Saudi Arabia: Black Stone Of Mecca Revealed To Be A Meteorite

Mecca| A group of geologists from Oxford University have finally lifted the veil upon one of the most intriguing cultural and religious mysteries of the Islamic faith: Where did the Black Stone of Mecca originate? Every year, millions of muslim pilgrims gather around the Kaaba, also known as the Sacred House, a cubic-shaped building at the centre of Islam’s most sacred mosque, Al-Masjid al-Haram, in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, for the ritual of the hajj, where pilgrims must walk seven times around the Kaaba in a counterclockwise direction, a ceremonial practice that has endured for fourteen centuries.

According to Islamic tradition, the stone was set intact into the Kaaba’s wall by the Islamic prophet Muhammad in the year 605 A.D., five years before his first revelation. Since then it has been broken into a number of fragments and is now cemented into a silver frame in the side of the Kaaba. Its physical appearance is that of a fragmented dark rock, polished smooth by the hands of millions of pilgrims.

Islamic tradition holds that it fell from Heaven to show Adam and Eve where to build an altar

Anthony Hampton and his team of geologists had, from the beginning, a major problem to further their examination of the Stone of the Kaaba since it may not be examined or fragments taken from it. “Part of the fog surrounding this stone is that the stone’s caretakers haven’t allowed any scientific tests to be performed on the stone, for obvious cultural and religious reasons, so we had to think of other ways of gathering information about this sacred object” he explains.

Local samples of sand where taken from a 2 km radius from the emplacement of the stone, which revealed its first clues. “We found important quantities of iridium, a metal that is found in meteorites with an abundance much higher than its average abundance in the Earth’s crust. We also found many shatter cones, a rare geological feature that is only known to form in the bedrock beneath meteorite impact craters or underground nuclear explosions” he adds.

Multiple evidence of shatter cones near Mecca prove that local rock formations in the surrounding area have been subjected to extreme shock and pressures The team of researchers hope the discovery will help shed light on the origin of the stone but also on the origins of Islam itself. “It is very interesting to see how, what started as the pagan worship of a meteorite, bloomed into, a few centuries later, a monotheistic religion that has spread around the world” comments religious historian Ahmed Ben Alifa.