This book has investigated the Kaʿba by examining six of its predominantly spatial effects, six actions that comprise but do not complete the work of the Kaʿba in the Islamic world. These effects we re: the effect of the Kaʿba as qibla; the effect of the Kaʿba as axis and matrix mundi; the effect of the Kaʿba, specifically it foundations, as an architectural principle in the bedrock of the Islamic world; the effect of the Kaʿba as a circumambulated goal of pilgrimage and a site of spiritual union for mystics and Sufis; and the dual effects of the Kaʿba as a house that is imagined to shelter temporarily an animating force but which otherwise holds a void. To each effect a chapter was devoted, with the principal findings recapitulated at the chapter's end.

In the course of examining these effects, a number of secondary findings were made in addition to the principal ones, some equally more suggestive than conclusive. Unlike the principal findings, however, these findings were not repeated in summary form at each chapter's end. I am therefore devoting this Conclusion to them, not to another encapsulation of the book's principal findings. I kindly refer the reader to the chapters’ conclusions should this decision prove disappointing.

From Chapter One, chief among the secondary findings was the likelihood that the Kaʿba played a ritual role for the proto-Muslim community of Believers from a very early period, contrary to revisionist claims. If, as argued, the earliest Islamic settlements were oriented to the Kaʿba, then its cultic importance already in the first half of the first Islamic century would seem to be beyond reasonable doubt. The possibility that this importance was due to the community's desire to remain participants in salvation history, an idea prompted by Neuwirth, remains compelling, I believe.

Also from Chapter One was the finding that whilst it was not uncommon for medieval and pre-modern sacrosanct leaders – caliphs and kings – to be personified as the Kaʿba, the Prophet was probably not personified that way before the Mughal period, when Qāsim-i Kāhī called him ‘everyone’s intended Kaʿba’.

From Chapter Two, a secondary finding of note was the possibility that the celestial Kaʿba, the Frequented House, was not a borrowing of Jewish Temple lore. If King was correct in interpreting the Meccan Kaʿba as a microcosm of the pre-Islamic universe, then he was likely also correct in surmising that Temple lore did not underpin the Islamic belief that the Kaʿba was a copy of the Frequented House.