Again, all this points to God as a regulative matter of “moral faith,” without any pretense of establishing any theological knowledge (which would violate Kant’s own epistemology). “Have a little faith,” people will say, but what does it mean? When Mohammed began receiving revelations from God (he received his first one about five years after the incident with the Black Stone) and preaching his message of monotheism, the rich Qurayshi merchants started getting a little antsy. There is very little inside it, though – just three tall stone pillars, a small table, some hanging lamp-looking things, and a staircase to the roof. Badral-Din Awliya. They are found in Akyab, Sandoway and on a small island off Mergui. 90 total particles can be found to exist, there will be more Universe to reveal itself to us in the future. India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka can be found in which subregion of Asia? Subtle Daoist influence on the Korean mind can be seen to this day in artistic expressions and geographical designations. This cloth is known as the kiswah, and it is replaced yearly, on the second day of the hajj.

On the second day of hajj, pilgrims wake at dawn and walk a short distance to Mount Arafat, where they spend the remainder of the day on or near the mountain in quiet worship and contemplation of God. The only ritual that is solely related to Mohammed is the climbing of Mount Arafat, which is where Mohammed preached his last sermon. There is a famous story in Islam about Mohammed and the Black Stone. His solution was to put the stone on a large cloth and have each of the leaders of the four tribes hold a corner of the cloth and carry the stone to its place. One of Mohammed’s first acts upon taking control of the city was to go into the Kaaba and smash the idol of Hubal and the hundreds of other idols to pieces, rededicating the shrine as a place of worship of the one God. The story goes that when construction was finished and it came time to place the Black Stone back in the eastern corner, the final step, the tribes of Mecca argued fiercely over who would get to do the honors. Other rituals include a ceremony where pilgrims throw small pebbles at three large stone walls, called jamarat, to symbolize the stoning the devil that tempted Abraham to defy God, and the slaughtering of an animal (usually a sheep) to honor the animal Abraham slaughtered instead of his son.

There is also a ritual called Sa’ee, in which pilgrims walk back and forth between the two hills of Safa and Marwah seven times to commemorate Hagar’s frantic search for water for her infant son. The most well-known ritual is the tawaf (literally “circumambulation”), during which pilgrims circle the Kaaba counterclockwise seven times at both the very beginning and the very end of the hajj. Today, the Kaaba is kept closed during the hajj because of the overwhelming number of people, but those who visit the Kaaba during other times of the year are sometimes allowed to go inside. Islamic tradition holds that although Abraham built the Kaaba to worship the one God, over time the Kaaba had been more or less co-opted by the various pagan tribes in the area, all of whom had placed idols to their preferred deity inside the Kaaba, thereby “corrupting” it. This is known as the Station of Abraham and is said to be the stone where Abraham stood while watching over the construction of the Kaaba. While Abraham was building the Kaaba, so the legend goes, the angel Gabriel came down and gave Abraham the famous Black Stone, which he placed in the eastern corner of the structure.

The Kaaba’s edges are not all the same length, so therefore it is best described as a “cuboid,” not a “cube.” It is covered by a black silk cloth decorated with verses of the Quran in gold-embroidered Arabic calligraphy. Today, both hills are enclosed within the Masjid al-Haram (Sacred Mosque) complex (which also houses the Kaaba), and the path between the hills is a long, beautiful indoor gallery with marble floors and air conditioning. It’s quite beautiful: The walls are white marble on the lower half and green cloth on the upper half. That has happened before: In 2015, WND published a three-part series written pseudonymously by someone who claimed to be a white British non-Muslim man who successfully fake-converted to Islam and went on hajj. They decided to ask the next man who walked by to decide for them, and that man happened to be Mohammed. Access to the Kaaba (and thus the idol) was controlled by the powerful Quraysh tribe, of which Mohammed was a member, and they basically capitalized on this to get rich, charging fees and selling wares to pilgrims coming to worship the idol. There is another squarish stone on the ground a few feet away from the Kaaba with what look like two footprints in it.