Impressions of the Kaaba

A unique, almost impressionistic response to seeing the Kaaba was written by Islam from inside.

My first encounter with the grand mosque was a slow recession backwards into time. As I entered through the mammoth doorway and walked across the cool marble floors I left behind the dissonance of congested traffic and the commotion and agitation of Mecca's busy streets and markets. Endless rows of pillars and high archways floated past as I made my way through vast, warmly hued halls, lined with row upon row of thick, yielding, richly textured rugs. The timbre of the colors and textures was overwhelming. I was reminded of a hike through an old growth forest in Canada, where towering tree trunks rose to make an arched canopy of intertwined branches and the forest floor was a soft, silencing carpet of fallen leaves.

and here:

I stood and watched the tawaf for a long time. The tawaf consists of walking around the Kaaba seven times. Each circuit begins with raising the right hand in a salute of acknowledgment towards the black stone (called the hajar-al-aswad) embedded in one corner of the Kaaba. The raising of the hand is a substitute for kissing this stone since it is almost impossible to get close enough to accomplish that - there is forever a tight knot of people around the stone, all pressing inward in an attempt to touch or kiss it. If you approach too close to this endlessly forming and reforming knot you are squeezed so forcefully that your feet leave the ground and you have no control over where you are carried.

Then, the gravitational presence of the Kaaba tugged at me and I was drawn into the tawaf. Immediately, I was caught in the press and flow of bodies. Heat and sweat engulfed me and the physical presence of the crowd of pilgrims pressing in around me became the direct focus of my concentration. I wiped at the rivulets that streamed off my forehead and walked forward swept along by the inundating flood of humanity in which I was immersed.

The crowd shifted and flowed around me - an organized chaos of particles they bumped along in a curved path around the Kaaba like electrons in orbit around a nucleus. Everyone was focused inwardly on their own individual recitations and concentrating on their own tawaf. In front of me an aged blind man, his pure white hair and beard glowing in the sun, leaned on a wooden staff as he performed his circuits unguided except by the sounds of the crowd and the movement of bodies around him. His free hand would rise occasionally, palm upwards in supplication as he would speak a prayer. What was it like to do this tawaf in darkness, with no visual cues, no images to process. Did he sense the looming presence of the Kaaba by his side, was he able to turn his consciousness completely inward without the incredible spectacle of the tawaf to distract him? I closed my eyes and for a few steps walked blind.

A swirling eddy of sounds came and went as people passed by or as I passed by them. Some traveled in groups loudly reciting quran'ic verses in unison, some whispered to themselves - others moved in silence and I knew their presence only by their touch as they brushed past. The sounds ebbed and flowed in my consciousness as if I was a leaf floating on a river of prayers - currents and eddies of supplications tugging my consciousness this way and that.

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