Kissing the black stone was a pagan practice
Executive summary
The simple claim "kissing the Black Stone was a pagan practice" is partly supported by historical evidence: ritual touching or kissing of sacred stones (baetyls) and the istilām gesture existed in pre‑Islamic Arabia and were performed at idols associated with the Kaʿba, suggesting continuity into early Islamic practice [1][2]. At the same time, Islamic traditions and later Muslim authorities reframed the Black Stone as a prophetic and Abrahamic relic and insist that kissing it is imitation of Muhammad rather than idol worship, creating a contested interpretive history rather than a single uncontested fact [3][4].
1. Pre‑Islamic cultic context: baetyls and local shrine practice
Archaeological and textual summaries indicate the Kaʿba functioned as a pagan shrine containing many idols in pre‑Islamic Mecca and that the Black Stone was one among numerous baetyls venerated by Arabs before Islam, a pattern consistent with Near Eastern aniconic stone cults [1][5][6]. Scholarly syntheses and popular reference works repeatedly note that the Black Stone’s sacralization likely predates Muhammad and fits the broader Arabian milieu of stone veneration [1][3].
2. Ritual continuity: istilām and the embodied gesture
The very term istilām—used for touching and kissing the Black Stone—appears in reports that link the practice to earlier haptic rituals performed at Meccan idols, indicating the physical gesture of kissing or touching a sacred stone was an established rite that Muslims inherited and adapted into tawaf (circumambulation) [2][3]. Early Muslim sources themselves preserve anecdotes of companions uneasily interpreting the act—such as ʿUmar’s remark that the stone "can neither benefit nor harm"—which scholars cite as evidence of awareness that istilām resembled pagan behavior [7][2].
3. Islamic reframing: prophetic precedent and theological rebuttals
Islamic tradition asserts prophetic validation: hadith literature records Muhammad kissing the Black Stone, and mainstream Muslim scholarship treats pilgrims’ kissing or gesturing toward it as emulation of the Prophet, not as worship of the object itself [3][4]. Modern Muslim apologists explicitly reject the label “pagan practice,” arguing that the ritual’s meaning was redirected into monotheistic memory and that Umar’s pragmatic explanation signals conscious reappropriation rather than simple continuity of idolatry [4][7].
4. Scholarly debate and evidentiary limits
Orientalist and critical writers emphasize continuity with pagan rites and sometimes assert the Black Stone was a meteorite or a syncretic relic, but scientific analysis of the stone has never been permitted and its material origins remain speculative, limiting certainty about its pre‑Islamic status [1][3]. Secondary polemical sources assert outright that the practice is pagan idolatry, yet those claims often reflect theological critique or ideological agendas—either orientalist skepticism or anti‑Islam polemics—and must be weighed against neutral academic work that documents ritual adaptation and reinterpretation [8][5][9].
5. Conclusion: accurate but contested characterization
It is accurate to say the physical act of kissing or touching a sacred stone has roots in pre‑Islamic Arabian religious practice—so describing the ritual form as “pagan in origin” is supported by multiple sources—but the meaning of that act was contested early on and later reframed within Islamic theology as prophetic imitation rather than idol worship, producing a legitimate scholarly dispute rather than an incontrovertible indictment [1][2][4]. Where certainty ends—because the Black Stone itself has not been scientifically analyzed and because sources reflect religious polemics—historians rely on patterns of ritual continuity and on how communities reinterpret symbols, making the statement partially true as a description of origins but incomplete as a full account of meaning and reception [3][7].