From the Vault: Black Stone of Mecca

into it now, go on the journey with us. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Today we're gonna be talking a little bit about religion, a little bit about geology, a little bit about about space and science. But I wanted to start off thinking about the idea of sacred places. For some reason, they're there are always central places that people want to go to

and experience personally and stand in. All I think about the in the secular version, they're like, you know, museums and stuff like this. Oh yeah, when I went to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. I remember feeling a kind of church like sensation, even though those bonkers of people running all over and making all kinds of noise. Uh, I had this sense of like I'm in a special place. Oh yeah, this is a

different place. Yes, well, I think I think museums are a great example because I feel the same way about the MET And absolutely yeah, like it's it's so fils like just you just as a place. It's very much the place of pilgrimage for individuals are interested in history and art and religion. And and then you go in and you have all of these pieces that themselves are from all of these distant sacred places and sacred times.

Oh totally yeah, it's great. Like you get to go to the it's almost like the catch net for for

sacred places throughout history. But when you go to a sacred place like this the you know, these places that have a history, I almost feel like you are you're playing on the same kind of awe that you might experience if you went to and believed in a haunted house that like that that some somehow a kind of energy has collected there over time and it it gives you this sense of the sense of being part of history.

To be there. Yeah, I mean we we sort of map out our worlds with these with these pin points, uh, that that all the energy seems to converge around. Uh. And then when we visit those places, we're we're taking part in that energy. We have all these expectations, and then we're engaging in sort of the collective expectations of

that place. Now, this is certainly something we've covered on Stuff to Blow of Mind in the past, that being a Stendahl syndrome or Jerusalem syndrome, the idea where when someone finally visits one of these places that means a lot to them personally. Be it Jerusalem, uh, be it, in the case of today's episode, Mecca, or be it just a museum or to stand before a particular piece of art that that carries a lot of weight with you. You enter into it with all these expectations. Then you're

finally there, and it can be overwhelming. It can be mentally overwhelming and physically overwhelming to actually be there at at this lynch pin of your life. Yeah, despite having lived in the world your whole life, suddenly you feel that you have connected with with again the sense of history, like here's a place that that will continue to be

visited and written about and now I'm here. Yeah. And it could be an historical cathedral, it could be Stonehenge, it could be a restaurant that was used as a filming location from movie you like, but whatever it is, like, this is a place that that has value that seems to extend beyond your life. Now, of course we've been talking about you know, our our favorite secular examples, museums

or whatever. But I'd say you probably have to amplify this feeling of importance connected to place, even more so for religious believers and the sites that are sacred to their personal religious beliefs. And of course one of the sites that is sacred to millions of people around the world will be found in Mecca in Saudi Arabia. That's right.

As far as sacred places go, and the and the collective capital of belief that goes into attributing them as such, the Haram Mosque or the Grand Mosque in Mecca is easily one of the most sacred places on earth. Uh is one of the five pillars of Islam. Every able bodied Muslim has to embark on a pilgrimage to Mecca,

and this is known as the Hodge. On the way, you conduct a series of rituals, including the stoning of the devil in Mina, and finally you conduct seven revolution san's within the Haram Mosque circling the Holy Kabba building, which is this essentially, this this dark cube. It's featured in the art for this episode, and I'm sure everyone

out there seeing the images of it. Of course, if you haven't, you should go look it up because you should have this in mind, this this dark stone building with with the tapestries draped on it versus from the Koran. And then at one corner of the building something very special. Yeah, the eastern exterior corner includes something that is known as the black Stone or the al Hajar alha squad. Uh. This uh, this, it's this is going to be the

object that we're talking about here. As you pass it, you touch, you touch it, if you can, you kiss it if you can. If you can't reach it, you you point at it. But to touch the stone, it is said, is to enter into a contract with God. And I've seen translations that indicate that the black Stone itself is the right hand of God on Earth. Now, later in this episode, we're going to be exploring what the black Stone might be from a geological standpoint, what

it's it's history and significance is within the religion. But I guess first maybe we should just take a look at the site itself at large, the Kabba. Yeah, the Coba itself is a very holy place in Islamic tradition, and it's it's uh. We're gonna in all of this, as we do with any religion, We're gonna we discuss, you know, we're gonna sort of divide between the mythic history, the religious ideas of what this is and where it came from, as well as what we actually know from history.

But according to uh, to tradition, the Kaaba was constructed by Abraham, and its four corners a line with the four compass points. It's made of great blocks of granite. But the the holy black stone itself burns with an even greater mysticism. So this black stone here, that's uh, that's that's set in this in cement and surrounded by silver here and again the eastern corner of the Cabba stone. It's not a single stone or at least, it's not

actually a single stone anymore. Rather, it consists of eight pieces of various size, seemingly the same rock, seemingly the same origin, and they're submitted together surrounded by a silver frame. And the largest fragment is said to be about the size of a date. So that's not very big, right, Yeah, it's these things go. So sometimes you just hear about

the black stone eager to match something larger. I must say that I always thought before reading about this for for the episode today, that it was a single stone, and I thought it was sort of like one very large jet black stone. And the reason for that is that there are not very good pictures of it out there, that's right. Uh, So you know, generally this is not something that people photograph very much. The photographs of it that do exist or kind of sometimes grainy or low

quality or from a distance. Uh, there's just not ideal documentation conditions. But which is crazy, considering this is probably of the most viewed objects on the planet. Yeah, it's amazing. It's it's something that you know, millions and millions of people have personally laid eyes on. But but it's very hard to find a good picture of it. Um. But yeah, so what you see in most of these pictures is there is this silver It almost looks like a like

a like a basin turned sideways or something. It's this silver collar that's built into the corner of the building. And then inside this silver bowl there is just this dark abyss. Generally is all you can see from the outside.

So if I had to guess before I started reading the research on it what this was, I would think it was like a large piece of obsidian or something like that, just a large flat black surface that is is smooth and dark and people uh, and you know, people pass by and and touch it and kiss it. But no, it turns out that there's actually a good bit more texture going on inside, which makes identifying the geology of the of the black stone all the more interesting. Yeah.

So the pieces that are set in the cement, they've been touched so many times they have there's a smoothness to them. Um, and uh, it's all the worth worth noting, like these are pieces of something that was once whole.

And we'll get into that in a bit. Various authors have commented on it and tried to you know, they're they're varying figures that have come out over the years, over the centuries, really Westerners getting a glimpse of it, looking at it, trying to figure out how how big it is the pieces are now and how big it might have been when it was a one piece. Um. There is a paper by Elizabeth Thompson which we're gonna refer to several times here. She was from the University

of Copenhagen. She wrote a paper in in Meteoritics in nineteen eighty titled New Light on the Origin of the Holy Black Stone of the Kabba, and she did some some figuring here, and she says that the the possible original size of the stone would have been by twenty or nine eight inches by seven point eight by seven point eight, which would have made it what possibly about the size of a cantaloupe originally basically cannel And I

rough estimate estimate here. I've never measured a cantaloupe. Robert Well, I I did some I was at home when I was doing this portion of the notes, and I was like, all right, well, how big is that? Let me think is that what fruit does that align with? And the best I can tell, possibly candaloupe? Uh fruit or um Islamic history esque experts may have may differ on that. Now, as for the color, this is another interesting thing because again you look at it, you just see darkness surrounded

called the black stone. So what color is it? That is actually kind of difficult to decide on as well, because various accounts have described it as brownish black or blackish brown, or reddish black or deep reddish brown, and some accounts also speak to a coal like matrix to it. I think I've read that that was only one account that actually said at least one account yeah, then said coal like matrix, But most accounts point out that they're

yellow spots pointed white crystals. There's also a possible interior that is described as gray, so it's not just this obsidian or charcoal like stone, but rather something that has you know, flex of other color in them. Right there there are these little pieces of yellow or white. And then there are also some reports that inside the stone it is white, or that like covered parts of the stone that are not exposed in the in the cemented,

cemented paved surface are white. Another claim we should probably deal with because it does figure big into scientists trying to figure out what type of rock or mineral this is, is that it allegedly, according to very old reports, floats in water. Yes, this is this is something that comes up with time or two in the actual in the historical record of the stone where supposedly this was used to authenticated after it has been stolen in return. And we'll get into that story in a bit that was

in like the tenth century. Yes, yeah, So the idea that they could tell it's the stone by placing it in water and seeing it would float, well, not many

stones float, so that would be a unique identifier. But I guess that that does just depend on taking that story as accurate, right, And that's one of the that's one of the problems, the challenges, the tantalizing aspects of this whole exercise and discussing what this stone actually consists of from a scientific standpoint, because you're you're left to draw on all these varying accounts and very limited uh you know, observational data about the stone. Yeah, I mean

one of the features of the stone. So one of the things about observing the stone that you have to understand is that it is sort of the mechanics of how the ritual the Kaba works. People are constantly circling this and there. You know, there might be thousands of people in there, all trying to get up to the stone to kiss it, or to point at it, or to touch it. And so you are not in a situation where you can sit there and look at it

and take notes. Right. This is not a museum, right. Uh. No, it might be more like in the louver where you try to get a good look at the Mona Lisa, but there's just people cramming in from all sides and pushing you. I mean, I've read reports about people trying to get a good look at the stone and and they're they're always reports mentioning just the crowd pushing you along, not being able to get up close to it. Or they're also guards there, and sometimes guards will push you along,

move you out of the way. Uh. You can sort of understand why, I mean that they don't want to have a case of crowd crush or something like that with the people there. Yeah. I mean, so you have and on top of all of this, you have your you're sort of religious expectations. You have the whole Stendahl

syndrome coming into play here. As you're beholding it now, Robert, I think you had a couple of accounts you were reading of people talking about visiting the Kabba, right, Yeah, I just I tend to find the idea of early Westerners visiting Mecca and seeing the Kabba in the stone. I find those really fascinating. And so I just had had had mainly two here I wanted to to highlight. And there's a third one that that we end up

referencing later. So the first one that to reference here, Swiss traveler and Arabic speaker Johann Ludwig Burkhardt, visited Mecca in eighteen fourteen, so he was very much an Arabic speaker enthusiast. He was he converted to Islam. This is also the guy who rediscovered the ruins of Petra, which if you're if you're if you're still foggy on what Petra is, think to what Indiana Jones in the last year said that is that the treasury building of Petra,

that's the one set in the cliff fool. Yeah, the tomb of the grail. There were not the tomb, the resting place, the booby trap place, Yes, the booby trap place with the with the with all the grail stuff. In reality, of course, that is Petra and does not have booby trap, does not have boot traps. Now, one of the most notable individuals, one of one of my favorites to visit Mecca in early times as a Westerner

is Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. He visited in eighteen fifty three, and Burton was also allegedly a convert to Islam and earlier possible convert to Hinduism. He's a difficult guy to pin down and it sounds like I'm being vague here. So he spoke twenty five distinct languages, not counting dialects. He was something of a bisexual, hedonist, a spy and explore. He was endlessly fascinated with other cultures, languages,

modes of human sexuality. And he's probably some commentators classify him more as an atheist, but his exploration into Hinduism and Islam are are often referred to his conversions. Like

he didn't just study them, he became them. Yeah, like that that's kind of my my my read on him, Like here's a guy who learned all these languages, and in using these languages, you kind of have to change the way your brain operates, and even to fake, like even just to if you were to assume, okay, someone like Burton, um they just faked Islamic belief in order to go on the hodge like to fake that, you would still have to be so versed in a deep

understanding of the culture the rights entailed there, Like your cover would be so deep. How would you keep it

from overcoming you? I mean, in one sense it almost you almost want to say that to fully understand someone else's religion, you almost have to be able to mentally convert to it, and kind of hypothetical sense to like to try to see what it looks like from the inside, right, And then at the same time, like Burton again as fascinating character, we can't get to everything he did here, but he wrote a lot about his his travels and his ideas and his his observations, and at times too

he kind of waffles back and forth. Sometimes he sounds you know, very much uh, you know, at one with his lam and and and intrigued by it. Other times he still still see some of that English colonial um mentality rising to the surface, and he sounds a bit dismissive, Like I said, very very fascinating guy. Difficult guy to to nail down. But here's a quick quote from his

writings about beholding the stone. He said, after thus reaching the stone, despite popular indignation, testified by impatient shouts, we monopolize the use of it for at least ten minutes. Yeah, which is quite a lot. When you see the crowd pictures right whilst kissing it and rubbing hands and forehead upon it. I narrowly observed it and came away persuaded that it is an aerial light. Other travelers, including Burkhardt,

had thought it volcanic in origin. Right, So here we're starting to get to the question of what the stone is geologically. A lot of commentators throughout the years have assumed that it was that it was lava of some kind of basalt, things like that. But here's the idea that it's an aero light, that it is a type of meteorite, a space rock. Right. And to understand why this idea is so appealing, we have to discuss the mythic the religious history of the stone a little bit.

So if you if you dive into Islamic tradition and Islamic belief. There's a basic kind of a Damic origin story and play here. So depending on how you interpret this origin story, the black Stone dates back to either Abraham or Adam, the first created human. So one interpretation is that Adam built the first Kaba on earth, and here he sat on a white stone okay, a stone

that turned black with the all of man. And the first Kaba was then destroyed in the Great Flood, and it wasn't until later that Abraham was tasked with rebuilding it or building the first cabin, depending on the telling. H Another idea here is that this was a meteorite brought to Abraham by the archangel Gabriel from the mountain side where it had fallen, or that it originally was

one of the stars of Paradise. Yeah. Now, one of the reasons they're they're kind of varying takes on this is because the black Stone, as I understand it, is not actually mentioned in the Koran. It is uh. It comes from additional Islamic sources and just sort of traditions. To me, that's always some of the most interesting things you find in any religion is the stuff that's not necessarily straight in the middle of the cannon, but but

not necessarily out of the mainstream cannon either. It's sort of like it comes from additional traditional material the the you know, the metadata of the religion, right. I think we've touched on this before, discussions of of heaven, hell, and purgatory in Christian and Catholic traditions and where those ideas come from, because certainly, if you're looking for a strict definition of those things within the older New Testament, uh,

those details are not really forthcoming. No, you get a few hints, but you're not going to find Dante in the Bible right now. In terms of what the stone does. Already mentioned that it's it's it's considered the right hand of God. To touch it is to enter into a contract with God, and there are additional powers that have been attributed to it. Oh, and I believe this comes from the writings of one Heinrich von Maltson Well visited this the Mecca as well in eighteen fifty eight, coming

after the two individuals we already mentioned. Yes, supposedly so so von maltzon Um. I want to be careful about citing him because he strikes me as perhaps unreliable and definitely unsympathetic. Like he wrote this eighteen sixty five book in German called Mina walfartnc Mecha, which means My Pilgrimage

to Mecca. The books in German. I've not found an official published translation, but using Google Translate, I did a little uh looking through this book and he um, he strikes me as an sort of unsympathetic and perhaps uncomprehending outsider. So I wouldn't use him as a as a very reliable account of what the people on the Hajj in

in the nineteenth century we're actually believing. But he at least claims, possibly wrongly, that the Pilgrims at the time believed that it was impossible to destroy the Kabba and the and impossible to destroy the black Stone itself. Uh so he said that you know, they were attributing these miraculous powers to it. Now I know, um, you know, within every religion there's always going to be plenty of

diversity of opinion and different ideas. But I know one strong tradition, and it's mom probably not adhered to by all Muslims, is the idea that you know that that there aren't miraculous objects you know that that that essentially people aren't going to do miracles for you. Objects aren't going to be miraculous. But if this account of is correct, there are at least some slightly miraculous uh properties attributed

to the stone at some points in history. But then again, as I say, this guy kind seems like a jerk and like he's maybe not understanding things correctly, Like he seems disgusted by the rituals. He doesn't at one point he's like, I had to go and kiss the stone, and he calls it the monster, So he's he's perhaps not looking at the stone from the perspective of of an outsider who has converted to it to Islam and is fully uh fully accepting any of the ideas and

traditions around it. Yeah, or even just trying for the sake of understanding, to get into that headspace and what what does this mean to the insider, to the believer.

And then as far as the future is concerned, there are tales that are on the Day of Judgment, uh, it is said that the stone will grow eyes, mouth, and tongue, and that it will see and speak, and it will witness in favor of all those who touched it with sincere hearts, which I think is wow, quite a visual that one kind of gives me a chill bumps.

The idea of the stone sort of becoming this floating face that then speaks on behalf to God of those who actually touched it and entered into that contract with with with it not just a mouth but a tongue. That's good. Well, maybe we should take a break, yeah, and then when we do, we can discuss a little bit more about the supposed history of this stone and then get into some of the geological ideas about what it is and where it came from. Than alright, we're back.

So the stone, the black Stone here, it actually predates Islam. So it was it was there when Mohammed the Prophet came into Mecca. And this is the fact that's acknowledged by Islamic tradition, not contrary to it. Right right, Yeah, this is this is pretty settled as far as I understand it. So in Persian legend it was supposedly a symbol of the planet Saturn. That was a tip that I read in a Brewer's dictionary phrase and fable. Now,

according to Oliver C. Farrington's writings. In nineteen hundred, he wrote an article that the worship and folklore of Meteorites. He says that the worship of the stone by Arabian tribes is first spoken spoken of by Greek writers of early times, and that the Kabba definitely existed as a as a shrine as early as two hundred CE, and the black Stone was part of it. So this would have been, you know, a shrine that entailed venerated objects div ooted to different deities and among them was the

black Stone. Yeah, and so like having idols there, like I know, part of the Islamic tradition is the idea of removing the idols from the Kaba, right right, And that's exactly what happened in UH six thirty C. That's when when the prophet entered Mecca, purged the Kabba of idols, reportedly destroying something like three three hundred sixty idols. But as often is the case with holy places in history,

the Kaaba and the stone retained their sacred aspects. We see this in Islamic history all the time as well, such as the function of the Greek Parthenon as a mosque during Ottoman occupation. This was something I really didn't know a lot of a lot about until recently when I attended a talk at at Emory University. How they

you had? They had it was converted into a mosque the Parthenon, and then when the Parthenon was put was partially destroyed, you had sort of the gutted Parthenon, and in the at all they had this, uh, this this kind of cubicle mosque that actually reminds one a little bit of the Kabba. Wow. Yeah, that's fascinating. I've never heard that before. Now, there was a lot of turmoil

even during Mohammed's life. Mohammed lived five seventies through six thirty two, and the Kabo was was burnt during this time, and this may have caused some of the fragmentation that we see. That's the thing. We don't know exactly when this fragmentation of the of the stone occurred. Yeah, this history of the uh, the stone as an object becoming

many objects does seem kind of fuzzy. Like there's this general idea that it was once a single stone or fewer number of stones, and then broke into smaller parts, and then now there are apparently fewer visible pebbles in the stone than there were, say in the nineteenth century, right. And one of the ideas here is that that the pieces could either have been removed or lost, or they

could still be there. We just can't see all that well because a we can't really see the stone fragments all that well anyway, where they might be partially obscured by the by the cement and the silver and repeated attempts to you know, hold everything together. So what were the circumstances under which it was burned? So this was during the civil war between the caliph Abd al Malik and Iban Zubar, who controlled Mecca at the time the

Kaba was set on fire. This would have been in six eight three and report by some accounts, the black Stone broke into three pieces and then was reassembled with silver. So that's a that's an opportunity, let's say, for the stone to have been broken certainly. Um. Now, another opportunity that comes up is in nine thirty and that's when Mecca was sacked by the Carmathians led by Abu Terar al Janabi, who apparently used the hag as an excuse uh to demand entry into the city with his troops. Now,

a number of you're probably wanting, well, who are the Karmathians. Uh. They were an heretical sect of Islam that considered the Koran allegory. They refuted various rights and entailed a mix of uh of of of Islamic and Persian mysticism. They sacked and looted Mecca, They desecrated holy sites. They mascuared pilgrims around the Kaba, and removed the black Stone and took it out of Mecca, apparently in hopes of moving the destination of the Hojj to Hajar in what we

now call Bahrain. So they were trying to get everybody to come to them from now on. That That is the that that is how I understand it. Yeah, based on the material I was reading, Um, this ended up not working all that well. And uh, I mean it's worth it's also worth noting here that of course history is written by the victors, so you know to what extended some of this color by the fact that the that even though the Carmatheans were very powerful at the time,

they ended up fading into history. So they tried to change the point of the hodge didn't work. The black Stone is a return to Mecca around or nine fifty two, but for a hefty ransom fee. Well, now, hold on a second, how do you know it's really the stone when you return it. Well, you've got to test its buoyancy, right, You've got to see if it floats in water, and

apparently it did. So that's where this idea comes from, right in the tenth century, that that this was returned, and one thing that was known about the stone somehow was that it would float in water. Yes, and some accounts indicate that it was returned and of shattered into pieces. So whether it was whether it was shattered during extraction or during the return, that's kind of you know, up

in the air. Now, there's a an additional account that is sometimes brought up as a as a possible incident in which it was shattered, and that's around ten fifty the caliph Al Hakim byam and Allah allegedly sent an agent to smash the stone, but this only inflicted slight

damage and the agent was killed on the spot. Who's to say, I only found one account where someone was speculating on the nature of the stone, who thought that this might have been an incident that could have resulted in serious damage, and the details on these accounts were from Mecca, a Literary History of the Muslim Holy Land by Francis E. Peters. So if any of these didn't do the trick, though, there was also a six flood that toppled three of the Cabal walls, so that also

could have contributed to the fracturing of the black Stone. Right. So, if you have a you have an object that is susceptible to damage and it plays such a vital role for such a long period of time, Um, it's it's it's there's there's a high possibility it's gonna result in damage.

You know. One of the other things we should mention is that this is a stone that you can quite well expect to be undergoing a certain amount of wear and tear, with millions of people from around the world coming to this stone and trying to touch it and kiss it. Um, I mean, there is there's all. There's all manner of which, uh, you know, handling of things leads to their deterioration over time, even if you think

you're being gentle. I mean, there's a reason museums don't let you touch stuff, right, Like, what if what if the statue of David. What if everyone got to touch David. Yeah, you know that would that would erode the statue over time. And certains and certainly accounts of the black stone indicate that there is a certain amount of erosion that has taken place, a smoothing of the stones from all of that, all of those human touches, all of those kisses, all

of that, you know, the oil from from human skin. Yeah, but one can imagine that, I don't know, all manner of various handling, touching and stuff like that could also maybe have contributed to fracturing. I mean, it wouldn't have to be a highly destructive event. Uh, even gentle caresses over the centuries can add up. Indeed. All right, and

that basically brings us up to modern times. So we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to discuss the possible scientific origins of the stone. What is it? Where did it come from? And how how limited are we in our ability to answer that question? Than all right, we're back. So we're gonna be talking about scientific inquiry into the geologic nature of the black Stone of the Kabba. What what kind of rock is it? Did it come from space, did it come from Earth?

What's it made of? And there's one thing we should note at the outset here, which is that it is hard to know the answer to this question because the rock has not been removed to a scientific lab where you can do tests on it. This is one of these strange situations where people are trying to do science from a distance, sort of through the intermediary of people's

subjective accounts. Right we have, scientists have not examined the black Stone, and really scientists are probably not going to get to analyze the black Stone at any point in the foreseeable future. Uh, Like I kind of have to think of sci fi scenarios in which the black Stone could possibly be analyzed. It's uh, it's it's They're simply like, why would you do it? Why would you allow it? Uh? Why why would you submit it for scientific analysis? There?

Because because there's really nothing quite like the black Stone in any other religious tradition that I can think of. I mean, yeah, an object that is so central, like literally central to the belief system. Like the closest thing I can think of in Christian and specifically Catholic traditions is the shroud of Turin. But even that, it's not you know, I would not say the shout of turn as an article of faith or or you know, in

any way associated with a pillar of Christianity. Yeah, there are definitely in other religions holy objects, holy sites, but I feel like nothing as central as this and as as hard to get at, because because as hard to get out in a in a scrutinizing way, obviously it's not hard to get at just in general, and that, like we said, millions of people go in touch and look at this thing, but you can't remove it, you can't take it away with you, and you can't spend

some time scrutinizing it. Right, So we end up with it was generally intellectuals geologists looking at a pictures such as they are looking at sketches, analyzing descriptions of it, and then using their knowledge of material science is to try and figure out what it can be, which can be very interesting. So one of the standard things this is probably not a very interesting hypothesis, but for you know, years people have said, well, it's probably some kind of

lava or basalt something like that. Uh, generally, now people don't think that's the answer. Uh So. Another one of the main theories that's been offered over the years is that the Blackstone is meteoritic in origin, that it came from space. And you know, it makes sense, right because this this aligns with the cosmic origins that are presented in a mythic history as a gift of a primordial God.

What better origin than outer space? Right, And there's also a long history of two important factors here, one the worship or at least veneration of meteorites and to the use of meteor media meteoric iron. Now, I think a lot of Muslims would probably want to emphasize the distinction that the Kabba Stone is not something that is worshiped, but it's a more like symbolic object that is, uh that is playing a role in what they would describe

as their relationship with God. But even if the object is not itself a point of worship, you can easily see how objects that fall from space would take on some kind of sacred or venerable dimension. Yeah. Like, one cool example of this is that Native Americans from the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ruined Community of Oregon continue to make annual ceremonial visits to the famous Willamette meteorite

at the American Museum of Natural History. Yeah. So, while scientists believe the rock is the the iron core of a shattered planet, uh, the Clackamas tribes people knew it as tom and Owa's a representative of the sky people and a source of healing and cleansing. I mean, if you look at a picture of this meteorite, and you should, Yeah, it looks like something that was sent by the gods. Of course it does. This thing looks insanean it's got these caverns in it. Robert, do you know what it

looks like. I've seen pictures. Yes, it looks like you get a sense of topography, like it's a maze, or even like a little of former living thing. There are like coral aspects to it. Yes, it looks like a large piece of iron. Uh, parts of which have come alive and slithered away. Now the iron is interesting too,

because that comes back to this, this use of meteoric iron. So, before mining technology allowed for the ready harvesting of iron ore, one of the few sources of this durable metal was the was bits of it that plummeted from the sky in the form of the meteorites. The ancient Egyptians knew about it. They dubbed black copper. That's a cool name it is. It's very very very cool. Uh. And uh, you know, it's generally spread then across vast distances. You're

gonna find little bits of fit here and there. So it was a rare commodity. You could not cannot arm an army with it, correct, you could, Yeah, you couldn't make enough swords for an army, but you could make if you scratch, scratch enough of it together, you could make a single sword and it would have you know, obviously would have holier or at least um, you know,

ceremonial significance. Um. So this this relegated most meteoric iron creations to the realm of decorative or significance or ceremony. In fact, in Islamic history, the seventh century Caliphs were said to have brandish swords made from meteoric iron, while such iconic figures as a Till of the Hun and tamer Lane reportedly wielded other cosmic blades against their enemies. And you know, also their bowls, plows and stirrups that have been observed to have been made from it as well.

So maybe sometimes you just ended up making what you needed out of the iron, But for the most part it tended to take on a sacred significance. Weapons from space, Yeah, that should be a whole episd so it on its own sometimes could be is there enough there? Could we do it? Weapons from space? I mean, has anybody ever tried to make like a like a I don't know. Oh what do you call it? A morning star? I don't know. Why would you make a morning star out

of it when you can make a sword? Terry Pratchett, by the way, before he died, I believe had obtained a sword made from er o'kirn. Know what I meant was make a morning star with a moon rock? Yeah? I like the idea. Yeah, who does that mean? If you have to be brain to death with a medieval blunt weapon, why not? Why not? Moon rock makes it a little special. So it's easy to fall into this thinking,

all right, it's a meteorite. Maybe it's it's it's it's meteoric iron, and that's why all this, uh this, uh, the significance is given to it. However, as Thompson points out we mentioned her, We mentioned her earlier, Elizabeth Thompson. Yes, as she points out, this isn't necessarily a slam dunk theory. And iron meteorite, she wrote, would not break into fragments, nor would it float in water because it is a piece of iron and so, but that doesn't alule out

all meteorites. There's also the idea that it's a stony meteor rite. But it would a stony meteorite float in water? Would it be able to withstand centuries of human erosion? Um? Probably not. Yeah. So here I think we should actually get into a few of the papers that have been published on this subject. Uh. And the first big one and that tried to get at the after after the meteorite theory had been dominant for a long time in

the twentieth century. The first one that I think really tried to dig in and and look at the descriptions and figure out what it would what it could be was in nineteen seventy four in the journal Meteoritics. And so they're looking at it and saying, okay, pretty much everybody thinks this thing is a meteorite. Are they onto something or are they wrong, and this was by Robert Diaz and John McCoy own And in this paper, Dietz and McCone argued that the Kabba Stone, the black stone,

is probably not a meteorite but an agate. So why do they get to age it. Well, let's follow them through their reasoning. So first of all, they say, the fact that it appears to have been cracked and fractured, as you mentioned earlier, Robert sort of rules out the possibility that it's a nickel iron meteorite. You you've seen these types of meteorites before that are that are essentially like a big metal sponge. You know, if you have tripped to phobia, these things really should set you off

with these patterns of holes. But a nickel iron meteorite, it's not brittle like most earth rocks. It's more like a piece of metal. Un Thus, we would not expect to see a meteorite like this with a crack or cracked into multiple pieces. But they say, okay, well, maybe it could be a stony meteorite. There's a different kind of meteorite. It's more like earth rocks. And from description and the stone they say is quote hummocky and muscled

so what does this mean and why is it relevant? Well, hummocky, that's not just like a cute British word or something that does kind of sound like, you know, lord hummocky twizzled. I was thinking it sounds like a great description for for a wine. It's like, what do you what do you think of this particular Wine's? Okay, well it's it's it's hummocky and and muscled, well muscled wine. Yeah, with notes of elderberry. Uh yeah, So hummocky actually means something

in geology. It means highly uneven or irregular in surface. So they say, you know, literally millions of people have touched this thing over the centuries, and yet they haven't worn away these apparent irregular features of the surface of the stone. So for that to be the case, the authors suggests that the stone needs to have a pretty good Mose scale rating, which they estimate should be a minimum of a seven. So you know about the mo A scale, right, That's that's how you answer no mo

m o H. The most scale geological hardness scale. It's how you rate how hard is it? You want to know how hard it is? You give a most scale rating. Um and a ten on the most scale is a diamond that's super hard. I think. I think talc is like a one or two. A seven is quartz. So they think for this thing to have withstood all of the touching and kissing over the years and still have this uneven, hummocky surface, it needs to be at least a seven on the most scale, So that gives them

one clue to work with. Another conclusion from the descriptions is that the black stone supposedly has this highly reflective almost mirror like polish. You know, you can you can put your makeup on in it. I would advise against doing that now, I don't know. People probably would not have the patience for that. Uh no, and you probably actually couldn't. It's uh it's but they say that it

is almost mirroral like, it's highly reflective. Um and they claim that this indicates the stone must be a fanitic and monomineralic. Oh god, more terminology. So what does that mean? A Ponitic is a geology term that means very fine grained minerals, So a fanitic rocks are those where you can't see the individual mineral crystals with the naked eye and This usually happens in igneous rocks, you know, fire formed rocks that are formed from molten rock cooling and

solidifying pretty quickly. You know, that often happens near the surface. One common example would be basalt. Uh. The other word was monomineralic. That means exactly what it sounds like, rocks that are made of just one type of mineral. If the rock is a fanitic and monomineralic, they think it's more likely that it could be polished down to this

reflective surface by people touching it over the years. Already, though, I think we should know this is something we we sort of warned about earlier, the awkwardness of doing science this way because listen to what's going on. They're having to work from secondhand descriptions of the features of the stone without examining it themselves. So there's just a lot of room for problems to creep into this kind of analysis. So we should definitely take their conclusions with a large grain,

large crystal grain of salt. Anyway, to continue, how about the color of the stone. Can that tell us anything about it? Well, their description says, you know, it's called the black stone. The stones black, maybe even jet black. Now they don't know whether black is the original color of the stone or whether it has turned black through handling, because again, the mythic idea here is that it was originally white and human sin has turned it black or

mostly black. And this this on top of the differing opinions of just how black it actually is now referenced earlier. Yeah, and so back when this article was first published, the author has managed to get in contact with the keeper of the Kaba, who in turn got a Muslim scholar named Mohammed alui Uh to offer a sort of concurrently published reply that gives some theological and historical context to

their article. And Uh and this scholar had among his claims, I guess is the idea that the stone was originally white. He goes with that idea, and he says, various descriptions have called it quote whiter than snow, as white as silver, or charmingly as white as yogurt. And I guess they what they have in mind is not that gray purple tricks yogurt that oh goodness, I forgot about tricks tricks yogurt yogurt in name only, Why would you make gray yogurt?

That is a crime against nature. Yeah, yeah, I mean the fruit needs to stay on the bottom or is added after the fact. It should It should not come

pre mixed. Okay, tricks. Tricks are for kids, I guess. Anyway, one explanation for the change in color, if in fact what happened is that it was originally white and it darkened over time, is that whenever the pieces of the stone become loosened or dislodged from the inset over the years, you know, they started to come out of the cement they were reattached with this kind of putty or cement

made by kneading together wax, musk and amber grease. Yeah, and so exposure to this putty is said to have turned the stones black over the time over time, and supposedly the historian Iban Nafi al Kazi, while writing a history of the Kabba, got to see the stone inset completely exposed while the Kabba was being rebuilt, so out of the frame where it's usually kept, and he reported that the part of the stone usually kept covered by

the wall, the part that's usually hidden is white. So if he's correct about that, um, then it's not just a jet black stone, but a white stone. That is either black on one part that's exposed, or has turned black over time due to possibly multiple factors. But in any case, if the stone were originally black, it could be a type of stony meteorites, such as chondrite condrite as a stony meteorite. Um. And remember that the stony meteorites different from that that solid metal sponge meteorite, the

iron nickel meteorite. But then again, a chondrite meteorite probably would not have been able to maintain it's quote hummocky character with all those years of rubbing. So you put a stony meteorite in there, people touch it for a thousand years, it would get ground down. And the authors also say that a chondrite meteorite probably would not be described as having a mirror like reflective polish. Now here's

one other option. How about a howardite meteorite. Good name again, um, Howard It's the authors don't think it's going to be because Howards are very rare. They think it's an unlikely candidate. Also, Howard it tends to be light colored, and this would not fit in with an originally black cobba stone. But then it might fit if the original stories of original

whiteness are true. Uh so a little bit more, some legends about the stone point to the possibility of it being a sapphire or an amethyst, which is interesting, but the authors think neither of those minerals really fit. Sapphires are not big enough to be you know, the date sized pebbles we see now, and uh and amethysts are they quote they say, quote too readily cleaved. I'm not

quite sure I understand why that would disqualify. Maybe they're saying that that doesn't meet the hardness characteristics that just come apart. Yeah, because because again I have to have a sweet spot here between something that is hard enough to withstand all that human erosion but also traction. Yeah. Uh, and so I I don't know. It sounds like what you would want is something that is readily cleaved but is not ground down by touching. Yeah. Maybe they mean

it would have just it's just just too fragile. Maybe yeah, it could be. So what do they conclude? While the authors suggest the simplest explanation would be to think of visually attractive stones that are somewhat unusual but also not things that are considered precious, gems. So they say obsidian might fit, but they say it's too brittle and delicate to have survived the years of handling and abuse that the Cobba stone has. And in the end they settle

on age. They think agged is the most likely candidate, especially black agg it. Why well, it's monomineralic. Uh, it's hard a Mose scale seven, it's tough, and it's fine grained, meeting a fanitic in that fun word from earlier. So age, when polished by years of rubbing, should also show a fairly reflective surface, you know, kind of mirror. Like one

last thing that they sawed in their favor. They sighted an anonymous Arab geologist who went to view the stone for himself while he was on the Hajj, and the scholar said that he observed what's called diffusion banding within the Kabba stone. If you've ever looked inside a cross section of an aggot, you see these things that are kind of like tree rings, you know what I'm talking about,

And these are the band's diffusion banding. And the authors claimed that this would be consistent with the stone being an agot um. One note is they seem absolutely unconcerned with or unaware of the idea that the stone maybe should float. Yes, and that's that's something that Elizabeth Thompson commented on when in her paper which came afterwards, she argued that that this choice, uh, the agot wouldn't wouldn't float,

and it also lacked a cosmic origin story. Now, now, personally, I think that last bit especially is short sighted, because I think human history shows us that an object or place need not be verifiably heaven touched to reson aid with with cosmic potency. Yeah, I'm not very convinced by that either. I don't see why you couldn't conclude that a regular Earth rock was a supernatural gift from heaven, Like it doesn't literally have to come from space for

people to venerate it as a gift from heaven. Yeah, Because I mean, essentially, you could boil it down to two different ways of looking at this stone and it's in its origin. Either it was a really cool looking stone that someone came across and and it kind of went from there, or it was a perfectly normal stone but there was enough capital belief that was put into it, be it's something situational or just the right people saying this is this is it? This is tied to to

some something larger than ourselves. I mean, you can just look around your house and you can find examples of two of those things in action. Right Um, I have. I'm on my desk right now, I have just a normal like gravel pete rock. I don't know, probably came from from asphalt or something. But my son brought it to me one day and say and wanted me to keep it because it was special. It's not special, it doesn't look special at all, but the fact that he

gave that No, No, I took it in. For the life of me, I can't quite get rid of it, because because I have this small attachment to it, and likewise, we all have various do dads around where that we have, be it a stone or some minor decoration where we just it just looks too interesting to get rid of. Well, I think maybe now we should go to the next paper, the one we've been talking about several times already, that of Elizabeth Thompson, who has a different theory about where

this stone comes from. And her theory is an interesting hybrid, I think, or I guess we should say it's a hypothesis. It's an interesting hybrid of the meteoric uh or the meteoritic origin story and UH and dealing with some of the problems with that. Right. So, as as you can tell by that that earlier criticism she had, she put a lot of stock in the cosmic origin aspect that this is somehow connected to to a meteorite. Uh. However,

it need not be an actual meteorite. According to her theory, it could be uh what is known as impact tight glass. So I've attached for Robert for you to look at here a couple of pictures of of wabar impact type glass. So cool looking. Yeah, wish I had some of this.

These look these look super cool. Yeah. And and there are there are examples of what maybe we'll try to include some links to these images on the landing page for this episode of Stuff to Build Your Mind dot com um, because they are kind of how would you describe them that I actually I was trying to think of the best way to put this. They don't look like normal rocks. That do look again sort of like the iron meteorite. They look like something that could plausibly

have come from a supernatural realm. It looks sort of like a fistful of cottage cheese was wrapped up in a bunch of seaweed, in a wad of seaweed, and then turned into stone. Which that sounds about right, Yeah, essentially the idea here. I'll get into it more. But imagine what happens when a meteorite uh impact occurs in a sandy region. All right, Okay, so there's silica sand, and what happens when sand is heated up turns to glass? Yeah? So Thompson points to the meteorite impact craters of a

region known as Wabar. This is six eight four miles or kilometers from Mecca, so it's reasonably close. It's in the Ruble Collie Desert and here several iron meteorites have turned up. But the bedrock here is pure pale sandstone composed mostly of quartz. Crater walls are composed of block glass that are formed from fuse silica and infused with billions of sphere ules of of nickel and iron. So

this is impact tight glass us. Yeah. And it occurs in in what they call porous bombs uh so, and often with a white interior and a glossy black shell, sometimes as black droplets. So she theorizes that the observed yellow white specks in the stone are remnants of glass and or sandstone, and that the hardness of the glass

would make it resistant to all that human erosion. Meanwhile, the poorous nature of the glass would make it would would make it float, and that the black color would be due to the nicoliferous iron sphere rules captured from an explosion of nickel and iron. And she adds that these qualities mash up with other examples of Wabbar glass, as well as reports of meteorites used as memorials to the prophet. Now, I think this is a really interesting theory.

Uh may I might be sort of favoring it just because I love the pictures of this impact type glass so much. It looks really cool. It looks so cool. I want this to be the answer. Yes, it it's It very much matches up with that classification and of I mean, you can imagine somebody coming across this stone and realizing this looks really cool. What's the story of this.

It's also I'm I'm persuaded, but not persuaded. I shouldn't say that I'm I'm unfairly biased by this being a very geologically cool origin story that an object from the heavens came down and literally melted the earth to form these these objects that later become objects of reverence. One thing that's probably not necessarily I don't know, an influence, but just a very interesting legendary parallel is the idea of the destruction of the city of Iram of the

Pillars by fire from heaven. Yeah. I've seen this referred to as the Atlantis of the Sands. Yeah, because it's you know, it's a lost city. And I think it's also called is it Ubar? Is that right? I'm not sure I've seen it referred to it either I I Ram with an eye or a Ram with an a at least in the the copy of the Koran that I was looking at, because it is mentioned in the

Koran chapter eighty nine, verse six to fourteen. It reads, hast thou not considered how thy Lord dealt with ad of Aram, having lofty buildings, the like of which are not created in the land, And of Famide, who hewed out rocks in the valley, and the Pharaoh, the Lord of Hosts, who exceeded limits in the cities and made great mischief therein so thy Lord poured on them a

portion of chastisement. Surely thy Lord is watchful. WHOA yeah, alright, So Thompson has made uh an interesting uh speculation here that that it could be this impact type glass. But there was another scientific paper on it by H. J. Asson published in the Journal of Material Science Letters in nine two called the Blackstone of Kabba Suggestions as to its constitution, And he looks at the research we've already talked about and tries to draw some conclusions from it,

critique it, and then offer some ideas of zone. So he reacts to to that original discussion of Dietz and McCone who said it was an agate, and so he says, okay, their reasoning rests on some assumptions that the stone is jet black, that it's mirror like in reflective power, uh, and that it's got these apparent banded regions that there that their friend the geologists saw when he went and visited it, that they attribute to diffusion banding. So it

makes them think agat on this basis. They say that it's not a stony meteorite of the chondrite variety because those crumble too easily and the word here is friable. They're too easily friable. Uh So they're looking for something that's a fanitic and monomineralic, you remember that, And they

conclude that it's ago. But Acton claims that even though agat is readily available in the Middle East, he thinks the authors overlooked the importance of the fact that the stone is a collection of pebble like fragments cemented together rather than a single stone with a well preserved hummocky surface. So he he thinks that they may be sort of um mistaking the textured appearance of this cemented together piece of pavement essentially for the surface of what a stone

itself should look like. And in defense of stony meteorites, he says, okay, chondrites, those are stony meteorites actually vary a whole lot and exactly how crumbly they are, you know, some of them might be more crumbly than others. How friable they are also, Accon says, you know, cond rites that have been subjected to what he calls extraterrestrial shock, which is also the medical condition induced by watching the

movie Mac and Me. He says, they quote tend to be compacted and contain dark veins which might be mistaken for banding under unfavorable conditions of observation. So he says, you know, if you're just coming up at this thing in the middle of the day and you're trying to peek in at it, you might mistake these these veins that we would often see in certain types of condrites for the kind of banding you'd see in an agate.

So that's in defense of it being a meteorite. On the other hand, against the condrite hypothesis, Accent says, Uh, it's common for chondrites to have these metallic iron nickel pieces distributed evenly throughout, which should be obvious when you look at this thing. Uh, this is something that people would have observed about it. On the other hand, he says that metal can disappear by way of oxidation i e. Rusting if exposed to your earth weather for long periods

of time. So it maybe maybe it's just rusting. But if this were the case, you'd expect to see rust, you'd expect to see like a reddish you. Now that being said, there are some accounts have said brownish or reddish, yeah, and here we get back to the problem with like come by all these different accounts that seem to differ from one another. Uh, it's hard to know which one to go on if you're trying to draw the best conclusions. But yeah, I have seen that too. Some people say

reddish brown, others say black. So that's a little confusing. Um. But also he says, we would expect to see in a chondrite quote light colored con drools of silicate So what is that? Well, con drools are these visually striking, colorful spherical minerals that are found in some meteorites. You should look this up. We could go Google search con drools. They have a distinctive appearance and people would probably have noticed and reported them if they'd been present in the stone,

because they're these like colored spheres. You would see them. So Accent says, okay, okay, what about a carbonaceous meteorite. These are rare condrites that are low in density, they're free of obvious medical medical metal particles, and sometimes they don't have these big cond rules that are really obvious. But these are rare meteorites. They're not a major candidate, and Accent thinks maybe we should just keep them in

the back of the mind, you know. And we've had a two different authors here discussed like rarity being an issue. I keep thinking, though, we're talking about a rare stone, like you no, in no classification. It's not like black stone. Yeah, like this is a singular stone. So can we really

count out the possibility of rare meteorites? Well, I mean it just it lowers the probability that anybody in history would have found things, but it maybe increases the probability that if they had found it, they would have kept it and revered it. Um. So you're just sort of like adjusting the selection dials in two different ways. Um. What about Thompson's hypothesis. He comes to that, you know

that it's this fused silical glass. There's an impact event in the sand and the desert, a bunch of sand gets melted along with some pieces of the meteorite into these crazy wads of spinach and cottage cheese, uh turned

into stone. Well. Thompson obviously, as we said, likes this hypothesis because it means the stone could feasibly float, and there are those stories from the past of it floating in brine or water or even concentrated brine, and this would this would also explain the white stone inside the black stone. Um. But Accent says, it's hard to see how a large peat piece of this impactite glass would form the smooth pebble shapes that are described by observers.

Again back to what people say. You see these smooth pebbles, you know, no bigger than a date in in the cement. If you look at these things, Accent says, if the black stone fragments really are this fused silical glass from an impact, they shouldn't look like these smooth pebbles. They should uh, they should have different surface features, including things like bubbles and vesicles. Um. And so one last thought he offers is, you know, perhaps the original body was

what he calls a concreteation of pebbles. And so this originally this original stone, when when it fractured, what it was was a bunch of pebbles stuck together and it was just the pebbles coming off, if that makes any sense.

So if you imagine the original stone was not like a solid stone that broke into pieces and then the pieces got smoothed down, what if it was a solid stone that was more like a cluster of grapes in shape, and he cites one example of a piece of lunar material that had been hit by a shock media write bombardment that actually showed this type of this shape that it looked sort of like a cluster of grapes. And

so that's one possibility in his mind. But ultimately he concludes, you know what, we don't know, and even though we've got better scientific knowledge to work with, we really need better access if we're going to make a conclusion, just better access to the primary data. We'd have to be able to look at this thing closely and make some measurements. Yeah.

I really like that point that he made in the paper, saying that you know, even at the time it was this ad two, that the material sciences had advanced so much, uh, even from some of the previous studies in the prior decades, and yet our information about the black Stone itself has remained relatively the same. Uh, just you know, a few more subjective observations of what it consists of. But but but ultimately no new information, certainly no scientific, scientifically analytic information. Yeah.

That that is a good point. And I think one thing that I come away from this discussion with is Um. This attempt to investigate the material or geological character of of the black Stone strikes me as kind of similar to our episode from a couple of years ago, or I guess, let yeah, almost a couple of year and a half ago, maybe on the Will of the Wisp uh in the same way, it encapsulates some of the difficulties of doing what you might call second hand science.

In both cases, you've got scientists trying to apply their knowledge of natural phenomena to match this wide range of disparate subjective reports. Now, I think the reports of the black Stone of the Kabba are much more substantive than those of the Will of the Wisp. Obviously, in the case of the black Stone, it actually exists, and we know for a fact that it actually exists. It's not something that maybe people are just imagining. We know millions of people see it all the time. It's not an

ephemeral phenomenon. It's like a thing that's there. It's widely observed, and we know that it's one unified phenomenon and not like different phenomena being reported under the same name. So these are all not the case for the Will of the Isp. But like the will of the whisp, we have to make judgments based on a host of variable descriptions and characteristics. What color is it? Different reports and different things. Are there flecks of other colors within it?

What color was it originally? Does it float in water? How reflective is it? Even in the cases where there's only one major answer to these, sometimes we don't know if we should trust that answer or just throw out the question entirely. You know, does it float in water? Are our evidence that the stone floats in water? Is some report from a thousand years ago? Yeah? Like, should

we give it? Give that more weight than the question, Well, could it conceivably you know, spout a mouth and start talking? You know, uh, you know, at what point you just cut off and say, all right, we're only gonna We're only gonna look at these three qualities. What class of meteorite most commonly sprouts a tongue? I can't, I can't think I think of one offhand. We'll have to what we'll have to have to have to reach out to

our audience on that one. Maybe the in meteorites. Yeah, well, I mean, even if you do make a distinction between um, you know, subjective religious beliefs and just subjective direct observational reports. Even the direct observational reports, they're giving us all this conflicting info, and and none of it's very solid. Like you you're you're not taking a measurement of it. You're

just saying like, yeah, here's generally what I saw. But then there's one other interesting parallel, at least it seemed interesting to me here in talking about a religious object, is that I think it's kind of funny how the practice of trying to do a geological or material science analysis on the black Stone based on these subjective descriptions almost reminds me of something that often happens in our faith traditions, which is the process of trying to draw

clarity of theology from just what amounts to a large collection of stories. You know. So when theologians of almost any religion try to come up with the systematic theology of that religion, the systematic theology being here are beliefs, here in the rules, here's what happens in the metaphysics

of our religion, essentially the science of the religion. Uh, they often have to draw these conclusions based on sources that are not originally written to be clear and systematic descriptions of rules and theological principles, but they're based on stories, and so you have to sift through the stories to try to pull out this clear, systematic understanding of it all. Anyway, I thought that was kind of interesting. No, No, I think, yeah,

that's that's that's fair. It has a yeah, the idea of of taking all of these either tales or these accounts and trying to build something concrete out of it, or just to say what does it mean? Yeah, yeah, what is the what is the shape of this? Or indeed, what is the meaning of this? Well? What am I supposed to take home from this? Right? But it's but again, so it's fascinating to to look at these different scientific

hypotheses about the black Stone. It's also interesting just to look at the history and in mythology surrounding it and try and figure out what that means as well. It's it's really an enigma on several different levels. And I hope that we've been able to relate some of that to you today. And on that note, hey, we're thinking about doing more episodes in this series looking at sacred places or objects, so we should throw out the question, what sacred objects or places would you like us to

cover in the future. We already have a few ideas kicking around obviously, especially if there's some interesting scientific angle it can be discussed about it. One of the things that I might want to talk about in the future is is the Ganges. Oh, yes, that's a good one. Uh. More of an object than a place that comes to my mind, as of course the Ark of the Covenant. Um, it's like nothing we've gone after before. We should at

least consider it u huh. But I'm sure there are some other examples out there that our listeners can think of, and certainly you can get in touch with us about those. And finally, you know, we've covered Islamic history, Islamic myth, Islamic scientific contributions on the show before and will again, and you know, it's all part of our shared global culture. And at the same time, we recognize that discussions of Islamic culture continue to resonate with particular potency in today's

political climate. So we encourage everyone out there to expand their understanding of what it means to be a mussliment today society. And as the starting point, we just wanted to highlight two organizations you might want to check out. First off, there's Muslims for Progressive Values at www dot mp V USA dot org. This is a um a faith based, grassroots international human rights organization organization that embodies and advocates for the traditional chronic values of social justice

and equality for all. In the twenty one century, so they championed such values as separation of religious and state authorities, freedom of speech you versaal, human rights, and gender equality. And another group is the Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity and that's at Muslim Alliance dot org. Uh So, they work to support, empower and connect lgb t Q Muslims.

They seek to challenge root causes of oppression, including misogyny and xenophobia, and the aim to increase the acceptance of gender and sexual diversity within Muslim communities and to promote a progressive understanding of Islam that is centered on inclusion,

justice and equality. Yeah. And one of the things that I hope always comes through UM whenever we talk about religions on this podcast, as we do fairly often because I think we all sort of find them very interesting, uh, is it can be very easy to talk about religions, especially a religion that you don't personally hold in ways

that are sort of over generalized and overdetermined. Uh. And so one thing I hope you always take away from our discussions is is the incredible room for diversity of opinion the that exists within all these faith traditions around the world. Uh. There are a lot of ways to be a Christian, a lot of ways to be a Muslim, a lot of ways to be a Hindu or Jew or anything. Indeed, and you know, I know we have some Muslim listeners out there, So I'd love to hear

your thoughts on this. And certainly if you have gone on the Hodge and you have seen the black Stone with your own eyes or touched it with your with your own body, Uh, we would love to hear your account of that. Yeah, what was it like? What? What what do you think? And what color is it? Really? Yeah? Yeah, what are your thoughts on that? You can find us online as always it's stuff to blow your mind. Dot

com that is the mothership. That's where we'll find all the podcast episodes, videos, blog posts, and links out to our various social media accounts, which is Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram it set, and if you want to get in touch with us directly, as always, you can email us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com The pay big believe I think by Man are doing