المسجد الحرام

المسجد الحرام

مكة المكرمة

The mosque in Mecca. Al-Muqaddasi's eyewitness portrait c. 375 AH — marble columns carried by the Mahdi's order from Alexandria to Jeddah by sea, three marble-pillared arcades clad in mosaics made by Syrian and Egyptian craftsmen whose names he could still read, nineteen gates including Bab Bani Shayba and Bab al-Nadwa, brass lamp-rings around the tawaf fed with candles by the kings of Egypt and Yemen, and three basins filled by Zubayda's channel ¹. Four centuries on, Ibn Fadl Allah al-Umari measures the Kaaba cubit by cubit — four cubits from door to Black Stone, the Multazam; the sealed door in its back called 'the refuge from sins'; its gilded door renewed under the Nasiri sultans after the old plates were valued at eighteen thousand dinars ².