corner where each circuit began, there was no stone. People turned towards that empty hollow, raised a hand and saluted the place, then began to walk. In the place of the sacred object stood the object's absence, and still people stopped at the same point and made the same gesture.

This detail reveals the greatest error in Abu Tahir's calculation. No one went to Hajar. The stone sat in his mosque, but not a single person counted that mosque a place of pilgrimage; no one changed direction. The object had moved; the sanctity had not. What people sought was not the stone, but the place where the stone belonged and the meaning attached to that place. The pilgrimage was made without the stone, and it went on being the pilgrimage. Abu Tahir never saw the stone go back. He died of smallpox in nine forty-four; he was about thirty-eight at the time. Pious sources prefer to describe his death in the grip of a hideous disease, rotting away, as a punishment sent from heaven. The more measured records we have point to an ordinary epidemic of the period. Either way, the young leader who had still been in his mid-twenties when he sacked Mecca was gone before he reached forty, and he left behind a stone that even he had not known what to do with.

Authority passed to his brothers and to the council descended from Abu Sa'id. And that council, unlike his older brother, saw that the thing in their hands was not a source of power but a burden too heavy to carry.

In the year nine fifty-one, a sack was left in the great mosque of Kufa.

Beside it lay a note saying what was inside. That one short sentence, as the sources report it, holds all the stubbornness of twenty-one years: we took it by a command, and by a command we have brought it back. No apology, no justification, no mention of a redeemer. Only the dry notice of a hand that gives as it took.

What brought the Qarmatians to this point is not precisely known; the sources offer different reasons. By one account, a large sum was paid in a bargain struck with the government in Baghdad. By another, holding the stone no longer carried any political return at all: the toll taken from the pilgrimage road was secure in any case, while the stone did nothing but keep the hatred of the whole Islamic world alive. For a movement that had lost its old fervour even among its own people after the upheaval of nine thirty-one, the empty space in the corner of the Kaaba was no longer a card to play, but a weight.

It was no accident that the stone was left in Kufa. The city was the soil in which the movement had been born, and at the same time a place Baghdad could easily reach. The sack was taken up, its contents were authenticated, and it was sent to Mecca. Tradition attaches a story of its own to that moment of verification: the stone, it is said, would not sink when thrown into water and would not grow hot in fire, and it was by this test that the returned fragments were known to be genuine. A story of the same kind travels along the road as well; the camel that carried the stone to Hajar is said to have perished on the way, while the camel that brought it back grew stronger with every mile. These tales were made in order to bear the sheer size of what had happened; they are not historical documents, but they do show how deep a mark those twenty-one years had left in people's minds.

The stone was set back in place in nine fifty-one. The hollow in the corner was closed. But what was closed was not the same as what had been prised out in nine thirty.

It had come back in pieces. Setting it in place meant holding those pieces together; it was mounted inside a silver frame, and the band that carried it was repaired and renewed. The silver ring you can see today in the eastern corner of the Kaaba, and the few dark fragments inside it, are the direct trace of that journey. Over the centuries that frame has been mended many times, replaced, remade; but its function, to hold the stone together, has never changed. One of the most touched objects in the world has stood from that day to this in a broken state, dependent on a frame.

The Qarmatian state outlived the stone, but it never recovered. On the toll it took from the pilgrimage road, the tribute it gathered from the surrounding regions and the date groves of al-Ahsa, it stayed on its feet for another century. That city with no taxes and free-running mills, which Nasir Khusraw described with such admiration in ten fifty-one, was in truth a city living on its past: the awaited redeemer had not come, people still remembered what the one said to have come in nine thirty-one had amounted to, and nobody dared make the same claim a second time. Their rule in the region came to an end in ten sixty-seven. Today, on that coast of eastern Arabia, what remains of a state that once minted its own coinage is a few lines of record and the memory of a stone's absence.

The real question that remains is where Abu Tahir was wrong. He thought holiness lay in the object. He imagined that if he took the stone, the centre would move with it, that people would turn in a new direction, that the address of the thing called pilgrimage would become Hajar. The stone stayed in his hands for twenty-one years, and in all those twenty-one years not a single pilgrim caravan went to Hajar. Even in the years when the stone was gone, pilgrims walked to Mecca, stood before the empty hollow, raised a hand and began the circling. What made the stone portable was physics; what made it sacred was the shared orientation of a community, and that was not something you could load onto a camel.

Anyone who looks at the silver frame in that corner today sees more than an old stone. The ring that holds the fragments together is the record of a morning on which an empire failed to protect its most sacred object, of a well filling with bodies, of caravans that for years could not set out, and of one silent sentence left in Kufa with a sack. The object came back, broken. Of the state built by the men who took it, not even a frame remains.

That brings us to the end of today's episode of Nöron Tarih. Until we meet again in a new story.