EJ Brill and the Ka'ba

Islam is a conformist, non-thinking cult. It is a sin for cult members to question any aspects of Moslem liturgy and practice. Apostasy is of course punishable with death. Outsiders are untermenschen, and are described in the Koran as unclean, unjust, stupid, evil, in league with Satan, hypocritical, and untrustworthy. These are hardly adjectives and appellations of love, tolerance and compassion. One central Moslem myth is that the Kabaa shrine, or 'cube', was a holy place dedicated by Abraham to the Abrahamic God, who or which, has absolutely nothing in common with Al-Lah, or the northern Arabian moon deity. But this lie is necessary in order to put Islam and its shrine which contains the idol of Al-Lah and a divinely created black rock, a centrality and supremacism denied to both Judaism and Christianity. In other words the veneration of the Kabaa as a holy place is meant to displace and suprecede any such localities worshipped by the Jews and Christians. As historian EJ Brill in the First Encyclopedia of Islam states:

On the other hand Muslim legend has developed the passage, Sura iii. 90: "Truly, the first temple that was founded for men is that in Bakka; a blessed house and a guidance for (all) creatures". The ambiguous expression according to which lbrahim and Isma'il "raised" the foundations of the Ka'ba left room for the view that the foundations already existed on which he erected the building. [p. 587-591]

Sura 3:90 [analyzed here] is a long chapter on why Arabs must accept Muhammad's rule [via his family deity the Al-lah]; and why Unbelievers will be punished. Sura 3 like the entire Koran is quite viciously manichean. Muhammad's followers are good and blessed. The rest are cursed. Part of the proof of this dichotomy is that the Al-Lah thing chose the Kabaa area as the holiest place on earth. In fact of course the Kabaa had existed for well over a millennia before the rise of Muhammadanism. But reality never gets in the way of the cult and its distortions. Muhammad and Moslems took the 'legend' of Abraham and the roots of Judaism and made them their own. How convenient.

The alleged religion of Abraham gave a basis for the esteem in which the Muslims held the Ka'ba. Legend attached itself to the Kur'anic statements and spun them out. As Snouck Ilurgronje has proved in his Mekkaansche Feest against Dozy's hypotheses (see his Israelielen in Mekka), there can be no question of a local Meccan tradition in this connection. There was, it is true, a local tradition, but it consists of semi-historical reminiscences of the last few centuries before Islam. But all that tradition relates regarding the origin of the Ka'ba and its connections with Biblical personages, belongs to Islamic legend. [ibid]

Muhammad took the area of the Kabaa which was used in various forms as a forum for political discussion, a market place, a scene of fertility rites and even an area of sex orgies, and turned it into the central point and locus in the worship of the Al-Lah thing. The Hajj which in distant times had been a fertility ritual for women who rubbed black stones against their genitalia to improve the chances of birthing males; was yoked to the Kabaa and changed into a mandatory pilgrimage. Cults work best when the members are dumbed-down and ritualized. The Kabaa and the Hajj enforce this mindlessness in a manner that is both total and unrelenting.

The intent to displace the 'Jews' is obvious in Muhammad's declaration of a 'new' Kabaa, one dedicated only to the moon idol the El-Lah thing; and an area of pious observance of the rites of Moslem ritualization and by extension, the worship of the great man himself, Muhammad:

This legendary story of the origin of the Ka'ba was easily brought into conformity with the cosmological views current among Christians and Jews in the East, the central point of which was the sanctuary itself. Muslim tradition at first adopted this cosmology completely, as is evident from the statements which are still wholly under the influence of the predominance of Jerusalem. They were however not content with this and transferred a considerable part of these sayings to Mecca. [ibid]

Islam and the Koran stole whole tracts from Judaism. The Kabaa's purpose was as much political as spiritual. All cults need a concrete center. Muhammad, mad though he may well have been, possessed a peasant cunning which understood that human nature demands an alignment of the spiritual with the definite. The Kabaa was if nothing else, a master-stroke at cult inculcation.