Quraysh Rebuilds the House

Now the people of Quraysh wanted to rebuild it. They gathered together, and they had to tear it down, but none of them agreed to make that move. So they were all waiting, ready with their equipment around the Kaʿbah, but no one wanted to go ahead and start bringing it down. That is how much honour and respect they had for the Kaʿbah in their hearts, even though at the time they were mushrikīn. But they feared Allah (swt), and they thought that it's a dangerous thing to tear down the walls of the Kaʿbah. And then one of them said, "I'll be the first to do it." And he gathered all of his sons, and they came early in the morning, and they started bringing the rocks of the Kaʿbah down, and they were saying, "Oh Allah, don't be afraid, all we want is good." So this shows also their false understanding of the divinity of Allah—they were trying to calm God by telling Him, "Don't be afraid, all what we want is good." Allah knows what's in your hearts; He does not need to be told that. So even though they believed in Allah, in terms of the attributes of Allah they had some problems with that.

So they brought down the walls of the Kaʿbah. Now, it happened that there was a Roman ship that crashed on a port on the Red Sea close to Makkah. So they brought some of the wood from that ship, and there was a Roman builder who was on that ship, so they also had him help with the wood. So this was the first time they made the roof of the Kaʿbah, the ceiling of the Kaʿbah, from wood. They used some of the wood from this ship.

The people of Quraysh knew that money from interest was no good, and they made the decision that they're only going to use ḥalāl money in the rebuilding of the Kaʿbah. They're not going to use money from interest or money from prostitution, because at the time—to show their corruptness, there's a hadith narrated by al-Bukhārī, from ʿĀʾishah, who talks about the types of marriages that existed in Arabia; it is on page eleven, for anyone who wants to refer to it later on—but the prostitution was something that existed, and there would be men hiring their slave girls as an income-generating source for them. But they knew that this wasn't good. They would do it, they would deal with interest, but they knew that this wasn't good. So they decided that they're not going to use this money in the rebuilding of the Kaʿbah.

Since they ran short of funds, they ended up shortening—the Kaʿbah originally was a bit of a rectangle rather than a square. Because the people of Quraysh ran short of funds, they ended up shortening the Kaʿbah from one side, so they made it a square rather than a rectangle to save money. The area of the Kaʿbah which they left out is what is referred to today as al-Ḥijr, the enclosed area in that semicircle—if you ever visited the Kaʿbah, you would see that on one side of the Kaʿbah there's a semicircle that used to be part of the original building of the Kaʿbah. And the Kaʿbah also had two gates; they made it one, and they raised the doorstep. So now, in order to get access to the door, one has to climb—the gate was made very high.