The Shadharwan: History, Fiqh and Ziyarah Guide to the Marble Skirt at the Base of the Kaaba

It is the part of the Kaaba that almost nobody asks about, because almost nobody notices it as a thing in its own right. Circling the Kaaba seven times, a pilgrim’s eyes go to the black kiswah, the gold-embroidered belt of calligraphy at shoulder height, the door, the corners, the Black Stone crowd at the start of each lap. Few look down at the low, sloping band of pale marble running along the base of the wall, angled outward like the hem of a garment, just above the level of the paved floor. Fewer still are told what it is. It has a name — shadharwan — and it carries more legal weight per square centimetre than almost any other stone surface a Muslim will ever stand beside. This is the guide to that ledge: what it precisely is, why touching it is treated by many scholars as walking through a wall of the Kaaba itself, and what an honest visitor should understand in the thirty seconds their tawaf brings them past it.

This article is a companion piece within a wider guide to the historical and ziyarah sites of Makkah and Madinah, and it should be read alongside the guide’s articles on the Kaaba itself, on the Hijr Isma’il, and on the history of Masjid al-Haram. Where those articles carry the fuller narrative of the Kaaba’s many rebuildings, this one stays close to a single detail on its exterior — a detail small enough to overlook and, once understood, too consequential to ignore.

Historical Background: What the Shadharwan Is

The shadharwan (الشاذروان) is the sloping band of marble fixed to the outside base of the Kaaba’s wall, running along three of its four sides at the level where pilgrims perform tawaf. It is built as a raised, chamfered skirt — wider at the ground than at the wall — so that it juts outward from the Kaaba’s face before disappearing under the black kiswah that drapes over it. Classical topographers described its shape as musannam, “hipped” or ridge-shaped, meaning it rises to a ridge line, then slopes away on the outward side, rather than presenting a flat vertical step. Its name is not Arabic in origin. It derives from the Persian shadur or shudhur, a term used elsewhere in the Islamicate world for a sloped stone apron or drainage skirt at the base of a building, and Arabic sources also gloss it as ta’zir, because it wraps the wall the way an izar, a lower wrap-garment, wraps the waist — the same comparison recorded by SaudiPedia’s entry on the Kaaba’s shadharwan.

Physically, it is not a single continuous slab. It is built up of dozens of individual marble stones cut and fitted around the Kaaba’s base. Sources differ on the exact count, which is itself a signal of how often it has been dismantled and relaid: the classical historian al-Azraqi, writing in the ninth century, counted sixty-eight stones in his Akhbar Makkah, as preserved in the Arabic Wikipedia article on the shadharwan, which reproduces his measurements directly; other accounts recorded in the same era of renewed stonework counted fifty-five copper rings rather than forty-one, and modern Saudi restoration records describe the present shadharwan as composed of thirty-six marble slabs after the 2016 renovation under King Salman, each about seven centimetres thick, ranging in weight from 110 to 225 kilograms, arranged so that thirteen slabs run from the Yemeni Corner to the Black Stone, fifteen from the Yemeni Corner to the Iraqi (northern) corner, and eight between the Kaaba’s door and the Levantine (eastern) corner, for a total run of roughly 48.7 metres, according to SaudiPedia’s detailed account of the 2016 restoration. These numbers do not need to be reconciled into a single figure across fourteen centuries — they are measurements of different shadharwans, rebuilt and re-counted in different eras, and this article reports each as it was recorded rather than forcing an artificial consensus.

Height and Projection

The dimensions of the shadharwan are recorded with more precision than most features of the Kaaba’s exterior, but the recorded figures vary by side and by era, and no single number should be treated as definitive. Imam al-Nawawi, writing in the thirteenth century, described it as “a very fine structure fixed to the wall of the Kaaba, its height above the ground in some places about a hand-span and a half, and its width in some places about two and a half hand-spans, and in other places a hand-span and a half” — a description preserved in the fiqh compilation hosted at Multaqa al-Khutaba’s article on the shadharwan. Centuries later, the Egyptian pilgrimage official Ibrahim Rifat Pasha measured it directly on four separate hajj journeys in the early twentieth century and recorded different heights and widths on each face: roughly 50 centimetres high by 39 centimetres wide on the northern side, 27 by 80 centimetres on the western side, 24 by 87 centimetres on the southern side, and 22 by 66 centimetres on the eastern side, figures likewise preserved at Multaqa al-Khutaba. A separate modern source describing the pre-restoration Saudi-era shadharwan gives a rounder figure of roughly 25 centimetres in height and 35 centimetres of outward projection, cited in general encyclopedic descriptions of the Kaaba’s construction. The honest summary is this: the shadharwan is low — well under knee height on every side, low enough that a standing adult’s foot could rest on it without noticing — and it is not uniform. It is taller on some faces than others, a fact that itself reflects its patchwork history of repair rather than a single unified design.

The Rings

Set into the shadharwan are metal rings, historically described as brass or copper, through which cords were once threaded to hold the lower edge of the kiswah taut against the wall so that wind and the pressure of the crowd would not lift or tear it. The number of rings recorded varies by source and era in the same way the stone count does: some descriptions give forty-one rings, others fifty-five, and Saudi-era restoration reports describe the 2016 renovation as including the renewal of gold-coloured rings used to anchor the kiswah, as recorded by SaudiPedia. The rings are absent from the northern face beneath the door of the Kaaba, where the shadharwan itself is also absent, for reasons this article returns to below.

None of this is decoration. Every element of the shadharwan’s design — its slope, its rings, its absence in exactly one place — points to one of two competing explanations for why it exists at all, and those two explanations are the load-bearing argument of everything that follows.

The Load-Bearing Point: Ground Outside the Rebuilt Kaaba

To understand why the shadharwan matters as much as it does to the law of tawaf, it helps to hold a simple picture in mind: the Kaaba you see today is not standing on the exact footprint that Ibrahim (peace be upon him) is believed to have built upon. It is standing on a slightly reduced footprint, chosen by the Quraysh a few years before the Prophet’s ﷺ prophethood, when resources ran short during a rebuilding after fire and flood damage.

According to the Islamic historical tradition, around 605 CE — roughly five years before the first revelation — a fire and a subsequent flood had weakened the pre-Islamic Kaaba’s structure, and the tribes of Makkah agreed to demolish and rebuild it, a project a young Muhammad ﷺ took part in before his prophethood, most famously by settling the dispute over who would place the Black Stone, as recorded in the historical accounts summarised by Islam On Web’s history of the Kaaba. When the Quraysh reached the limits of their funds — the account holds that they wished to build only from wealth that was entirely lawfully earned, and could not raise enough — they made two structural compromises. They roofed the building and heightened its walls, but they narrowed its footprint, leaving a crescent-shaped strip on the northern side, roughly seven cubits wide, outside the new walls. That strip is the area known today as the Hijr Isma’il, sometimes called al-Hatim. They also raised the single remaining door above ground level and sealed a second, western door that had existed before.

The Quraysh’s decision to shrink the footprint troubled the Prophet ﷺ for the rest of his life. In one of the most frequently cited hadiths concerning the Kaaba’s structure, Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her) reported that he ﷺ said to her: “Do you know that when your people rebuilt the Ka’ba, they decreased it from the foundation of Ibrahim?” She asked why he did not restore it to Ibrahim’s foundation, and he replied, “Were it not that your people have only recently left disbelief behind, I would have done so” — a hadith recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari 1583 and, in a longer version naming the door plan, in Sahih al-Bukhari 1586, and also preserved in Sahih Muslim 1333a. In the Bukhari 1586 version, the sub-narrator Yazid ibn Ruman adds that this hadith is precisely what later drove Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr, during his caliphate over the Hijaz, to demolish the Kaaba and rebuild it on what he identified as Ibrahim’s original foundation, incorporating the Hijr, adding two ground-level doors, and increasing its height — and that the narrator himself entered the excavated Hijr and saw camel-hump-shaped foundation stones that Ibn al-Zubayr identified as Ibrahim’s original footing.

Ibn al-Zubayr’s Kaaba did not last. After his death in 692 CE, the Umayyad governor al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, acting on the instruction of Caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, demolished the portion Ibn al-Zubayr had added and rebuilt the Kaaba back to the smaller Qurayshi footprint — the footprint that stands today. This history, including al-Hajjaj’s reversal, is summarised in the account carried by Islam On Web and is uncontested among historians of the site.

The geometry that follows from this is the entire reason the shadharwan is not simply a marble ledge. The present Kaaba’s walls sit on the reduced, Qurayshi footprint. But the ground beneath and immediately around those walls — the strip the shadharwan now covers — is, on one reading, still the wider, original footprint that the Quraysh chose not to build on. The shadharwan does not extend the Kaaba outward into new territory; on this reading, it marks and covers ground that always belonged to the Kaaba’s true perimeter, ground that the standing walls simply fail to occupy. A pilgrim’s foot resting on the shadharwan, in other words, is a foot resting on what many scholars hold to be part of the Kaaba’s own footprint — not beside the House, but within the outline of the House as Ibrahim built it. Because tawaf must, by definition, circle the House and stay outside it, a circuit that clips this strip has — on this view — clipped the corner of the building itself, cutting the circle short exactly as surely as if the pilgrim had walked through the Hijr Isma’il, which sits on the same original foundation on the Kaaba’s northern side and which everyone agrees must be walked around, not through.

This is why the instruction repeated at every tawaf briefing — keep the whole body clear of the shadharwan — is not a crowd-safety courtesy. It is, in the view of the scholars who hold this position, a structural condition for the validity of the circuit itself.

Two Readings, Not One: The Rebuilding Account and the Reinforcement Account

The geometry above depends entirely on accepting that the shadharwan sits on original Ibrahimic ground. That is one serious scholarly position, but it is not the only one, and this guide presents both without adjudicating between them, exactly as the sources themselves are divided.

Reading One: Original Foundation, Left Exposed

On this reading, the shadharwan is what remains visible of the true, wider base of the Kaaba’s wall as Ibrahim built it — the part of that base that the Quraysh’s narrower superstructure does not sit directly on top of, left exposed at ground level the way a building’s original footing sometimes shows at the base of a later, narrower wall raised upon it. The Arabic-language sources are explicit about this framing: the classical description recorded at Makkawi.info’s article on the shadharwan states plainly that “the reality of the shadharwan is that it is of the original substance of the wall of the venerated Kaaba when it stood on the foundations of Ibrahim, peace be upon him, and the Quraysh reduced it from the width of the Kaaba’s foundation wall when it appeared on the surface of the earth.” The same framing appears in the Sundanese-language Wikipedia summary translated for regional pilgrims, which states that the shadharwan “is part of the original foundation of the Kaaba built by the Prophet Ibrahim, peace be upon him,” as recorded at Sundanese Wikipedia’s entry on the shadharwan, and in the modern history compiled by Islam On Web, which lists the shadharwan among the Kaaba’s features and states directly that “it is part of the original foundation laid by Ibrahim, peace be upon him,” per Islam On Web’s history of the Kaaba.

Reading Two: A Later Structural Addition

The competing account holds that the shadharwan is not original fabric at all, but a support structure added later — a buttress skirt built up against the base of the standing wall to protect it from water damage and to stabilise the masonry above, in the same way builders in the region routinely reinforced the base of an important wall. On this reading, the shadharwan is functionally similar to the Hijr Isma’il’s low containing wall, but it is not a remnant of Ibrahim’s footprint; it is a protective addition built centuries after the fact, and its outward slope exists to shed rainwater away from the wall rather than to mark a lost boundary. Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah is quoted stating this position with characteristic bluntness: “The shadharwan is not part of the House; rather, it was made a support for the House” (وليس الشاذروان من البيت، بل جعل عمادا للبيت), a quotation reproduced across multiple Arabic sources including the Arabic Wikipedia entry on the shadharwan and the Saudi news feature at Sabq. On this reading, the reason walking on the shadharwan invalidates part of a tawaf circuit is not that it covers lost Ibrahimic ground, but the separate, narrower reason discussed in the next section: that the shadharwan is treated as physically attached to and inseparable from the Kaaba’s wall, so that any part of the body raised onto it counts as touching the Kaaba itself rather than circling it.

Both readings are held by serious scholars and neither this guide nor, as far as its sources show, the broader scholarly tradition treats the question as settled. What is agreed on all sides is the practical conclusion: no part of the body should be on or above the shadharwan during tawaf, whichever explanation one accepts for why that rule exists.

The Madhhab Positions, Named

The four Sunni schools of law and the Twelver Shia tradition of fiqh converge on the practical rule — stay off the shadharwan — while differing in their reasoning and in the fine detail of what happens if a pilgrim strays onto it.

The report circulating in Arabic-language fiqh literature states that the Shafi’i school held the shadharwan to be a separate structure from the Kaaba itself, added for reinforcement, and that the Hanafi school affirmed the same position, according to the summary at al-Mursal’s article on the shadharwan, which states that “the Shafi’i school agreed on this view, which the Hanafi school affirmed, that it is a part separate from the venerated Kaaba.” On this basis, both schools are reported to hold that anyone whose tawaf passes over the shadharwan must repeat that portion of the circuit, because — regardless of whether the shadharwan is original Ibrahimic ground or a later addition — a person standing on it has, in effect, circled through the House rather than around it. Imam al-Nawawi, the great Shafi’i jurist, is reported to have ruled explicitly that “whoever circles upon the shadharwan must repeat the tawaf, because he has circled in the House, not with the House” (طاف في البيت لا بالبيت) — a formulation reproduced at al-Mursal. This is a striking form of the ruling: it treats the shadharwan not merely as an obstacle to avoid for etiquette’s sake, but as functionally inside the Kaaba’s legal boundary, so that stepping onto it is treated the same as entering the building.

The Twelver Shia tradition of fiqh, represented in the contemporary rulings of the Grand Ayatollahs, states the same practical outcome with precise, numbered rules. Sistani’s manual of hajj rulings states: “If a pilgrim departs from tawaf to the shadharwan, tawaf becomes invalid commensurate to the extent of the departure. After making good the distance, he should, as a matter of precaution, complete the tawaf and then repeat it,” and adds, as a matter of precaution, that a pilgrim “should not extend one’s arm towards the shadharwan or the wall of the Holy Ka’ba to touch a corner or whatsoever” during tawaf — rulings numbered 303 and set out at Sistani.org’s guide to stepping outside the bounds of tawaf. The Shafaqna compilation of hajj rulings likewise lists among the conditions of a valid tawaf that “one must circumambulate keeping clear of the Holy Kaaba and the projection from it known as Shadharwaan,” alongside the requirement to circle, not cross, the Hijr Isma’il, at Shafaqna’s explanation of the obligations of tawaf.

The Hanafi tradition, through the contemporary fatwa body Darul Fatwa, frames the same rule in terms of the tawaf’s boundary rather than in terms of touching: “One cannot have any part of one’s body above the shadharwan, which is the rim at the base of the Ka’bah,” and separately states that tawaf must be performed “outside the Ka’bah, which means outside the structure as it was originally built” — explicitly invoking the original-foundation framing for the adjoining rule on the Hijr Isma’il, at Darul Fatwa’s guide to tawaf al-qudum.

What none of the sources gathered for this article supply is a side-by-side, textually cited comparison of the Maliki and Hanbali positions specifically on the shadharwan, as distinct from the general Sunni consensus that the body must stay clear of it. The Maliki and Hanbali fiqh manuals consulted in the course of this research affirm the same practical rule — no part of the tawaf circuit may pass over the shadharwan — but a citation naming the specific classical Maliki or Hanbali authority and text on this point, comparable to the Nawawi citation for the Shafi’is, was not found in the sources available for this article, and none is invented here. That gap is noted rather than papered over.

The Structural-Reinforcement Account: Attribution and Its Uncertainty

Alongside the fiqh question of what the shadharwan legally is sits a separate historical question: who actually built it, and when. Here the sources are genuinely inconsistent, and this article reports that inconsistency rather than resolving it.

The most frequently repeated attribution credits Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr with first installing the shadharwan during his rebuilding of the Kaaba around 65 AH (685 CE), as part of the same programme that restored the Hijr to the Kaaba’s footprint. IslamicLandmarks states this directly: “The Shadharawan was first installed by Abdullah bin Zubair (may Allah be pleased with him) when he rebuilt the Ka’bah in 685 CE (65 AH). It was created to prevent water seeping down into the foundations of the Ka’bah,” citing Dr Muhammad Ilyas Abdul Ghani’s History of Makkah Mukarramah as its source, at IslamicLandmarks’ page on the shadharwan. The blog-hosted description of the Kaaba’s building materials makes the same attribution, adding that Ibn al-Zubayr built it “on the foundations of Abraham, peace be upon him, to protect the wall of the Holy Ka’bah from water leaking into it,” at this compiled account of the Kaaba’s construction materials. About Islam’s list of facts about the Kaaba repeats the same claim in summary form.

Other Arabic sources complicate this picture considerably. The Saudi feature article at Sabq notes that some historians consider the shadharwan older than Ibn al-Zubayr’s rebuilding, on the grounds that it is mentioned by name in the legal writings of Imam Abu Hanifah, who died in 150 AH, and of Imam al-Shafi’i, who died in 204 AH — meaning the shadharwan, in some form, already existed and already carried legal significance a full generation or more before either of those imams wrote, which pushes a possible origin back toward the Quraysh’s own pre-Islamic rebuilding rather than forward to Ibn al-Zubayr. The same article states plainly that historians therefore differ on whether the shadharwan was “built by the Quraysh, or by Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr, who rebuilt the Kaaba, and then it was built up again by al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf.” A separate forum-hosted historical compilation states that Ibn al-Zubayr “built, during his caliphate over the Hijaz, a platform outside the Kaaba around its four sides, known as the shadharwan” — again crediting Ibn al-Zubayr but describing it as a platform built around an already-standing Kaaba rather than as an exposed fragment of Ibrahim’s own footing, at this Arabic-language history and images compilation.

The task brief for this guide specifically raised the possibility that an Abbasid caliph — al-Mu’tadid or an earlier ruler of that dynasty — added or reinforced the shadharwan to protect the Kaaba’s base from flood scour. That is a plausible-sounding claim given how often flooding recurs in this history, and it deserves to be tested rather than assumed. Searching the available sources for a direct link between al-Mu’tadid (who reigned as Abbasid caliph from 892 to 902 CE, 279 to 289 AH) and the shadharwan specifically returns no citation connecting the two. What does connect the Abbasids to construction at the Grand Mosque in this period is a documented, but separate, project: Asharq Al-Awsat’s history of the Grand Mosque’s architecture records that al-Mu’tadid oversaw a limited expansion of the mosque itself in 281 AH (894 CE), followed by a further expansion under his successor al-Muqtadir in 306 AH (918 CE) — expansions of the surrounding mosque precinct, not of the Kaaba’s own shadharwan. Separately, the Mataf’s paved floor — a different surface from the shadharwan, discussed below — is recorded as having been tiled with marble under the Abbasid caliph Abu Ja’far al-Mansur in 145 AH and again under an unnamed Abbasid caliph in 284 AH (896-897 CE), close to al-Mu’tadid’s reign, according to the history relayed by heritage researcher Abdullah al-Batati in Arab News’s feature on the marble flooring of the Two Holy Mosques. It is possible that popular retellings have conflated this Mataf floor work, which does fall within the Abbasid period close to al-Mu’tadid’s reign, with the separate structure of the shadharwan itself. This article does not make that link, because no source consulted here makes it explicitly and reliably. The honest position is that the shadharwan’s documented renewals across history — recorded variously at 542 AH, 636 AH, 660 AH, 670 AH, and 1010 AH by multiple sources including Hajj and Umrah Planner’s account of the Kaaba’s features — do not include a clearly sourced Abbasid-era renewal specifically naming al-Mu’tadid, and a reader should treat any confident claim linking the shadharwan by name to al-Mu’tadid with caution until a primary source is produced.

What is not in dispute is the functional explanation offered across nearly every source, regardless of who gets credit for building it: the shadharwan protects the base of the Kaaba’s wall from water damage during Makkah’s periodic flash floods, a hazard that recurs constantly through this history and that on at least one occasion — the flood of 1039 AH (1630 CE) — brought down entire walls of the Kaaba itself, as recorded in the account of Sultan Murad IV’s reconstruction discussed below.

Historical Development: Ottoman Marble Work and Saudi Restorations

The shadharwan’s documented history of renewal, so far as the sources allow it to be traced, runs as follows. Early renewals are recorded, without full documentary detail, at 542 AH (1147 CE), 636 AH (1238 CE), 660 AH (1261 CE), 670 AH (1271 CE), and 1010 AH (1601-1602 CE), a sequence given by both Hajj and Umrah Planner and Arabic Wikipedia’s entry on the shadharwan. None of the sources consulted give a narrative account of what prompted each of these renewals individually; they are recorded as dates, not stories, and this article does not invent detail to fill that gap.

The most consequential rebuilding of the Kaaba itself in the Ottoman era came after the flood of 19 Sha’ban 1039 AH (April 1630 CE), when heavy rain sent floodwater into Masjid al-Haram and the Kaaba to a depth reaching halfway up its walls. By the next day the northern wall, along with parts of the eastern and western walls and the roof staircase, had collapsed. Scholars and the leadership of Makkah agreed to demolish the remaining unstable walls, and the Ottoman Sultan Murad IV ordered the reconstruction, which was completed by 2 Dhu al-Hijjah 1040 AH — an account given in detail by Islam On Web’s history of the Kaaba and corroborated by the academic study of the rebuilding hosted at a scholarly paper on the rebuilding under Sultan Murad IV, which notes that Ibn Allan, a leading Shafi’i mufti of Makkah, supervised the work day by day and that the project proceeded only after fatwas were obtained from muftis of all four Sunni schools. This 1040 AH reconstruction, built to the same footprint and dimensions established by al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf’s earlier Umayyad-era rebuilding, is the structure that stands today; no wall of the Kaaba has been demolished to its foundations since. The shadharwan as rebuilt in this period would have been part of that same 1630 reconstruction, though the sources describe the Kaaba’s walls and roof in far more narrative detail than they describe the shadharwan specifically in this episode.

In the Saudi era, the shadharwan has been treated as a distinct maintenance item within two major restorations of the Kaaba. The first was the comprehensive restoration ordered by King Fahd bin Abdulaziz in 1417 AH (1996 CE), which addressed the Kaaba’s ceiling, its three interior support pillars, its interior walls and floors, its roof marble, its internal staircase, the rainwater spout, the wall of the Hijr Isma’il, and the shadharwan together, according to the summary at Islam On Web. During this restoration the old shadharwan marble was replaced with new marble matched to the colour of the rest of the Grand Mosque, while some of the old marble pieces were deliberately preserved beneath the area of the Kaaba’s door, a detail recorded by SaudiPedia. The second was a further renovation under King Salman bin Abdulaziz in 2016 (1437-1438 AH), which replaced the shadharwan’s marble again and renewed the golden rings used to secure the kiswah, the specifications given in the earlier section on materials above.

The Hijr Isma’il Side: Where the Shadharwan Is Absent

The shadharwan does not run continuously around all four sides of the Kaaba, and this asymmetry is not an oversight — it is itself evidence for the argument at the centre of this article. On the north-western side, where the crescent-shaped Hijr Isma’il wall stands a short distance from the Kaaba’s wall, the shadharwan as it exists on the other three sides is absent. IslamicLandmarks states the reason directly: “The Shadharawan isn’t on the Hateem side of the Ka’bah. This is because this side forms part of the original perimeter of the Ka’bah. A much smaller dark-grey ledge has been built here instead,” at IslamicLandmarks’ page on the shadharwan. In other words: on the Hijr side, the ground that the shadharwan elsewhere marks as “original but unbuilt-upon” is instead enclosed by an entirely separate, purpose-built low wall — the Hijr Isma’il’s own wall, roughly 1.3 metres high and 90 centimetres wide, made of white marble — because that whole area, not just a thin marginal strip, was left outside the Quraysh’s narrower rebuilding. The Hijr does the same legal work as the shadharwan (marking ground that must not be crossed during tawaf) but does it at a much larger scale, since it encloses a semicircular area roughly three metres deep rather than a shin-high lip a few dozen centimetres wide.

The distances here are documented with some precision. The gap between the shadharwan’s eastern end and the Hijr’s eastern opening measures about 2.30 metres, and the gap between the Hijr’s western opening and the shadharwan’s western end measures about 2.23 metres, according to Ibrahim Rifat Pasha’s measurements as preserved by Hajj and Umrah Planner’s history of the Hijr Isma’il and by the parallel entry at WikiShia’s article on the Hijr Isma’il, which gives the same figures. On the Hijr’s own side of the Kaaba, the shadharwan reappears at a noticeably lower level than on the other three faces — SaudiPedia’s entry on the Hijr Isma’il notes that “it is the only side of al-Kaaba where the Shadherwaan is at a lower level,” at SaudiPedia’s page on the Hijr Isma’il, likely because the rainwater spout, the Mizab al-Rahmah, drains directly onto this side and the lower shadharwan here assists with water flow away from the Hijr’s own floor.

There is also no shadharwan beneath the door of the Kaaba, on the eastern face. Sources agree this gap is deliberate and functional rather than a remnant of the original-foundation question: it exists, according to IslamicLandmarks, “to make it easier for pilgrims to cling to the door ledge,” since visitors have historically reached up to touch or kiss the base of the door and its threshold, a practical accommodation rather than a foundation marker.

Qur’anic Connections

The Qur’an does not mention the shadharwan, which is a post-Qur’anic structural feature rather than a scriptural one, and this guide does not force a verse onto it. The relevant Qur’anic material concerns the House’s foundation more broadly, and readers should turn to the wider guide’s article on the Kaaba itself for full treatment of these verses.

One verse is worth citing briefly for the geometry of the whole argument, since it names the act of raising the foundations that this article’s entire dispute turns on:

﴿وَإِذْ يَرْفَعُ إِبْرَاهِيمُ الْقَوَاعِدَ مِنَ الْبَيْتِ وَإِسْمَاعِيلُ رَبَّنَا تَقَبَّلْ مِنَّا ۖ إِنَّكَ أَنتَ السَّمِيعُ الْعَلِيمُ﴾

“And [remember] when Ibrahim was raising the foundations of the House, and Isma’il [with him], [saying], ‘Our Lord, accept [this] from us. Indeed, You are the Hearing, the Knowing'” (Surah al-Baqarah, 2:127). Classical tafsir treats this verse as establishing that the Kaaba’s foundation — its qawa’id — is Ibrahim’s own construction, the same foundation the Aisha hadiths describe the Quraysh later narrowing. The verse does not describe measurements or later alterations; it establishes the origin that later rebuilders, from the Quraysh onward, worked from and departed from in the ways this article has traced.

Hadith References

The hadiths most directly relevant to the shadharwan are, properly speaking, hadiths about the Kaaba’s original foundation and the Hijr, since no hadith describes the shadharwan by that name — a fair reminder that the word itself is a later structural term, not a term from the Prophet’s ﷺ own vocabulary.

  • Authentic (sahih): Aisha’s report that the Prophet ﷺ told her the Quraysh had narrowed the Kaaba from Ibrahim’s foundation, and that he would have restored it were it not for his people’s recent emergence from disbelief — Sahih al-Bukhari 1583 and Sahih Muslim 1333a.
  • Authentic (sahih): The longer version naming the plan for two ground-level doors and recording Yazid ibn Ruman’s eyewitness account of Ibn al-Zubayr’s excavation of Ibrahim’s foundation stones, described as resembling camel humps — Sahih al-Bukhari 1586.
  • Authentic (sahih): The Prophet’s ﷺ instruction to keep the Kaaba on one’s left throughout tawaf, and to “learn your rites from me,” narrated by Jabir and recorded by Muslim, cited within the discussion of tawaf’s conditions at IslamQA’s answer on the conditions of tawaf.
  • Scholarly opinion, not hadith: Ibn Taymiyyah’s ruling that the shadharwan is “not part of the House, but was made a support for the House,” which is a juristic statement, not a prophetic report, and should not be mistaken for one.

No hadith consulted for this article claims the Prophet ﷺ spoke about the shadharwan by name, touched it, or gave a ruling specifically addressing it. Readers should treat any account that attributes a specific saying about “the shadharwan” to the Prophet ﷺ with real suspicion, since the structure in its known form appears to postdate his lifetime.

Architecture: Materials, Design and What the Numbers Mean

Setting the fiqh question aside for a moment, the shadharwan is worth understanding simply as a piece of construction. Its sloped, ridge-backed profile sheds water outward and downward, away from the vertical joint between the Kaaba’s granite wall and the ground — precisely the joint most vulnerable to water infiltration during Makkah’s flash floods, which recur often enough in the historical record to have brought down entire walls of the Kaaba on more than one occasion, most dramatically in 1039 AH. Whether or not the shadharwan began as exposed Ibrahimic foundation, its present form functions unambiguously as a protective apron: it is built from a harder, denser marble than ordinary paving stone, cut into individual pieces heavy enough (up to 225 kilograms in the 2016 slabs) to resist being dislodged by floodwater, and it is fitted tightly enough against the Kaaba’s granite wall to prevent water from working its way behind it.

The rings serve the kiswah, not the tawaf. Before the era of the single-piece kiswah suspended from a belt near the roofline, the covering’s lower edge needed to be anchored close to the ground to keep it from billowing or tearing in wind and in the press of the crowd; cords run through the shadharwan’s rings did that work. Today the kiswah is held by a combination of methods including the belt (the hizam) higher up the wall, but the rings remain in place and are renewed with each restoration, a continuity of function across a very long span of the Kaaba’s history.

The colour of the shadharwan’s marble has also mattered enough to restorers to be recorded: the 1996 restoration under King Fahd specifically matched the replacement marble’s colour to the rest of the Grand Mosque’s stonework, while preserving some original pieces under the door area rather than discarding them outright — a choice that suggests the restorers themselves treated the old shadharwan stones as historically significant rather than as ordinary building material to be swapped without ceremony.

Archaeological Findings

There is nothing to report here with confidence. No published archaeological excavation report on the shadharwan itself — as distinct from historical descriptions and measurements recorded by pilgrims, officials and topographers across the centuries — appears in the sources consulted for this article. The closest analogue is the eyewitness account attributed to Yazid ibn Ruman, preserved within Sahih al-Bukhari 1586, describing camel-hump-shaped foundation stones he saw exposed during Ibn al-Zubayr’s seventh-century excavation of the Hijr area — a valuable historical witness statement, but not a modern archaeological survey, and it concerns the Hijr rather than the shadharwan specifically. Given the Kaaba’s status as an active site of worship rather than an excavatable ruin, no controlled archaeological investigation of the ground beneath the shadharwan has been conducted or published, and none should be expected. This section is included, as the spec requires, precisely to say plainly that there is nothing on record.

Stories of the Companions

The companions most directly tied to this feature’s history are Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr, who is credited by several sources with the shadharwan’s first construction (or reconstruction) during his rebuilding of the Kaaba around 65 AH, and, at one remove, Aisha bint Abi Bakr, whose report of the Prophet’s ﷺ words about the Kaaba’s narrowed foundation is what Bukhari’s own chain says drove Ibn al-Zubayr to act. Yazid ibn Ruman, who narrates the account of witnessing Ibn al-Zubayr’s excavation in Sahih al-Bukhari 1586, was not himself a companion of the Prophet ﷺ — he was a client (mawla) of the family of al-Zubayr and a later narrator, present at the actual rebuilding under Ibn al-Zubayr in the first Islamic century, and this article does not present him as a companion, since he was not one. No other companion narration specifically concerning the shadharwan, as distinct from the Kaaba’s foundation and the Hijr more broadly, was found in the sources consulted.

Stories of Great Islamic Scholars

Three named scholars anchor the fiqh history traced above. Imam Abu Hanifah (d. 150 AH) and Imam al-Shafi’i (d. 204 AH) are both reported, in the Sabq news feature’s historical summary, to have discussed the shadharwan in their legal writings, which historians use as evidence that some form of the structure already existed and already carried ritual significance in their lifetimes — pushing its likely origin earlier than Ibn al-Zubayr’s rebuilding in some tellings, though, as noted above, the sources do not resolve this cleanly. Imam al-Nawawi (d. 676 AH), writing generations later, gave the most precise surviving classical measurement of the shadharwan’s height and width and is credited with the explicit ruling that circling upon it invalidates that portion of tawaf, because the pilgrim has then “circled in the House, not with the House.” Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 728 AH) is the source of the single most quoted line on the structure’s legal status: that it is “not part of the House, but was made a support for the House” — a position that aligns him, whatever his reasoning, with the reinforcement account discussed above rather than with the reading that treats the shadharwan as exposed original foundation. No source consulted for this article records a specific ruling on the shadharwan from Imam Malik, Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Ibn Kathir, Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, or al-Samhudi (whose expertise in any case concerns Madinah’s topography rather than Makkah’s), and this guide does not manufacture one.

Spiritual Reflection

You will pass the shadharwan seven times in a single tawaf, on three sides of the Kaaba, and if no one has told you what it is, you will pass it seven times without a thought. That is, in a way, the point of writing this article at all: so much of what stands at the centre of the Muslim world’s devotion is made of details this small, this easy to miss, and this heavily weighted with meaning once someone bothers to explain them.

Consider what the shadharwan asks of you, practically. It asks you to walk a slightly wider circle than looks necessary — to give a low marble lip a few centimetres of clearance you would otherwise not think to give it. There is something quietly instructive in that. The scholars who hold that the shadharwan marks Ibrahim’s true foundation are asking you, in effect, to honour a boundary you cannot see with your eyes and would never guess at without being told — to trust that a piece of ground now covered by grey stone still carries the weight of where a prophet once stood and built. Whether or not you find that reading historically decisive, the discipline it asks for is not a small one: to hold back from a shortcut that would cost you nothing in comfort and everything in precision, because someone before you, centuries before you, drew a line here and asked that it be kept.

There is also something worth sitting with in the shadharwan’s plainer, more contested identity as mere reinforcement — a buttress against floodwater, nothing more. If that is all it is, the pilgrim’s obligation to stay off it rests on a different foundation: not that the ground itself is sacred, but that the wall it protects is, and that even a modest structural addition built to protect the House deserves the same wide berth as the House. Either way, you are being asked to extend your care a little further than the eye alone would tell you to. That, too, is worth carrying past the Mataf.

Practical Visitor Guide

What you will actually see, walking your tawaf today, is a low band of pale marble running along the base of the Kaaba’s wall on three sides, sloped outward, mostly hidden beneath the black kiswah that hangs down over it. It does not look dramatic. Most pilgrims walk past it seven times without registering that it has a name, and pilgrim guides on the ground rarely explain it beyond a single instruction: do not let any part of your body or clothing come into contact with it, and do not step up onto it.

Practical guidance for standing and looking:

  • Locate it before you start moving. Standing anywhere in the Mataf facing the Kaaba, look at the base of the wall just above the paved floor. The shadharwan is the narrow sloped strip where the wall meets the ground, distinguishable from the flat Mataf floor by its angle and, often, by a slightly different shade of marble.
  • Keep a visible gap. During tawaf, walk with a clear, deliberate distance between your body and the Kaaba’s wall — enough that neither your feet, your ihram or abaya, nor an outstretched hand can reach the shadharwan, let alone the wall or kiswah above it.
  • Do not lean on it, even briefly. In heavy crowding it can be tempting to steady yourself against the sloped ledge or to let a foot rest on its edge while you catch your breath. Both should be avoided; the ruling discussed above treats even brief, unintentional contact as affecting the validity of that portion of the circuit for those who hold this view.
  • Treat the area near the Kaaba’s door the same way, even though the shadharwan itself is absent directly beneath the door. The absence of the ledge there is a practical accommodation for pilgrims reaching for the door’s threshold, not an invitation to stand closer to the wall.
  • If crowding pushes you toward the wall, prioritise moving outward rather than continuing to advance; scholars who hold that contact invalidates part of the circuit generally also hold that the affected distance should be made up once it is safe to do so, rather than requiring an immediate, dangerous scramble back into position.
  • With children, keep a firm hold on their hands or carry them through the inner part of the Mataf close to the Kaaba, since children are both more likely to reach out and touch the wall or shadharwan out of curiosity and less visible to the crowd around them.
  • Photography of the shadharwan itself is not restricted in the way that photography of people can be sensitive elsewhere in the Haram, but the same general courtesy applies: do not stop to photograph it in the flow of tawaf, since doing so creates exactly the kind of stationary obstruction in a moving crowd that leads others toward the wall.

The best time to actually look closely at the shadharwan, rather than simply avoid it, is not during your own tawaf but from the raised viewing areas or upper floors of the Haram, where the sloped marble band is visible as a continuous feature running around three sides of the Kaaba, with the gap at the Hijr Isma’il and the gap beneath the door both clearly visible from height.

Common Misconceptions

It is not decorative. The shadharwan is sometimes assumed to be an ornamental marble trim, matching the general use of white marble throughout the Haram’s paving and columns. It is not ornamental; it is either a load-bearing marker of the Kaaba’s original foundation or a structural flood-protection element, depending on which scholarly account one accepts, and its ritual significance follows from that function, not from its appearance.

It is not a step, and should never be used as one. Its sloped profile can look, at a glance, like a low step someone might briefly stand on to see over a crowd or reach higher up the kiswah. Doing so is precisely the action the fiqh discussed above addresses, and it is treated by many scholars as invalidating the portion of tawaf performed while any part of the body is elevated on it.

Leaning on it during crowding does not, by itself, invalidate the Hajj or Umrah as a whole. This is a common and consequential overcorrection. The scholarly positions above concern the validity of the specific portion of the tawaf circuit performed while in contact with the shadharwan — they call for that portion to be made up or, out of caution, for the tawaf to be repeated — not for the pilgrim’s entire Hajj or Umrah to be voided outright. A pilgrim who realises they have brushed against it should seek to correct the affected distance rather than panic that their entire pilgrimage has failed; the specific remedy differs by school and by the pilgrim’s own school of reference, which is a matter for a qualified local scholar to advise on in person, not for this article to adjudicate.

The shadharwan is not the same thing as the Mataf floor, and the two are confused constantly by first-time pilgrims. The Mataf is the entire paved circumambulation area surrounding the Kaaba, floored in imported marble and expanded repeatedly over the centuries — a separate construction project with its own long history, including tiling under the Abbasid caliph Abu Ja’far al-Mansur in 145 AH, further marble work in 284 AH, replacement under Ottoman Sultan Muhammad Khan around 1006 AH, and major re-paving and expansion projects under successive Saudi kings through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, detailed in Arab News’s feature on the marble flooring of the Two Holy Mosques. The shadharwan, by contrast, is a narrow, sloped band attached directly to the base of the Kaaba’s own wall — not the floor pilgrims walk on, but the small transitional strip between that floor and the wall itself. Mixing the two up matters because the Mataf floor carries none of the foundation-related fiqh discussed in this article; walking on the Mataf floor is simply performing tawaf normally, while walking on the shadharwan is the specific action scholars caution against.

A note on ziyarah intent, applicable here as elsewhere in this guide: the shadharwan is part of the Kaaba itself, not a separate site visited for its own sake, so the broader caution this guide applies to detached historical locations around Makkah and Madinah does not bear on it in the same way. It is worth noting all the same, for context, that IslamQA’s summary of the scholarly position on ziyarah — a position associated with Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn Uthaymeen and the Standing Committee — holds that devotional visitation with the expectation of specific reward has a sound basis in the sunnah only for a short, named list of sites, and that historically interesting features are properly approached as objects of study and reflection on the seerah rather than as objects of ritual attention in themselves. Other scholars, particularly within Sufi and broader traditionalist currents, take a wider view of what counts as legitimate tabarruk, or seeking blessing through proximity to sacred things and places. Nothing about the shadharwan specifically has generated its own body of practices in the way that, say, touching stones or tying cloth to railings has at other sites; the caution here is included for completeness rather than because such practices around the shadharwan itself have been documented.

Lesser-Known Facts

  • The word “shadharwan” is Persian in origin, not Arabic, entering Arabic architectural vocabulary as a general term for a sloped stone apron at the base of a wall, and it is used in Persian-influenced building traditions outside Arabia for comparable drainage skirts, as reflected in general Persian architectural vocabulary discussed in unrelated contexts such as historic Sassanid-era water structures bearing the cognate name shadravan.
  • The shadharwan’s stone count and ring count are recorded differently by different eras’ observers — sixty-eight stones by al-Azraqi in the ninth century, thirty-six slabs after the 2016 Saudi restoration — a discrepancy that is not an error to be resolved but direct evidence of how many times the structure has been dismantled and rebuilt at different scales.
  • Ibrahim Rifat Pasha’s early twentieth-century measurements found the shadharwan’s height and width to differ noticeably from one face of the Kaaba to another, meaning the “ledge” a pilgrim sees is not a uniform object; its proportions on the northern face differ from those on the western, southern and eastern faces.
  • The 1996 Saudi restoration deliberately preserved some of the old shadharwan marble beneath the area of the Kaaba’s door rather than discarding it, a small act of conservation inside a project that otherwise replaced the material entirely.
  • Both Abu Hanifah and al-Shafi’i are reported to have referenced the shadharwan in their legal writings, meaning the structure — in some form — has carried legal weight in Islamic jurisprudence for well over a millennium, regardless of the unresolved question of exactly who built it first.

Timeline

  • Pre-Islamic era: The Kaaba, in Islamic tradition, is rebuilt across many generations, most significantly by Ibrahim and Isma’il (peace be upon them), whose foundation is the reference point for every later dispute treated in this article.
  • c. 605 CE (pre-prophethood): The Quraysh rebuild the Kaaba after fire and flood damage, narrowing its footprint for lack of funds and leaving the Hijr outside the new walls — the origin point of the “original foundation” argument.
  • Before 150 AH: Some form of the shadharwan is understood, on the basis of Abu Hanifah’s (d. 150 AH) recorded discussion of it, to already exist and carry legal significance.
  • 64-73 AH (683-692 CE): Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr, having taken control of the Hijaz, rebuilds the Kaaba on what he identifies as Ibrahim’s original foundation, incorporating the Hijr and, according to several sources, first constructing or reconstructing the shadharwan in this period.
  • 73 AH (692-693 CE): Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, on Caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan’s order, demolishes Ibn al-Zubayr’s addition and rebuilds the Kaaba to the smaller Qurayshi footprint that stands today.
  • 281 AH (894 CE) and 306 AH (918 CE): Limited Abbasid-era expansions of the Grand Mosque precinct occur under caliphs al-Mu’tadid and al-Muqtadir respectively — expansions of the mosque, not documented rebuildings of the shadharwan itself.
  • 542, 636, 660, 670 AH: Recorded renewals of the shadharwan, without detailed surviving narrative.
  • 1010 AH (1601-1602 CE): A further recorded renewal of the shadharwan.
  • 1039-1040 AH (1630 CE): Flood damage collapses walls of the Kaaba; Ottoman Sultan Murad IV orders a full reconstruction, completed the same year, establishing the Kaaba’s present form and, within it, a rebuilt shadharwan.
  • 1417 AH (1996 CE): King Fahd bin Abdulaziz’s comprehensive restoration of the Kaaba renews the shadharwan’s marble, matching it to the Grand Mosque’s stonework and preserving some original stones beneath the door area.
  • 1437-1438 AH (2016 CE): King Salman bin Abdulaziz orders a further renovation, replacing the shadharwan’s marble again and renewing its rings.

Key Lessons

Historical

The shadharwan cannot be understood without the story of the Kaaba’s own rebuilding under the Quraysh and the long argument, running from the Prophet’s ﷺ own lifetime through Ibn al-Zubayr’s caliphate, over whether the building should stand on its full original footprint. Even a feature this physically small carries the entire weight of that argument.

Spiritual

Devotion is sometimes most demanding in its smallest, least dramatic requirements — the discipline of a wider circle, held for no visible reason, out of respect for a boundary that predates you by fourteen centuries.

Personal

It is worth asking, before your own next tawaf, how much of what you walk past you have actually had explained to you — and how differently a familiar ritual can read once even one of its smallest details is properly understood.

Practical

Keep your whole body clear of the shadharwan throughout every tawaf, treat brief accidental contact calmly rather than as a crisis, and know before you go that the low sloped ledge at the base of the Kaaba’s wall is not a step, not decoration, and not the same thing as the Mataf floor beneath your feet.

Authentic Sources

Primary Islamic Sources

Hadith citations in this article are drawn from Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim via Sunnah.com. Classical historical detail on the Kaaba’s dimensions and the shadharwan’s early measurements draws on the ninth-century historian al-Azraqi’s Akhbar Makkah, as preserved and quoted in secondary compilations rather than consulted here in a primary manuscript edition. Readers should treat classical narrative historians of Makkah such as al-Azraqi, and by extension later compilers such as al-Fasi, as invaluable but not infallible sources, in the same way that Ibn Ishaq, al-Waqidi and al-Tabari require care when used for early Islamic history more broadly — their reports on physical measurements are generally more reliable than their reports on speeches and motivations, which can carry the embellishment typical of the historiographical conventions of their time.

Classical Scholars

Imam al-Nawawi’s description of the shadharwan’s measurements and his ruling on tawaf performed upon it; Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah’s statement on its status as a support rather than a part of the House; Imam Abu Hanifah’s and Imam al-Shafi’i’s early references to the structure, as reported in the secondary sources cited throughout this article rather than verified here against their primary legal texts directly.

Modern Academic and Reference Sources

A note on method: this article draws on a mixture of classical Arabic fiqh and historical sources (accessed here through reputable secondary compilations rather than primary manuscripts), contemporary Saudi state encyclopedic sources, and English-language Islamic educational sites of varying scholarly rigor. Where sources disagreed — on who first built the shadharwan, on its exact dimensions, on the stone and ring counts across different eras — this article has reported the disagreement rather than silently choosing one figure. Where a claim raised in the brief for this article, specifically the attribution of the shadharwan to the Abbasid caliph al-Mu’tadid, could not be verified against any source consulted, that gap has been stated plainly rather than filled with invented certainty. No hadith has been paraphrased into a stronger claim than its text supports, and no fiqh position has been assigned to a school without a citation naming that school explicitly.