The Quran

125

وَإِذ جَعَلنَا البَيتَ مَثابَةً لِلنّاسِ وَأَمنًا وَاتَّخِذوا مِن مَقامِ إِبراهيمَ مُصَلًّى ۖ وَعَهِدنا إِلىٰ إِبراهيمَ وَإِسماعيلَ أَن طَهِّرا بَيتِيَ لِلطّائِفينَ وَالعاكِفينَ وَالرُّكَّعِ السُّجودِ

Muhammad Asad

AND LO! We made the Temple a goal to which people might repair again and again, and a sanctuary:¹ take then, the place whereon Abraham once stood as your place of prayer."²And thus did We command Abraham and Ishmael: "Purify My Temple for those who will walk around it,³ and those who will abide near it in meditation, and those who will bow down and prostrate themselves [in prayer]."

The Temple (al-bayt)- lit., "the House [of Worship]"'- mentioned here is the Ka'bah in Mecca. In other places the Qur'an speaks of it as "the Ancient Temple" (al-bayt al-'atiq), and frequently also as "the Inviolable House of Worship" (al-masjid al-haram ). Its prototype is said to have been built by Abraham as the first temple ever dedicated to the One God (see 3:96), and which for this reason has been instituted as the direction of prayer (qiblah) for all Muslims, and as the goal of the annually recurring pilgrimage (hajj). It is to be noted that even in pre-Islamic times the Ka'bah was associated with the memory of Abraham, whose personality had always been in the foreground of Arabian thought. According to very ancient Arabian traditions, it was at the site of what later became Mecca that Abraham, in order to placate Sarah, abandoned his Egyptian bondwoman Hagar and their child Ishmael after he had brought them there from Canaan. This is by no means improbable if one bears in mind that for a camel-riding bedouin (and Abraham was certainly one) a journey of twenty or even thirty days has never been anything out of the ordinary. At first glance, the Biblical statement (Genesis xii, 14) that it was "in the wilderness of Beersheba" (i.e., in the southernmost tip of Palestine) that Abraham left Hagar and Ishmael would seem to conflict with the Qur'anic account. This seeming contradiction, however, disappears as soon as we remember that to the ancient, town-dwelling Hebrews the term "wilderness of Beersheba" comprised all the desert regions south of Palestine, including the Hijaz. It was at the place where they had been abandoned that Hagar and Ishmael, after having discovered the spring which is now called the Well of Zamzam, eventually settled; and it may have been that very spring which in time induced a wandering group of bedouin families belonging to the South-Arabian (Qahtani) tribe of Jurhum to settle there. Ishmael later married a girl of this tribe, and so became the progenitor of the musta'ribah ("Arabianized") tribes - thus called on account of their descent from a Hebrew father and a Qahtani mother. As for Abraham, he is said to have often visited Hagar and Ishmael; and it was on the occasion of one of these periodic visits that he, aided by Ishmael, erected the original structure of the Ka'bah. (For more detailed accounts of the Abrahamic tradition, see Bukhari's Sahih, Kitab al-'Ilm, Tabari's Ta'rikh al-Umam, Ibn Sad, Ibn Hisham, Mas'fidi's Murai adh-Dhahab, Yaqut's Mu'jam al-Buldan, and other early Muslim historians.)
This may refer to the immediate vicinity of the Ka'bah or, more probably (Manor I, 461 f.), to the sacred precincts (haram) surrounding it. The word amn (lit., "safety") denotes in this context a sanctuary for all living beings.
The seven-fold circumambulation (tawaf) of the Ka'bah is one of the rites of the pilgrimage, symbolically indicating that all human actions and endeavours ought to have the idea of God and His oneness for their centre.