This chapter concerns the principal ritual regarding the Kaʿba, the ṭawāf, or sevenfold circumambulation of the House, without which no pilgrimage to Mecca is valid. Although entering the Kaʿba is permissible, if restricted, no ritual is prescribed for the interior. Rather, the exterior of the Kaʿba is where the rituals are performed, principally the obligatory ṭawāf, but also the recommended pressing of one's body against the Multazam, a section of wall commonly identified as being between the door and the Black Stone. As I shall argue, in circling and hovering just outside the building in this way, the pilgrim temporarily fuses with Kaʿba; momentarily, the seeker and their goal, the ‘lover’ and the ‘beloved’, unite.

The chapter is in three parts. Part one describes the ṭawāf and looks at some of the meanings that have been attributed to the ritual. It examines an issue in Islamic studies of attributing meaning to ritual and relates it to a similar issue in Islamic architectural scholarship. This examination leads on to a discussion, first broached in the Introduction, of why the Kaʿba is all but absent in this scholarship and how this oversight is unjustifiable from the perspective of both Islamic tradition and Islamic architectural inscriptions. Part two refers to early, medieval and pre-modern pilgrims’ experiential accounts of the ṭawāf so as to investigate, with regard to the Kaʿba, what Lindsay Jones calls the ‘ritual-architectural event’ of architecture. Ibn ʿArabī's account forms the core of this investigation. Part three takes its findings and, in the light of them, reviews an important and well-known academic work regarding the Kaʿba as a bride.

Part One: Ṭawāf and the Meaning of Architecture

The ṭawāf, from the Arabic verb ṭawāfa, ‘to go about’, is a ritual specific to the Kaʿba, where it involves the sevenfold circumambulation of the House's walls and semicircular Ḥijr. It is not limited in the number of times a pilgrim can perform it; rather, as the Moroccan traveller Ibn Baṭṭūṭa (d. 770/1369 or 778/1377) observed during his time in Mecca, some people perform it almost ceaselessly. This is an obsession that can end up in divorce, as he himself witnessed.