The Mataf: History, Architecture and Ziyarah Guide to the Circumambulation Plaza Around the Kaaba

The Mataf is the open, roughly circular floor immediately surrounding the Kaaba inside Masjid al-Haram, the ground on which pilgrims walk seven counter-clockwise circuits in the rite of tawaf. It is almost certainly the most intensively used piece of pavement on earth: at peak Hajj hours, more than a hundred thousand people an hour cross the same white stone, most of them barefoot, many of them elderly, some in wheelchairs, all moving around a single point. This article is about that floor — where it came from, what has stood on it and been removed from it, how it is engineered to survive impossible crowds and impossible heat, and what the fiqh says about where, exactly, a valid tawaf may be walked. The Kaaba itself and the ritual sequence of tawaf are covered fully elsewhere in this Ziyarah guide; here the focus stays on the plaza beneath the pilgrims’ feet, as part of the broader Islamic history of Masjid al-Haram and the Umrah historical sites and Seerah locations covered across Makkah.

Understanding the history of the Mataf matters for reasons beyond curiosity. Every generation of Muslims has performed the same rite on ground that has been dug up, flooded, rebuilt, repaved, and re-engineered more times than most ancient monuments anywhere. The Islamic history of Masjid al-Haram is, in large part, a history of this floor: who paved it, who flooded it, who raised it, and who, in the last two decades, re-engineered it to move crowds an order of magnitude larger than anything the pre-modern city ever saw. A visitor doing Umrah historical sites research, or simply preparing for their own tawaf, benefits from knowing which parts of what they see are original, which are medieval, and which were poured in the last twenty years.

Historical Background: From Bare Ground to Engineered Plaza

Before any pavement existed, there was no Mataf as a distinct built space at all — only the open ground around the Kaaba, encircled by the houses of Mecca’s clans, with narrow alleys serving as the entrances into what would become the mosque. Multiple sources describing the Prophetic era agree on this basic picture: Masjid al-Haram had no perimeter wall, and the space between the surrounding houses and the Kaaba was simply the Mataf, an unpaved patch of ground barely large enough for the pilgrims of that time (Hajj and Umrah Planner). The ground itself was uneven, filled with pebbles and small stones — described by one heritage researcher as smaller than a bean — and it curved rather than lying flat (Arab News, citing heritage researcher Abdullah Al-Batati and Dr Salma Hawsawi of King Saud University).

The first structural intervention came from Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph. After travelling to Mecca to perform Umrah in 17 AH (639 CE) and finding that a flood had damaged the Kaaba and the surrounding ground, Umar ordered the demolition of some of the encircling houses — compensating their owners — in order to enlarge the Mataf and formally enclose the Zamzam well within the mosque precinct for the first time (Hajj and Umrah Planner; Saudipedia). This is the first recorded expansion of the space in Islamic history, and it set the pattern that would repeat for the next fourteen centuries: flood damage, followed by acquisition of neighbouring property, followed by enlargement.

Uthman ibn Affan continued the process around 647 CE, purchasing further houses and introducing arcades along the edges of the Mataf — porticoes that gave the courtyard a defined architectural edge for the first time, rather than simply fading into the surrounding residential fabric (Saudipedia).

Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr and the First Paving

The first person to actually pave the Mataf — rather than merely enclose or enlarge it — was Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr, the companion’s son who held Mecca during the Second Fitna and rebuilt the Kaaba itself on what he believed were its original Ibrahimic foundations. Sources place his paving of the Mataf in the aftermath of that reconstruction: after finishing the Kaaba, he had stone left over, and used it to pave a strip of ground about ten cubits wide around the building (Hajj and Umrah Planner). Sources differ by a couple of years on the exact date — one gives 64 AH (684 CE) as the year of paving, while Saudipedia places Ibn al-Zubayr’s tiling of the Mataf in 686 CE — a discrepancy of roughly two years that is best read as different chroniclers rounding the same events to nearby years in the Islamic and Gregorian calendars, rather than a genuine dispute about what happened. Either way, this is the point at which the Mataf stops being simply “the ground around the Kaaba” and becomes a built surface with a designer.

Marble first appears in the story a generation later. The Umayyad caliph Al-Walid ibn Abdul Malik is credited with repaving the ground with marble for the first time, in what one source dates to 119 AH (737–738 CE) and another to 737 CE specifically (Hajj and Umrah Planner; Saudipedia) — again a variance of at most a year, not a substantive conflict. From this point on, marble becomes the Mataf’s default material, occasionally interrupted by cheaper stone or plaster during periods when a caliph or sultan could not fund a full replacement.

Abbasid, Mamluk and the Long Medieval Middle

The Abbasid period saw at least two further repavings on record. Under Caliph Abu Ja’far al-Mansur al-Muntasir Billah, construction work at the Mataf was commemorated on a marble inscription dated 611 AH (1214 CE), which survives today and is displayed in the Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques’ Architecture in Mecca (Madain Project). One source describes an older repaving under Abu Ja’far Al-Mansur in 145 AH (762–763 CE), followed later by Abbasid Caliph al-Mu’tadid, who tiled the Mataf floor with marble in 284 AH — dated variously to 896–897 CE or 897 CE depending on the source (Arab News; Hajj and Umrah Planner). A further Abbasid caliph, al-Musta’sim, is recorded making improvements in 631 AH (1234 CE), commemorated by an inscription near the Kaaba’s door.

The Mamluk era brought a different material approach. According to the fifteenth-century Meccan historian Taqi al-Din al-Fasi, writing in his history Shifa’ al-Gharam, the Mataf was furnished with carved stones in stages until the work was complete, a project he places in 766 AH (1365 CE) and associates with the reign of the Mamluk Sultan al-Ashraf Sha’ban of Egypt; Sultan al-Mansur Lajin al-Mansuri is credited with further improvements to the same area (Hajj and Umrah Planner). One especially vivid detail survives from this general period, attributed to al-Fasi’s account: the Mataf’s black paving stones grew so hot under the Meccan sun that they resembled hot plates, and water carriers were kept busy pouring water over the stones to cool them for pilgrims’ bare feet — a temporary, manual version of the cooling problem that Saudi engineers would eventually solve with imported marble and mechanical ventilation seven centuries later (Hajj and Umrah Planner).

The Ottoman Contribution

The Ottomans made the most architecturally significant intervention before the Saudi era. In 1571, Sultan Selim II commissioned his chief court architect, Mimar Sinan — already responsible for some of the great domed mosques of Istanbul — to renovate Masjid al-Haram. Sinan removed the mosque’s flat roof and replaced it with a system of small domes, their undersides decorated with calligraphy, and added new columns brought from the nearby Shams mountains to support the new roof structure (Archnet; Wikipedia, Masjid al-Haram). These Ottoman-era colonnades and their domes are the oldest surviving architectural fabric of the mosque as it stands today — older than anything else in the building except the Kaaba itself (Encyclopaedia Britannica).

The Mataf’s own surface received direct Ottoman attention a few decades later. Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent’s renovations of 961 AH (1553 CE) included repaving the Mataf area, alterations to the Kaaba’s ceiling and roof, a newly carved marble minbar for the mosque, and reconstruction of the collapsed Bab Ali minaret, subsequently known as the Minaret of Suleiman the Magnificent (Hajj and Umrah Planner). In 972 AH (1564 CE) Suleiman ordered a further relaying of the Mataf using tiles sealed with lead and fixed with iron nails, a technique that was then extended until the whole of Masjid al-Haram’s open ground was covered with plaster (Hajj and Umrah Planner). Roughly forty years later, further work under Sultan Mohammad Khan replaced worn flint paving with alabaster in 1003 AH (1594–1595 CE), and laid bright white marble in 1006 AH (1597–1598 CE) (Arab News).

The Twentieth-Century Transition to the Saudi Era

By the early twentieth century, the Mataf’s surface was still fundamentally a patchwork of successive marble and stone layers, none of it designed for crowds anywhere near modern Hajj scale. Records converge on further work carried out in 1344–1345 AH (1925–1926 CE), around the time the Saudi state took control of the Hijaz (Arab News). Under King Saud, the old marble was fully removed and the Mataf releveled and repaved, with a black marble dividing line — cut from Saudi quarries — marking the boundary between the newly finished surface and older adjoining work (Arab News).

The pivot to imported Greek marble, the material that defines the Mataf today, came under King Khalid, whose 1978 expansion order specifically called for heat-resistant marble sourced from Greece (Arab News). King Fahd’s second Saudi expansion in 1985–86 added further cold white marble tiling laid in a circular, lined pattern, and King Salman’s later works completed a third major expansion phase (Arab News). The full physics of why Greek marble specifically was chosen, and how it performs under direct desert sun, is addressed in this article’s architecture section — but the headline fact belongs here in the historical sequence: after roughly thirteen centuries of local stone, plaster, alabaster and various marbles, the Mataf’s material identity has, for the last five decades, been Thassos marble from Greece.

The Story Behind the Place: A Floor That Has Never Stopped Changing

Most ancient religious sites are valued for what has survived unchanged. The Mataf is the opposite kind of monument. Its entire history is a story of intentional, repeated replacement — every caliph, sultan and king who touched it did so because the previous surface had failed, whether through flood damage, wear, insufficient capacity, or simple heat. No other detail captures this better than the fact that the current dividing line between “old” and “new” marble, laid under King Saud in the 1920s, is itself now one of the older surviving features of a plaza that has been resurfaced multiple times since.

The Mataf’s story is therefore not the story of a single architect’s vision realised once and preserved. It is the story of a problem — how do you keep a small circular plaza usable, safe and physically survivable for millions of people converging on a single point, in one of the hottest inhabited cities on earth — solved and re-solved across fourteen centuries by builders working with the technology available to them: Ibn al-Zubayr’s leftover stone, Sinan’s Ottoman domes and colonnades, Suleiman’s lead-sealed tiles, and finally twentieth- and twenty-first-century Saudi engineers importing purpose-selected Greek marble and burying mechanical systems beneath it. Each solution was adequate for the crowd sizes of its era and inadequate for the next. The scale of the modern rite — tens of thousands of people an hour, sustained for weeks at a time during Hajj — has no precedent in any of the preceding centuries, and the Mataf’s twenty-first-century form, covered later in this article’s architecture and capacity sections, is the first attempt in its history to engineer for that scale deliberately, rather than simply repave after the fact.

It is worth pausing on what has not changed. Through every repaving, flood, demolition and expansion, the act performed on this ground has stayed constant: seven counter-clockwise circuits around the same building, starting and ending at the same corner. Companion articles in this guide cover the ritual sequence of tawaf and the structure of the Kaaba itself in full; this article’s concern is the ground beneath that unchanging rite, and how radically that ground has had to change to keep serving it.

The Prophet ﷺ and This Place

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ performed tawaf on this ground both before and after his prophethood, though the space he walked was, as described above, unpaved and irregular — nothing resembling the engineered plaza of today. The most architecturally significant Prophetic episode tied specifically to the Mataf’s layout is the origin of ramal, the brisk, shoulder-swaying walk performed during the first three circuits of tawaf. According to Ibn Abbas, when the Prophet ﷺ and his companions arrived in Mecca for Umrat al-Qada in 7 AH, the Meccan pagans had spread word that the Muslims had been weakened by the fever of Yathrib. The Prophet ﷺ ordered his companions to perform ramal for the first three circuits and to walk normally between the Black Stone corner and the Yemeni corner, precisely to visibly refute that claim of weakness in front of the watching Meccans — he did not extend the ramal to all seven circuits only out of mercy for his companions’ exertion (Sahih al-Bukhari 1602). That specific stretch of ground between the two corners — still walked at a different pace than the rest of the circuit by pilgrims who know the practice — is a detail of the Mataf’s floor plan with a direct Prophetic origin, not merely a later scholarly convention.

The Prophet’s ﷺ own handling of the Black Stone corner also speaks to how he behaved on this ground under crowding, a theme this article returns to in its discussion of tawaf when the Mataf is full. Ibn Umar reported that he saw the Prophet ﷺ touch and kiss the Black Stone; when a questioner then asked what to do if the crowd made this too dangerous to attempt, Ibn Umar’s answer — given with evident impatience — was to describe what he had seen the Prophet ﷺ do, rather than to invent a workaround (Sahih al-Bukhari 1611). Classical and contemporary scholars have read this exchange, alongside other reports, as establishing that touching or kissing the stone is a sunnah to be attempted when safely possible and abandoned without guilt when it is not — a principle with obvious relevance to a Mataf now crossed by well over a hundred thousand people an hour at peak times.

The Prophet ﷺ performed his own Farewell Hajj tawaf, and later caliphs and companions continued to perform tawaf on this same ground through the early expansions described above. The detailed narrative of the Farewell Pilgrimage, the Conquest of Mecca, and the Prophet’s ﷺ other visits to the Kaaba are covered in this guide’s dedicated articles on those subjects; this section is limited to the episodes that bear directly on the physical layout and use of the Mataf itself.

Qur’anic Connections

Two verses anchor the Mataf’s religious significance and are quoted by nearly every source on the subject. The first identifies the Kaaba, and by extension the ground around it, as a place of gathering and safety:

﴿وَإِذْ جَعَلْنَا الْبَيْتَ مَثَابَةً لِّلنَّاسِ وَأَمْنًا وَاتَّخِذُوا مِن مَّقَامِ إِبْرَاهِيمَ مُصَلًّى﴾

“And ˹remember˺ when We made the Sacred House a centre and a sanctuary for the people ˹saying˺, ‘You may take the standing-place of Abraham as a site of prayer.’ And We entrusted Abraham and Ishmael to purify My House for those who circle it, who meditate in it, and who bow and prostrate themselves in prayer” (Surah al-Baqarah, 2:125). Classical exegetes read “those who circle it” (al-ta’ifin) as a direct reference to the rite of tawaf, making this verse the Qur’anic basis for treating circumambulation as one of the House’s defining purposes — the Mataf exists, in the Qur’an’s own language, because the House was made “a centre… for those who circle it.” The verse also names the Station of Abraham, Maqam Ibrahim, the small enclosed stone structure that still stands within the Mataf today and is discussed further in this article’s architecture and “what no longer stands” sections.

The second verse addresses tawaf directly as a command tied to the completion of Hajj rites:

﴿ثُمَّ لْيَقْضُوا تَفَثَهُمْ وَلْيُوفُوا نُذُورَهُمْ وَلْيَطَّوَّفُوا بِالْبَيْتِ الْعَتِيقِ﴾

“Then let them groom themselves, fulfil their vows, and circle the Ancient House” (Surah al-Hajj, 22:29). The description of the Kaaba here as “al-Bayt al-‘Atiq” — the Ancient House, or the House of ancient standing — is echoed in a third verse commonly cited alongside these two:

﴿إِنَّ أَوَّلَ بَيْتٍ وُضِعَ لِلنَّاسِ لَلَّذِي بِبَكَّةَ مُبَارَكًا وَهُدًى لِّلْعَالَمِينَ﴾

“Surely the first House of worship established for humanity is the one at Bakkah — a blessed sanctuary and a guide for all people” (Surah Ali ‘Imran, 3:96). Together these three verses form the scriptural basis classical scholars cite when discussing why tawaf must be performed specifically around this House, on this ground — a point with direct bearing on the fiqh discussed later regarding tawaf performed outside the physical confines of the Kaaba and the Hijr, or on the mosque’s upper floors.

Hadith References

This section consolidates the authenticated reports most directly relevant to the Mataf as a physical space, distinct from the broader hadith literature on the meaning and reward of tawaf covered in this guide’s article on the ritual itself.

• On the origin of ramal in tawaf: Ibn Abbas’s report that the Prophet ﷺ ordered ramal for the first three circuits between the two corners, to demonstrate strength to the watching Meccans. Graded Authentic (sahih) as part of the Sahih al-Bukhari collection (Sahih al-Bukhari 1602).
• On touching and kissing the Black Stone under crowding: Ibn Umar’s report of witnessing the Prophet ﷺ touch and kiss the stone, and his terse response when asked about doing so under crowded conditions. Graded Authentic (sahih) (Sahih al-Bukhari 1611).
• On speech during tawaf: a report transmitted with a chain reaching a companion rather than the Prophet ﷺ directly, stating that “Tawaf around the House is similar to Salat except that you talk during it. So whoever talks in it, then let him not say but good.” This report is graded Hasan by the Darussalam annotation used on Sunnah.com, and is recorded in the chapter on talking during tawaf (Jami’ al-Tirmidhi 960). A note on authenticity: this report is transmitted with some variation between narrators — Sunnah.com’s own commentary notes that one narrator’s wording was contradicted by another’s — and its chain in some recensions stops at a companion (making it mawquf) rather than reaching the Prophet ﷺ directly. It is nonetheless widely cited by scholars as establishing that ordinary speech, unlike in formal prayer, is not prohibited during tawaf, provided the speech is good.

No hadith describing the Mataf’s physical dimensions, paving material, or capacity in the Prophet’s ﷺ own time was found in the major collections; reports about the unpaved, irregular state of the ground in that era come from historical and biographical sources rather than hadith proper, and are presented as such above rather than attributed to the Prophet ﷺ himself.

Historical Development: Floods, Silt, and a Floor That Kept Having to Move

The Mataf’s floor level has not stayed fixed across Islamic history. It has risen and fallen repeatedly, driven by a hazard that predates Islam itself: Mecca sits in a valley that channels flash floods from the surrounding hills directly toward the sanctuary. This section traces that flood history and the excavation and rebuilding work it repeatedly forced, complementing the paving chronology already set out under Historical Background.

A City Built to Flood

Before the twentieth-century rebuilding of Masjid al-Haram, the sanctuary floor lay roughly three metres below the level of the surrounding streets, a legacy of centuries of silt accumulation that made the whole precinct a natural catchment basin whenever the upper valley — Wadi Ibrahim — received heavy rain (German Wikipedia, “Sturzfluten in Mekka”). Even in pre-Islamic tradition, this vulnerability shaped the Kaaba’s own design: after a fire destroyed the pre-Islamic Kaaba and the Quraysh rebuilt it early in the seventh century CE, they deliberately raised the entrance door above ground level specifically to keep floodwater out of the interior, and a raised step was later added around the building’s base for the same purpose (documentary account cross-referenced with standard seerah sources). Flood mitigation is therefore not a modern engineering afterthought at this site — it is arguably the oldest architectural concern the Kaaba and its surrounding ground have ever had.

Historians who catalogued the frequency of serious flooding reached varying estimates depending on their era and method. The sixteenth-century Meccan chronicler Qutb ad-Din al-Nahrawali judged that flood-level events struck roughly once a decade; the nineteenth-century Ottoman writer Eyüp Sabri Pasha put the interval closer to twelve years; a 2001 Kuwaiti geographic study, using more systematic hydrological criteria, found that extreme floods recurred on average every 46 years, “second-order” floods every 33 years, and dangerous floods roughly every 13 years (German Wikipedia, “Sturzfluten in Mekka”). These figures do not agree with one another precisely, which is unsurprising given they are measuring different thresholds of severity with different methods across different centuries — but they converge on the same underlying fact: serious flooding of the Mataf was not a rare freak event across most of Islamic history, but a recurring feature of life in Mecca that shaped how every generation rebuilt the ground around the Kaaba.

A Chronicle of Recorded Floods

The documented flood record, compiled principally from the German Wikipedia’s detailed chronology and cross-checked against a parallel German-language chronicle, spans the earliest decades of Islam to the mid-twentieth century. The earliest recorded flood struck in 17 AH (638 CE) — the same flood that prompted Umar ibn al-Khattab’s expansion of the Mataf described earlier — sweeping away the Station of Abraham, which was later recovered downstream; Umar subsequently ordered a protective dam, later known as the “Umar Dam,” built to redirect floodwater away from the Bab Bani Shaybah gate (German Wikipedia).

Serious floods recur through the Umayyad and Abbasid centuries: a flood in 80 AH (700 CE), remembered as the “Juhaf flood” or “death flood,” caused enough destruction that the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan sent a Christian architect and building funds to construct stone flood-control dams; further floods struck in 120 AH (737–738 CE), 160 AH (776 CE, during Caliph al-Mahdi’s own pilgrimage), and 184 AH (800–801 CE), the last of these followed by a disease outbreak. A flood in 202 AH (817–818 CE) again swept away the Station of Abraham and submerged the Kaaba to within a cubit of the Black Stone; one in 208 AH (824 CE), caused by a burst dam at ath-Thaqaba, flooded the mosque up to the Black Stone and covered the whole precinct in mud, prompting Caliph al-Ma’mun to fund repairs and re-graveling of the Mataf floor. Further silt-driven flood and repair cycles are recorded in 253, 262 and 263 AH (867–876 CE) (German Wikipedia).

The tenth-century historian al-Mas’udi records a flood in 297 AH (909 CE) severe enough that all four corners of the Kaaba were underwater and pilgrims drowned while attempting tawaf — the same account states that the Zamzam well overflowed for the first time in its recorded history during this event. A flood in 569 AH (1173–1174 CE) reached the emir’s palace as well as the mosque, an extent of flooding the chronicler notes as unprecedented up to that point.

The medieval flood record becomes especially dramatic from the twelfth century onward. On 8 Safar 593 AH (31 December 1196 CE), floodwater entered the Kaaba itself and stood roughly a cubit deep inside it, sweeping away the doors of the Bab Ibrahim gate, the mosque’s minbar, and the Kaaba’s external staircase; for a period, pilgrims are recorded as having performed tawaf by swimming. A further flood on 15 Dhu’l-Qa’da 620 AH (10 December 1223 CE) submerged the Kaaba and caused fatalities. On 14 Sha’ban 669 AH (28 March 1271 CE), water reportedly entered the sanctuary “like a sea,” the minbar floated loose around the mosque, and one man is recorded as having performed tawaf entirely by swimming, to the astonishment of onlookers (German Wikipedia).

The worst single flood on record struck on 14 Dhu’l-Qa’da 687 AH (10 December 1288 CE). Water rose to the height of a standing man inside the Kaaba itself; seventy people are recorded as having drowned inside the mosque and five hundred more outside it; the water did not recede for four days. The Meccan judge Burhan al-Din Ibn Zahira, writing to Egypt afterward, said nothing like it had ever happened before, and gave the flood’s height as seven and a third cubits (German Wikipedia). A further mud-flood struck the mosque for two days in 730 AH (1330 CE) without any local rainfall at all — the water having travelled from flooding further up the valley — demonstrating that the Mataf’s flood risk was never purely a function of Mecca’s own weather.

The so-called “Lamp Flood” (sayl al-qanadil) of 10 Jumada I 738 AH (4 December 1337 CE) gouged holes two men deep near the mosque’s north and west gates, swept away the minbar and the Kaaba’s staircase, extinguished the lamps that hung over the Mataf, flooded the Zamzam well itself, and drowned eight elderly women who had taken shelter on stone benches; eighty houses collapsed in the surrounding city (German Wikipedia). A flood in 771 AH (1369–1370 CE) is described by the historian al-Suyuti as the worst Meccan flood he knew of, with over a thousand houses collapsed and roughly a thousand deaths.

Perhaps the most architecturally destructive flood on record struck over several days beginning 10 Jumada I 802 AH (8 January 1400 CE). Water reached five cubits inside the mosque and higher than a man’s height at the Bab Ibrahim gate; it entered the Kaaba to a cubit above the threshold, swept the Kaaba’s external staircase into the Ibrahim gate, and collapsed two columns and the roofing above the Ajyad gate. Around sixty people died from collapses and drowning, and tawaf itself was impossible for two days. A plague followed roughly three months later, peaking at fifty deaths a day in the city (German Wikipedia). A later flood in 983 AH (17 August 1575 CE) covered the Black Stone and the Hijr wall, nearly reaching the Kaaba’s door lock, and disrupted communal prayer for a full day and night.

The best-known flood by structural consequence is the one usually dated to 1630 CE (one source dates the same event to 1629), which caused the walls of the Kaaba itself to collapse and damaged the surrounding mosque; the Ottoman Sultan Murad IV had the Kaaba rebuilt that same year using grey-green granite blocks quarried locally around Mecca, and the building’s construction and appearance have not changed since (Italian Wikipedia, Ka’ba; English Wikipedia, Kaaba). The one-to-four-year variance between sources on the exact year is a minor and unresolved discrepancy rather than a substantive dispute about what happened.

The 1941 Flood and the Swimming Tawaf Photograph

The best-documented flood of the modern era struck in 1941, after roughly a week of continuous torrential rain. Floodwater in the mosque reportedly reached around two metres, and the event is frequently described as the worst flood at the holy site in modern memory (Dompet Dhuafa). A photograph from this flood, showing a young man performing tawaf by swimming through the submerged Mataf, became one of the most widely circulated images associated with Meccan flood history; the swimmer is most commonly identified as Sheikh Ali al-Awadhi, a twelve-year-old Bahraini student at the time, who died in 2015 at the age of 86 (Siasat Daily; Shafaqna). Some retellings name the swimmer differently, and this identification should be treated as the most widely repeated version rather than a settled fact beyond dispute. Similar accounts describe Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr performing an early “swimming tawaf” in the earliest Islamic period, and separately credit the medieval scholar Badr al-Din ibn Jama’a with diving to kiss the Black Stone during a flood — both of these earlier stories are repeated in popular retellings without a clear primary source, and are best treated as traditional anecdotes rather than verified historical fact. Later, less severe flooding is also recorded around 1727 and 1728, and again in 1913, though with less documentary detail than the major medieval and 1941 events.

What the Flood Record Means for the Mataf’s Floor Level

Two consequences follow from this long flood history, both directly relevant to the Mataf as it exists today. First, the repeated cycle of flood, mud deposition, and subsequent re-graveling or repaving — recorded explicitly after the floods of 208, 253, 262 and 263 AH, among others — means the Mataf’s floor has been built up in layers over centuries, each flood leaving silt that the next generation of builders either cleared away or simply paved over. Second, the pre-modern sanctuary’s position roughly three metres below the surrounding street grade was itself a product of this same long accumulation process, and it was this depressed, flood-prone siting that the twentieth-century Saudi rebuilding projects finally addressed structurally, through large-scale excavation, regrading and the installation of the drainage infrastructure described later in this article’s architecture section. The modern Mataf’s engineered drainage system is not a new problem invented by twenty-first-century crowd sizes — it is the final, mechanised answer to a flood risk that mosque authorities had been fighting with dams, gravel and repeated repaving since the year 17 AH.

Architecture: Engineering the Most Intensively Used Floor on Earth

The modern Mataf is not simply a paved courtyard. It is a mechanically ventilated, hydraulically drained, structurally layered piece of civil engineering, built to keep a stone surface walkable in direct desert sun and to move crowd volumes that have no real precedent anywhere else in the built environment. This section sets out the physics of the marble, the cooling and drainage systems beneath it, the crowd-flow engineering that shapes how pilgrims move, and the capacity figures — carefully attributed, since they vary significantly by source and date — that describe just how much load this floor is now designed to carry.

Why Thassos Marble, and the Physics of Staying Cool Underfoot

The marble now used across the Mataf and the wider courtyards of the Two Holy Mosques is quarried on the Greek island of Thassos, and has been supplied to the Saudi Binladin Group since at least 2008 by Greek suppliers including FHL Group, which alone has shipped more than 200,000 square metres of it to the site (FHL Group). Individual slabs are typically cut around 120cm by 60cm and roughly 5cm thick — a size, according to the Undersecretary-general for technical, operational and maintenance affairs at the General Presidency for the Affairs of the Two Holy Mosques, Eng. Fares Al-Saedi, chosen partly so that a single slab fits the space a kneeling worshipper occupies (Arab News; FHL Group).

The physics behind the marble’s performance in extreme heat has been studied directly, not just asserted. A 2021 paper in the journal Construction and Building Materials, cited by Arab News, assessed the thermophysical properties of the white marble pavement at Masjid al-Haram and found it combines high solar reflectance with comparatively high thermal conductivity relative to ordinary limestone paving — a combination that both reflects a large share of incoming solar radiation away from the surface and, for the heat that is absorbed, conducts it downward and sideways through the slab rather than letting it concentrate and build up at the surface where a bare foot makes contact (Construction and Building Materials, 2021; discussed in Arab News). The same paper found this combination also reduces night-time convective heat loss, which is part of why the marble does not simply radiate its stored heat back out after dark but instead stays within a moderate, walkable range around the clock.

A separate, earlier joint Saudi-Egyptian study published in the Arabian Journal of Geosciences in 2018 examined the marble’s mineral structure directly and described it as a “heat-dissipating smart marble.” X-ray diffraction analysis found the Masjid al-Haram marble is dominated by dolomite rather than the calcite that dominates ordinary white marble, and scanning electron microscopy showed a well-arranged, pore-free calcite crystal structure with a correspondingly higher compressional wave velocity than typical marble — properties the study links to both the stone’s characteristic whiteness and its superior heat-dissipating performance (Arabian Journal of Geosciences, 2018, via academia.edu mirror).

There is also a genuinely useful, if less dramatic, moisture mechanism at work. Eng. Al-Saedi describes the marble’s surface as porous enough to absorb ambient moisture overnight and release it gradually during the day, a slow evaporative process that draws additional heat out of the stone as the sun climbs — broadly the same physical principle, evaporative cooling, that makes a wet towel feel cold as water leaves it (Arab News). Saudipedia’s own explainer on the subject makes the same point independently: Thassos marble “does not absorb heat” and instead “absorbs moisture at night” and “releases [it] by day” (Saudipedia).

One recurring popular myth deserves a direct answer here, because multiple credible sources address it explicitly: the marble is not kept cool by pipes of chilled water running beneath it. General Presidency officials and engineers have stated plainly that no such piping system exists, and when the Mataf has been excavated for maintenance work reaching down to the Zamzam well, no cooling pipe network was found beneath the surface (Life in Saudi Arabia). The marble’s coolness is a property of the stone itself and the way it is laid, not of a hidden hydraulic cooling grid — a distinction some popular travel content and video explainers get wrong, describing “chilled water pipes” that engineers directly deny exist.

Resolving the “Carrara or Thassos” Question

One respected reference source, the Madain Project, states that the current Mataf floor “is paved with Carrara marble” (Madain Project) — a claim that conflicts with the overwhelming weight of other sourcing, including Arab News’s detailed engineering coverage, the Greek supplier FHL Group’s own project records, multiple peer-reviewed studies of the marble’s mineral composition, and Saudipedia’s dedicated explainer, all of which identify the Mataf’s marble as Thassos, from Greece. Saudipedia’s own article resolves the apparent conflict directly: it states that Carrara marble, from Italy, is used for the flooring of the Prophet’s Mosque in Madinah — which it notes covers an area of over ninety thousand square metres and additionally relies on fans and water-mist systems to manage heat — while Thassos marble is what is used in the courtyards and surfaces of the Two Holy Mosques, including the Mataf, in Mecca (Saudipedia). The Madain Project’s reference to Carrara marble at the Mataf appears, on the weight of this evidence, to be an error, most likely a conflation with the material used at the sister site in Madinah, rather than a genuine second sourcing tradition for the Mecca courtyard.

What Lies Beneath: Drainage and Ventilation

Beneath the visible marble, the Mataf is built as a layered engineering system rather than a simple slab-on-grade pavement. Each marble tile sits on a bed designed to manage both heat and water: insulating layers beneath the stone are laid to spread absorbed heat downward and sideways through the substructure rather than allowing it to build up at the surface (World Today Journal). Given the Mataf’s flood history detailed earlier in this article, drainage is not a peripheral concern bolted onto the marble layer but one of the oldest functional requirements the ground has ever had to satisfy, dating back to Caliph Umar’s flood-diversion dam of the seventh century CE.

Some travel and video content describes an “underground ventilation system” running beneath the whole Sahn al-Mataf area, cooling the marble from below by mechanical means in addition to the marble’s own thermal properties (Prayer Times KSA). This claim is consistent with the General Presidency’s broader, well-documented programme of climate-control infrastructure across Masjid al-Haram — the mosque’s air-conditioning and ventilation systems are extensive and well known — but the specific claim of a dedicated underground ventilation duct network built directly beneath the Mataf marble, distinct from the mosque’s general HVAC systems, was not found described with engineering-level detail in any primary or technical source consulted for this article, and should be treated as a plausible but not fully verified claim, distinct from the well-documented thermal properties of the marble itself and the explicitly denied “chilled water pipe” myth.

Crowd-Flow Engineering: Lanes, Levels and the Physics of a Circle Full of People

Moving huge numbers of people around a single fixed point is a genuinely difficult problem in crowd science, and the Mataf has been the subject of dedicated academic study for exactly this reason. A 2013 paper published in Jurnal Mekanikal by researchers at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia modelled tawaf crowd flow as a queuing system using discrete-event simulation software, and found that lane-switching — pilgrims moving sideways between different radii of the circular flow, rather than holding a consistent path — was the single most significant factor increasing crowd density and reducing the efficiency of movement through the Mataf (Haghighati and Hassan, Jurnal Mekanikal, 2013). The same paper cites earlier work proposing a spiral-path design, in which pilgrims enter tawaf at the outermost of seven concentric spiral bands and exit at the innermost after completing the seventh circuit down a ramp to an underground tunnel — a proposal aimed specifically at eliminating the lane-switching problem by design rather than relying on pilgrim discipline (Haghighati and Hassan, Jurnal Mekanikal, 2013). The paper also records that crowd density in the Mataf can reach as high as eight pilgrims per square metre near the Kaaba itself at peak times — a density figure that gives a concrete sense of just how tightly packed the innermost circuits become during Hajj.

In practice, today’s Mataf manages this problem partly through vertical separation rather than purely horizontal lane discipline. The modern Mataf area comprises multiple levels: a ground floor immediately around the Kaaba, a first floor above it, a second-floor mezzanine, and a roof level, each able to host tawaf simultaneously (Hajj and Umrah Planner; Saudipedia, “The Saudi Riwaq”). Dedicated provision exists for pilgrims with reduced mobility: current Mataf operations reserve specific time windows and, at points in the mosque’s recent history, dedicated elevated walkways for wheelchair users and the elderly, keeping this more vulnerable population physically separated from the highest-density general flow nearest the Kaaba. A temporary bridge built during the 2010s expansion works, discussed further below, was specifically engineered for this purpose before being dismantled once ground-level capacity had increased enough to make it unnecessary.

Capacity: Pilgrims per Hour, Before and After the King Abdullah Expansion

Capacity figures for the Mataf are reported with real and significant variation across sources and time, and this article attributes every figure to its source and date rather than presenting a single, artificially tidy number.

Baseline, pre-expansion figures cluster in the range of 48,000 to 52,000 pilgrims per hour: Arab News reported a baseline of 48,000 per hour in 2013 coverage of the expansion works (Arab News, 2013); the Saudi Gazette separately reported a baseline of 48,000 per hour rising to a tripled capacity by Hajj 2015 (Saudi Gazette, 2014); other outlets reported the pre-expansion figure as 50,000 per hour (Coastaldigest, 2014) or 52,000 per hour (Askislampedia). Saudipedia’s own retrospective states the pre-expansion Mataf handled roughly 50,000 pilgrims per hour (Saudipedia), while a separate Saudipedia article on the Mataf’s general history gives a lower figure of thirty thousand per hour for the pre-third-expansion baseline (Saudipedia) — the discrepancy between these two Saudipedia figures likely reflects different reference points in the expansion timeline being compared, rather than a factual contradiction about the same moment.

Target figures for the completed King Abdullah-era expansion vary more widely, and appear to reflect a shifting series of official projections issued at different stages of a multi-year, multi-phase project rather than a single number that was simply revised once. In December 2012, Sheikh Abdul Rahman Al-Sudais, head of the General Presidency for the Affairs of the Two Holy Mosques, stated the expansion would allow the Mataf to accommodate 150,000 worshippers per hour (Arab News, 2012); the Saudi Gazette repeated a target of 150,000 per hour by Hajj 2015 in 2014 coverage (Saudi Gazette, 2014). Other contemporaneous reporting gave lower target figures of 130,000 per hour (Arab News, 2011; Arab News, 2015; Coastaldigest 2014; Askislampedia). By 2015 and 2016, as the project moved toward completion, official figures converged lower still, around 105,000 per hour: Arab News’s 2016 coverage of the removal of the temporary Mataf bridge cites an overall project target of 105,000 worshippers per hour (Arab News, 2016), a figure echoed in contemporaneous defence and news coverage (Arab News, 2016).

The figure that has stabilised as the current official capacity, cited consistently in more recent reporting, is 107,000 pilgrims per hour. Saudipedia’s dedicated capacity article gives 107,000 per hour as the present figure, describing it as more than double the prior baseline of 50,000 (Saudipedia), and Gulf News reported the same 107,000-per-hour figure as the official capacity ahead of Hajj 2025 (Gulf News, 2025). Asharq Al-Awsat’s 2023 coverage gives a closely aligned figure of 105,000 people per hour for the expanded Mataf area specifically, distinguishing it from the separate Mas’a (Safa–Marwa) area, which it reports accommodates 120,000 per hour across four added floors (Asharq Al-Awsat, 2023). Reading the full sequence together, the most defensible summary is this: pre-expansion capacity was in the region of 48,000 to 52,000 pilgrims per hour; official projections during the multi-year King Abdullah and King Salman-era construction works ranged as high as 150,000 per hour at various points, reflecting evolving engineering plans rather than a single static target; and the figure that has held steady as the current, completed capacity across the most recent reporting is 105,000 to 107,000 pilgrims per hour.

A narrower but equally well-documented figure concerns the specific ground-level courtyard capacity before and after the removal of the temporary Mataf bridge. That bridge, built to carry wheelchair users and elderly pilgrims across an elevated route during the main construction works, held around 1,700 wheelchairs per hour when first opened in 2013 (Arab News, 2013), and was later reported carrying 7,000 pilgrims per hour combined across its two levels (Saudi Gazette, 2014). Once the surrounding ground-floor expansion works were far enough advanced that this bridge was no longer needed, its removal in 2016 raised capacity on that specific ground-courtyard level from 19,000 to 30,000 pilgrims per hour, according to Arab News’s coverage of the demolition, which also reported more than 14,000 engineers, technicians and workers involved in the wider project (Arab News, 2016). This 19,000/30,000 figure describes only that specific courtyard level at that specific stage of construction — it should not be confused with the mosque-wide 48,000–52,000 baseline or the 105,000–107,000 current overall figure discussed above, and conflating the two is a common error in secondary reporting on this subject.

The Temporary Removal of the Ottoman Colonnades and Domes

Al-Sudais’s December 2012 statement on the expansion also confirmed that historic colonnades — describing structures built roughly seven years earlier, i.e. around 2005, during an intermediate renovation phase rather than the original sixteenth-century Ottoman work — would be removed from the second floor and terrace area as part of the works (Arab News, 2012). Separately, a number of genuinely Ottoman-era domes were removed in 2013 specifically to expand available Mataf floor area, before being restored in 2015 in a reduced footprint covering only three sites, according to Sultan Al-Quraishi, director of projects administration at the General Presidency for the Affairs of the Two Holy Mosques (Ummid.com, 2015). A related but architecturally distinct episode concerns the portico columns from Mimar Sinan’s sixteenth-century Ottoman arcade: several of these were removed or altered during the 1432 AH/2011 CE expansion phase, and a number of the original columns have since been preserved and displayed as a heritage installation titled “Seven Columns” (Diriyah Biennale Foundation, “Seven Columns”). Readers should note the distinction between these three related but separate episodes: the 2005-era colonnade removed per Al-Sudais’s 2012 statement, the genuinely Ottoman domes removed in 2013 and partly restored in 2015, and the sixteenth-century Sinan-era portico columns affected by the 2011 expansion and now preserved as heritage objects rather than reinstalled in the mosque.

Archaeological Findings

Systematic, published archaeological excavation of the Mataf itself, in the academic sense of a documented dig with recorded stratigraphy, is not something this research found evidence of. The construction and repair work described throughout this article — the various rounds of excavation, levelling and repaving under the Abbasids, Ottomans and the Saudi state — were building and engineering projects, not archaeological investigations, and were generally not accompanied by published archaeological reporting of what was found beneath the successive floor layers. The one physical find with a documented provenance is the marble inscription commemorating construction work under the Abbasid Caliph Abu Ja’far al-Mansur al-Muntasir Billah, dated 611 AH, which survives today on public display in the Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques’ Architecture in Mecca (Madain Project) — a preserved architectural artifact rather than the product of an excavation. Beyond this, no published archaeological findings specific to the Mataf’s subsurface were located, and this section states that plainly rather than speculating about what excavation might have revealed.

Stories of the Companions

Several companions are tied directly to specific, datable interventions in the Mataf’s physical fabric, distinct from the general companion narratives of the Hajj and Umrah covered elsewhere in this guide. Umar ibn al-Khattab’s expansion of the Mataf and enclosure of the Zamzam well after the flood of 17 AH has already been described above; it is worth noting here that Umar acted as a builder-caliph in this instance, personally ordering the demolition of neighbouring houses and ensuring compensation to their owners — an early example of the state balancing the sanctuary’s needs against individual property rights, a tension that recurs throughout the site’s later expansion history. Uthman ibn Affan continued this pattern around 647 CE, purchasing further houses and introducing the Mataf’s first arcades (Saudipedia).

Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr stands apart from the other companions in this story because his intervention was not incremental expansion but a deliberate act of reconstruction and reinterpretation: having rebuilt the Kaaba itself on what he believed were its original Ibrahimic foundations — a reconstruction later reversed by Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, a matter covered in full in this guide’s article on the Kaaba’s structural history — he used the leftover stone from that project to give the Mataf its first paved surface. It should be noted plainly that Ibn al-Zubayr was not present during the Prophet’s ﷺ own lifetime as an adult companion active in this specific building role; his major interventions at the Kaaba and Mataf both belong to the period of his own governorship of Mecca during the Second Fitna, decades after the Prophet’s ﷺ death, and should not be conflated with events of the Prophetic era itself.

Stories of Great Islamic Scholars

The scholars whose names are most directly tied to the Mataf are not the classical jurists of the formative centuries so much as the modern authorities who ruled on questions the twentieth-century multi-storey expansion created for the first time — questions with no medieval precedent, because no medieval Mataf had an upper floor. These rulings are addressed in detail in the fiqh section below; here it is worth naming the historians whose written accounts anchor the paving and flood chronology set out earlier in this article. Taqi al-Din al-Fasi, the fifteenth-century Meccan historian, is the primary source for the account of Mamluk-era carved-stone paving and the vivid detail of water carriers cooling the hot black paving stones by hand, recorded in his history Shifa’ al-Gharam (cited via Hajj and Umrah Planner). The sixteenth-century chronicler Qutb ad-Din al-Nahrawali and the nineteenth-century Ottoman writer Eyüp Sabri Pasha are the sources for the two differing estimates of flood recurrence intervals discussed in the Historical Development section (German Wikipedia, “Sturzfluten in Mekka”). Al-Mas’udi, the tenth-century historian, is the primary source for the account of the 297 AH flood in which the Zamzam well is said to have overflowed for the first time in its recorded history.

What No Longer Stands in the Mataf

The Mataf visible today is markedly emptier than the Mataf of a century ago, because several structures that once stood within the circumambulation area — obstacles pilgrims had to walk around while performing tawaf — have been removed, in every case explicitly to make more room for a growing number of worshippers. This section states plainly what is gone, on whose authority, and roughly when; it does not repeat the fuller narratives that belong to this guide’s companion articles on the four maqams and on what the Saudi-era expansions removed more broadly, and readers wanting the complete story of any one structure should look there.

The Zamzam Well Building

For most of Islamic history, the Zamzam well was housed inside a freestanding building within the Mataf, altered and rebuilt multiple times, most recently by the Ottomans after the first Saudi state had demolished an earlier version. Sources genuinely disagree on the precise date this building finally came down, and the disagreement spans nearly a decade: one detailed account states the historic Zamzam building was removed as early as 1955 due to congestion, with the idea of moving the well fully underground first discussed in 1963 (Hisar Tour); Saudipedia’s dedicated Zamzam Well article gives a 1962 royal order to expand the Mataf, a lowered well opening set into a 2.7-metre-deep basement split into separate men’s and women’s sections, and a completion date of 1963 (Saudipedia); English Wikipedia’s Zamzam Well article gives 1964 as the demolition date, with the well’s opening moved into a 2.5-metre-deep basement (Wikipedia, Zamzam Well); and Arab News reporting on the well’s history likewise gives 1964 as the year the building was finally demolished for Mataf expansion and safety reasons (Arab News). Hisar Tour’s account adds two further, later stages not mentioned elsewhere: the well was moved to a separate ground-floor area with its entrance near the eastern portico in 1979, and the stairway and access section were closed entirely in 2001 due to crowding, after which only on-duty mosque staff could access the well directly, with water distributed to pilgrims via thermoses and coolers throughout the mosque instead (Hisar Tour). Rather than resolve these dates to a single figure, this article presents the well’s disappearance from the open Mataf as what the sources actually describe: a phased process running from the mid-1950s through 2001, with the building’s demolition most consistently dated to 1962–1964 and the well’s final withdrawal from public access dated to 1979 and 2001 in stages. A visitor to the Mataf today sees no well building at all — only marble floor, with the well itself sealed beneath it and its water supplied elsewhere in the mosque.

The Four Maqams of the Schools of Law

Until the early twentieth century, four separate pavilions stood within the Mataf, one for each of the four Sunni schools of law — Hanafi, Shafi’i, Maliki and Hanbali — each with its own mihrab, used so that congregations of each school could pray behind their own imam at the same time. This tradition is attested as far back as the Andalusian traveller Ibn Jubayr’s 579 AH (1184 CE) account of his own pilgrimage, which records five simultaneous Tarawih congregations at the mosque, including a Zaydi Shia congregation alongside the four Sunni ones (cross-referenced via ebnhussein.com’s historical account). The order in which the schools prayed daily placed the Shafi’is first, reflecting their historical numerical dominance in Mecca, followed by the Hanafis, Malikis and Hanbalis, except for Maghrib prayer, whose short time window meant all four congregations prayed together. The Ottomans, being Hanafi themselves, rebuilt the Hanafi maqam as the largest and most architecturally elaborate of the four.

The practice of four separate congregations praying behind four separate imams at the same site ended by royal decision, not by gradual disuse: a scholarly gathering of Hejazi and Najdi ulema, convened in October 1926 (1345 AH) on the order of King Abdulaziz, formally unified prayer behind a single imam. Named participants in that ruling included the Hanbali sheikhs Abd al-Zahir Abu al-Samh and Hamad al-Khatib and Shafi’i sheikhs including Abd al-Rahman al-Zawawi, according to Arabic-language reporting on the episode (Al-Riyadh; Asharq Al-Awsat). It is important to separate this decision from the physical demolition of the maqam structures themselves, which happened later and in stages: the Hanafi, Maliki and Hanbali maqam structures are recorded as demolished in 1956, while the Shafi’i maqam came down alongside the Zamzam well building in the 1963–1964 works, and the structure housing the Maqam Ibrahim — a separate matter from the four schools’ maqams, discussed below — was itself dismantled on 17 October 1967 (18 Rajab 1387 AH), together with the Bab Bani Shaybah gate. In short: the four-imam practice ended in 1925–1926 by scholarly and royal decision, but the physical pavilions themselves stood for another three decades after that, coming down in three separate stages through the 1950s and 1960s. The fuller history of each individual maqam, and of the broader debate this unification provoked, is covered in this guide’s companion article on the four maqams.

The Maqam Ibrahim Enclosure, the Minbar, and the Ottoman Canopies

The Maqam Ibrahim, the stone bearing the imprint tradition associates with Ibrahim’s feet, has never been removed from the Mataf — it remains in place today, near the Kaaba’s eastern corner, as required by the Qur’anic verse discussed earlier in this article. What has changed repeatedly is the structure enclosing it: the maqam’s protective housing was rebuilt several times across Ottoman and early Saudi history, and the specific structure standing in the mid-twentieth century was dismantled on 17 October 1967, with the stone subsequently placed inside a smaller crystal or glass enclosure to give pilgrims a clearer, less obstructed line of tawaf around it (cross-referenced via Saudipedia, “The Saudi Riwaq”, which records the same 1967 timeframe under King Faisal’s reign). The mosque’s minbar, the pulpit used historically for Friday sermons and the call to prayer platform known as al-Mukabariya, both stood within or at the edge of the Mataf through the Ottoman period and were relocated during the twentieth-century Saudi expansions — one detailed account places the minbar and muezzin’s platform relocation specifically in 1978, under King Khalid’s expansion works (Saudipedia). The Ottoman canopy structures and domes that once stood over sections of the Mataf are addressed in the architecture section above, in the context of their temporary removal and partial restoration during the 2010s expansion works. None of these structures — the four maqam pavilions, the historic Zamzam building, the pre-1967 Maqam Ibrahim housing, the old minbar position — exist in their historic form or location today; a visitor standing in the Mataf now sees open marble floor and the Kaaba, with only the low, glass-enclosed Maqam Ibrahim marking where any of this earlier architecture used to stand.

Fiqh of Tawaf: Where, Exactly, May It Be Walked

The Mataf’s multi-storey twenty-first-century form created fiqh questions with no real medieval precedent, because no pre-modern Mataf had upper floors, a roof, or the sheer crowding that makes those upper levels necessary. This section sets out the scholarly positions by name, distinct from the ritual sequence of tawaf itself, which is covered in full in this guide’s dedicated tawaf article.

Tawaf Must Stay Within the Mosque, and Must Encompass the Hijr

Contemporary Sunni scholarship is consistent on two structural boundaries. First, tawaf must be performed within the physical confines of Masjid al-Haram; a circuit walked around the outside of the mosque’s exterior walls does not count as tawaf of the Kaaba at all, because, as Shaykh Ibn Uthaymeen explained, a person who does so “has circumambulated the mosque, not the Kaaba” (IslamQA, citing Shaykh Ibn Uthaymeen). Second, a valid tawaf must go around the entire Kaaba including the semicircular low wall known as the Hijr (also called Hijr Ismail), rather than cutting through the gap between the Hijr wall and the Kaaba to shorten the walk; scholars hold that anyone who takes this shortcut has not completed a valid circuit, because the Hijr is treated as effectively part of the House for the purposes of tawaf (IslamQA).

Tawaf on the Upper Floors and the Roof: A Position Named by Scholar

On the specific question raised by the modern multi-storey Mataf, Shaykh Ibn Uthaymeen’s position, as recorded by IslamQA, is that tawaf performed on the mosque’s upper floors, as well as its lower or ground floor, is valid, because both remain within the confines of Masjid al-Haram — his ruling explicitly extends validity to “those who do tawaf inside the mosque itself, whether on the upper or lower floors.” The same ruling draws a boundary at the Mas’a, the corridor used for sa’i between Safa and Marwa, and its roof: Ibn Uthaymeen states that tawaf should not be performed there or on its roof, “because the Mas’a is not part of the mosque” (IslamQA, citing Shaykh Ibn Uthaymeen).

This is a live area of scholarly divergence rather than a single settled global position, and readers should understand that other authorities differ, including across the Sunni-Shia divide. The office of the Shia authority Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani gives a more restrictive ruling specific to the Mataf’s own upper storeys: tawaf on the first floor is described as permissible, for example for an elderly pilgrim in a wheelchair who prays behind the Maqam Ibrahim on that level, but tawaf on the roof is stated plainly as “not permissible,” with no further detail given; a further condition attached to any additional level is that it must not be physically higher than the Kaaba itself, since “if you know the level is higher than the height of the Kaaba, then it is not permissible” (Office of Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani). This represents a genuine and substantive divergence, not a rounding difference: mainstream contemporary Sunni fiqh, as represented by Ibn Uthaymeen’s ruling, permits tawaf on any floor within the mosque’s confines including the roof, while Sistani’s office restricts validity to levels below the Kaaba’s own height and excludes the roof specifically. Both positions are presented here by name, without adjudication, exactly as the source material states them.

Tawaf When the Mataf Is Full

The crowding problem this article has described throughout — densities reaching eight pilgrims per square metre near the Kaaba according to the academic crowd-flow modelling cited earlier — is precisely the practical circumstance the multi-level Mataf and its floor-by-floor fiqh rulings exist to address. The Prophetic precedent discussed earlier in this article, Ibn Umar’s report of the Prophet ﷺ touching and kissing the Black Stone and his blunt response to a questioner asking what to do if crowded out of doing the same (Sahih al-Bukhari 1611), is the foundational text scholars draw on for the broader principle that the sunnah acts around the Black Stone corner are to be performed when safely possible and set aside without guilt when crowding makes them dangerous — a principle contemporary scholars have extended by analogy to the practical question of which level of the Mataf to use when the ground floor is full. No single named contemporary fatwa specifically addressing “which floor to choose when the ground floor is full” as its own distinct question was located in the sources consulted for this article, beyond the general floor-validity rulings already cited above; where sources were silent on this precise framing, this article has not manufactured a citation to fill the gap.

Spiritual Reflection

Stand for a moment at the edge of the Mataf before you step onto the marble, and consider what you are actually walking on. This floor has been sand, then stone, then black paving that scalded bare feet, then alabaster, then lead-sealed Ottoman tile, then Greek marble engineered specifically so your feet would not burn. It has drowned people. It has been swum across. It has been dug up and relaid more times than any single person could count, by caliphs, sultans and kings who never met each other but were all solving the same problem: how to let ordinary people get close to this one building safely. You are not walking on something ancient and untouched. You are walking on the latest version of something that has never been allowed to stay the same, because too many people have always needed to reach the same point.

There is a particular humility available in that fact. Every stone beneath you was placed there by someone responding to your need before you existed — Umar’s compensation to displaced homeowners, Ibn al-Zubayr’s leftover marble, King Khalid’s imported Greek stone chosen specifically so your soles would not blister in the sun. None of them are watching you circle the Kaaba now. All of them made this possible anyway. When you find yourself packed shoulder to shoulder near the Black Stone, unable to reach it, remember Ibn Umar’s answer to the man who asked the same question centuries ago: the Prophet ﷺ touched and kissed it when he could, and no more was asked of anyone who could not. The floor was rebuilt for you. The mercy in the ritual was already there before the floor existed.

Visiting the Mataf: Practical Visitor Guide to Choosing Your Level and Time in 2026

This section gives practical guidance as of July 2026. Saudi authorities adjust Mataf access patterns, escalator routing and time-based restrictions frequently, and pilgrims should confirm current arrangements through the official Nusuk platform or on-site signage before relying on any specific detail below.

Which Level to Choose, and Why

The Mataf today operates across several distinct levels: the ground floor immediately around the Kaaba, at least one intermediate or first-floor level, a second-floor mezzanine, and a roof level, with the distance of a single circuit growing at each level as the radius from the Kaaba increases. Multiple current guides converge on broadly similar figures: a full seven-circuit tawaf on the ground floor, walked reasonably close to the Kaaba, covers roughly 1.4 to 2 kilometres, while the same seven circuits on the first floor run to around 2 kilometres, on the second floor to around 2.8 kilometres, and on the roof to 3.5 kilometres or more (The Pilgrim; Al Maqam Transport). The Madain Project’s own distance breakdown gives slightly different but broadly comparable figures, putting the closest possible circuit at 75 to 80 metres per lap — around 525 to 600 metres for all seven — rising as far as 720 metres per lap towards the outer edges of the roof and corridor areas (Madain Project). The range across sources, from roughly half a kilometre at the innermost ring to over four kilometres on the outer roof, reflects genuinely different possible paths rather than a single fixed number, since where exactly a pilgrim walks within any given level changes the distance substantially.

The honest advice here is that ground-floor Mataf is not the goal in itself. Being closest to the Kaaba is not a separate ritual merit beyond what tawaf itself carries, and the ground floor is also, by a wide margin, the most physically demanding option: it is where crowd density is highest, where the academic modelling cited earlier in this article recorded densities up to eight people per square metre, and where the risk of being pushed, separated from companions, or physically hurt is greatest. Multiple practical guides now actively recommend the upper floors, not as a compromise but as the more comfortable and often equally fast option: one widely shared account reports a first-floor tawaf taking about the same time as a ground-floor one attempted at a supposedly quiet hour, with substantially less physical and mental strain, and better proximity to the Mas’a exit for pilgrims proceeding directly to sa’i (pilgrim account, r/Umrah). Elderly pilgrims, wheelchair users, and anyone uncomfortable in dense crowds are generally best served by the first floor or above, both for physical safety and, per Ibn Uthaymeen’s ruling discussed in this article’s fiqh section, without any loss of validity.

Real Time Cost, Per Level

Time estimates vary with crowd density more than with distance alone, and different sources give somewhat different ranges. A commonly cited breakdown suggests seven ground-floor circuits take roughly 20 to 30 minutes in quiet periods, first-floor circuits around 35 to 60 minutes, and roof-level circuits up to about 90 minutes in the busiest conditions (The Pilgrim; Hisar Travel Singapore). A separate breakdown gives a tighter general range of 20 minutes to over an hour depending purely on congestion, regardless of level chosen (Al Maqam Transport). The practical lesson across all these sources is consistent even where the specific numbers differ: the upper floors are longer in distance but not necessarily slower in practice, because their lower crowd density lets pilgrims walk at a steady, uninterrupted pace, while the ground floor’s shorter distance is frequently cancelled out by stop-start crowding.

Best Hours

Recurring advice across current pilgrim guides and reported Ministry of Hajj and Umrah recommendations identifies two consistently quieter windows: the period roughly 45 to 90 minutes after Fajr prayer, once the immediate post-prayer crowd has thinned and before the late-morning arrivals build up, typically extending to around mid-morning; and late night, roughly from 11pm to 2am or 2:30am, after the post-Isha crowd disperses and before the pre-Fajr build-up begins (Sunaan; Hisar Travel Singapore). The thirty to forty-five minutes immediately before and after each of the five daily prayers are consistently identified as the most crowded, and are best avoided for anyone starting a fresh tawaf, since movement in the Mataf pauses for the prayer itself in any case. Friday, particularly from after Fajr through Asr, is repeatedly flagged as the single most crowded day of the week due to the influx of local worshippers for Jumu’ah, alongside the general surge after Maghrib and Isha as tour groups and evening visitors converge on the mosque (UH Umrah). During Ramadan specifically, the last ten nights intensify all of these patterns substantially, and guides recommend the same late-night and post-Fajr windows even more deliberately during that period (Budget Savvy Diva).

Accessibility Provision

The current Mataf retains dedicated accessibility infrastructure that grew directly out of the temporary wheelchair bridge described earlier in this article’s capacity section. Wheelchair users and elderly pilgrims are generally directed toward the first floor and above, both because scholarly rulings — including Ibn Uthaymeen’s position cited above — affirm the validity of tawaf on these levels, and because the lower crowd density there makes navigating a wheelchair or walking frame substantially safer than attempting the ground floor. Designated lanes and staff assistance points exist at marked locations on these upper levels; pilgrims travelling with someone who needs this kind of support should ask on-site staff at the marked accessibility points for current routing, since exact lane locations shift as the mosque’s crowd-management plan for that season is adjusted.

The Honest Advice

Ground-floor Mataf, close enough to touch the Kaaba’s stone, is a real and legitimate goal for many pilgrims, and there is nothing wrong with wanting it. But it is not, in itself, what tawaf requires, and treating it as a mandatory achievement can push pilgrims — especially those less able to withstand crowd pressure — into genuinely dangerous situations for no ritual gain. The fiqh discussed earlier in this article is unambiguous on the point that matters most: a tawaf performed correctly on the first floor, second floor, or roof, within the confines of the mosque, going around the entire Kaaba and Hijr, is a complete and valid tawaf. Choosing a higher, roomier level when the ground floor is dangerously full is not a lesser option. It is frequently the wiser one.

Common Misconceptions

Several ideas repeated in casual pilgrim conversation and some travel content do not hold up against the sourcing gathered for this article, and are worth addressing directly and respectfully.

• “Chilled water pipes run beneath the marble.” This is a widely repeated but explicitly denied claim. General Presidency engineers have stated there is no network of cold-water pipes cooling the Mataf marble from below, and no such piping was found during excavation work reaching the Zamzam well beneath the Mataf (Life in Saudi Arabia). The marble’s coolness is a genuine, studied property of the stone’s mineral structure and surface behaviour, not a hidden hydraulic system.
• “The current marble is Carrara marble, the same as in Madinah.” As discussed in this article’s architecture section, this claim appears in at least one otherwise credible reference source but conflicts with the great majority of technical and journalistic sourcing, which consistently identifies the Mataf’s marble as Thassos marble from Greece, distinct from the Italian Carrara marble used at the Prophet’s Mosque in Madinah (Saudipedia).
• “Roof-level tawaf is universally accepted as valid, or universally rejected.” Neither is accurate. As set out in this article’s fiqh section, mainstream contemporary Sunni scholarship, represented by Shaykh Ibn Uthaymeen’s ruling, accepts tawaf on any floor within the mosque including the roof, while the office of Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani explicitly excludes roof-level tawaf and imposes a height condition relative to the Kaaba on any other elevated level (IslamQA; Office of Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani). This is a genuine, named scholarly divergence, not settled consensus in either direction.
• “The four maqams disappeared all at once in the 1920s.” As discussed above, the practice of four separate imam-led congregations ended by decision in 1925–1926, but the physical pavilion structures themselves survived for several more decades, demolished in stages across 1956 and 1963–1964. Collapsing this into a single date obscures a genuinely multi-stage process.

Lesser-Known Facts

• The black marble dividing line laid under King Saud in the 1920s to mark the boundary between newly repaved and older Mataf surface is itself now one of the oldest surviving features of the current floor, despite being a comparatively recent addition in the Mataf’s fourteen-century history (Arab News).
• Individual Thassos marble slabs used in the Mataf are cut to roughly 120 by 60 centimetres specifically so that a single slab accommodates a kneeling worshipper — a dimension chosen with the act of prayer in mind, not merely for structural convenience (FHL Group).
• The marble’s dolomite-rich mineral structure, confirmed by X-ray diffraction in a 2018 joint Saudi-Egyptian study, is what distinguishes it from ordinary calcite-dominant white marble, and is described in that study’s own language as producing a “heat-dissipating smart marble” (Arabian Journal of Geosciences, 2018).
• During the great flood of 10 Jumada I 738 AH (1337 CE), remembered as the “Lamp Flood,” the water was severe enough to extinguish the lamps that hung over the Mataf itself and to flood the Zamzam well directly (German Wikipedia).
• The 1288 CE flood, the worst on record, is reported by a contemporary Meccan judge to have reached seven and a third cubits in height and to have drowned seventy people inside the mosque itself, with five hundred more dead outside it (German Wikipedia).
• Academic crowd-flow modelling of the Mataf has found that pilgrims switching between lanes mid-circuit, rather than simple crowd volume alone, is the single largest driver of dangerous density buildup near the Kaaba (Haghighati and Hassan, Jurnal Mekanikal, 2013).
• The temporary Mataf bridge erected during 2010s expansion works, before its 2016 removal, carried roughly 1,700 wheelchairs an hour when it first opened in 2013, later rising to a combined 7,000 pilgrims an hour across its two levels (Arab News, 2013; Saudi Gazette, 2014).

Timeline

• 17 AH / 638 CE — Flood damages the Kaaba; Umar ibn al-Khattab expands the Mataf and encloses the Zamzam well, later building a flood-diversion dam (Hajj and Umrah Planner; German Wikipedia).
• c. 647 CE — Uthman ibn Affan purchases surrounding houses and introduces the Mataf’s first arcades (Saudipedia).
• 64–66 AH / 684–686 CE — Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr paves the Mataf for the first time, using leftover stone from his Kaaba reconstruction (Hajj and Umrah Planner; Saudipedia).
• 119 AH / 737–738 CE — Al-Walid ibn Abdul Malik repaves the Mataf in marble for the first time (Hajj and Umrah Planner).
• 145 AH / 762–763 CE and 284 AH / 896–897 CE — Further Abbasid-era marble repavings under Abu Ja’far al-Mansur and Caliph al-Mu’tadid (Arab News; Hajj and Umrah Planner).
• 611 AH / 1214 CE — Inscription commemorates Abbasid construction work at the Mataf, later preserved in the Exhibition of the Two Holy Mosques’ Architecture (Madain Project).
• 766 AH / 1365 CE — Mamluk-era carved-stone paving under Sultan al-Ashraf Sha’ban, recorded by al-Fasi (Hajj and Umrah Planner).
• 1571 CE — Sultan Selim II commissions Mimar Sinan to rebuild the mosque’s roof with domes and add supporting colonnades, the oldest surviving fabric of the modern mosque (Archnet).
• 961 AH / 1553 CE and 972 AH / 1564 CE — Suleiman the Magnificent’s Mataf repaving works, including lead-sealed tiling (Hajj and Umrah Planner).
• 1629–1630 CE — Major flood collapses the Kaaba’s walls; Sultan Murad IV rebuilds it in the form that stands today (Italian Wikipedia; Wikipedia, Kaaba).
• 1941 CE — Severe flood inundates the Mataf to roughly two metres; the widely circulated “swimming tawaf” photograph dates from this event (Dompet Dhuafa).
• 1345 AH / October 1926 — Scholarly gathering ordered by King Abdulaziz formally unifies prayer behind a single imam, ending the four-maqam congregational practice (Al-Riyadh).
• 1956 CE — Hanafi, Maliki and Hanbali maqam structures demolished (Hisar Tour).
• 1377 AH / 1957 CE — King Abdul Aziz-era Mataf quarrying, excavation and repaving begins (Hajj and Umrah Planner).
• 1962–1964 CE — Zamzam well building demolished and its opening moved into a basement, alongside demolition of the Shafi’i maqam (Saudipedia; Wikipedia).
• 18 Rajab 1387 AH / 17 October 1967 — The Maqam Ibrahim’s enclosing structure and the Bab Bani Shaybah gate are dismantled; the stone is placed in a smaller crystal enclosure (Saudipedia).
• 1398 AH / 1978 CE — King Khalid orders Mataf expansion using imported Greek Thassos marble for heat resistance, and the minbar and muezzin’s platform are relocated (Zawya; Saudipedia).
• 1979 CE — Zamzam well’s public access point relocated near the eastern portico (Hisar Tour).
• 1985–1986 CE — King Fahd’s second Saudi expansion adds further cold white marble Mataf tiling (Arab News).
• 2001 CE — Direct pilgrim access to the Zamzam well is closed entirely; water distributed via coolers throughout the mosque instead (Hisar Tour).
• 2011–2012 CE — King Abdullah-era Mataf expansion begins; some Ottoman-era portico columns removed or altered, later preserved as the “Seven Columns” heritage display (Diriyah Biennale Foundation).
• 2013 CE — Ottoman-era domes removed to expand Mataf floor area; temporary wheelchair bridge opens, carrying 1,700 wheelchairs per hour (Ummid.com; Arab News).
• 2015 CE — Removed Ottoman domes partly restored at three sites (Ummid.com).
• 2016 CE — Temporary Mataf bridge dismantled, raising ground-courtyard capacity from 19,000 to 30,000 per hour and contributing to an overall project target of 105,000 per hour (Arab News).
• 2023–2025 CE — Current official capacity figure of 105,000 to 107,000 pilgrims per hour confirmed in Saudipedia and Gulf News reporting ahead of Hajj 2025 (Saudipedia; Gulf News).

Key Lessons

Historical

The Mataf’s fourteen-century paving history shows that no single dynasty or era “finished” this space. Each solution — Ibn al-Zubayr’s stone, Al-Walid’s marble, Sinan’s Ottoman colonnades, King Khalid’s Greek slabs — was built for the crowd sizes and technology of its own time and was eventually judged insufficient by the next generation. Reading the history of the Mataf is, in large part, reading a history of ambition repeatedly outgrown.

Spiritual

The floor beneath a pilgrim’s feet during tawaf carries no independent sanctity of its own; the sanctity belongs to the act performed and the House being circled, not to the specific marble or level underfoot. This is precisely why scholarly rulings on upper-floor and roof tawaf, discussed above, can affirm a first-floor or roof-level circuit as fully valid: the requirement is nearness to and encirclement of the Kaaba within the mosque’s bounds, not contact with any particular generation’s pavement.

Personal

Choosing a higher, less crowded level over the ground floor is not a lesser or lazier form of worship. Given the real safety risks of extreme crowd density documented in the academic literature cited in this article, it is frequently the more considered choice, particularly for anyone travelling with children, elderly relatives, or a physical condition that makes crowd pressure dangerous.

Practical

Plan tawaf around the Mataf’s known quiet windows — post-Fajr mid-morning and late night — rather than around a fixed idea of which floor is “correct,” and treat the specific hour and level as adjustable variables to be decided on arrival, based on what the crowd in front of you actually looks like that day.

Authentic Sources

Primary Islamic Sources

Qur’anic citations in this article are drawn from Surah al-Baqarah 2:125, Surah al-Hajj 22:29, and Surah Ali ‘Imran 3:96 via Quran.com. Hadith citations are drawn from Sahih al-Bukhari 1602, Sahih al-Bukhari 1611, and Jami’ al-Tirmidhi 960 via Sunnah.com. Historical narrations of early Mataf expansions attributed to Umar ibn al-Khattab, Uthman ibn Affan and Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr are drawn from secondary historical compilations rather than primary hadith collections, and are presented as historical record rather than hadith; readers should treat classical historians such as Taqi al-Din al-Fasi (Shifa’ al-Gharam) and al-Mas’udi, cited throughout via secondary sourcing, with the same caution generally applied to early Islamic historiography, since their works were not compiled under the same chain-verification standards as the hadith sciences.

Classical Scholars

Shaykh Muhammad ibn Salih al-Uthaymeen’s rulings on the boundaries and validity of tawaf, including the upper-floor and Hijr Ismail questions central to this article’s fiqh section, are cited via IslamQA. The position of the Office of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani on floor-level restrictions for tawaf is cited via the Sistani office’s official English-language site.

Modern Academic and Reference Sources

• Arab News, detailed history of Mataf paving and marble engineering
• Saudipedia, “Mataf of the Grand Mosque”
• Saudipedia, “What Is the Capacity of Mataf?”
• Saudipedia, on marble cooling properties
• Saudipedia, “The Saudi Riwaq”
• Saudipedia, “Zamzam Well”
• Madain Project, “Mataf”
• Madain Project, “Tawaf Distance”
• Hajj and Umrah Planner, “Mataf”
• German Wikipedia, “Sturzfluten in Mekka” (flood chronology)
• Wikipedia, “Zamzam Well”
• Wikipedia, “Kaaba”
• Wikipedia, “Masjid al-Haram”
• “Cool white marble pavement thermophysical assessment at Al Masjid Al-Haram,” Construction and Building Materials, 2021
• “Physical characteristics of heat-dissipating smart marble at Al Masjid Al-Haram,” Arabian Journal of Geosciences, 2018
• FHL Group, Thassos marble supply records
• Haghighati and Hassan, “Modeling the Flow of Crowd During Tawaf at Masjid Al-Haram,” Jurnal Mekanikal, 2013
• Arab News, 2012, Al-Sudais on expansion capacity
• Arab News, 2016, temporary bridge removal
• Gulf News, 2025, current Mataf capacity
• Asharq Al-Awsat, 2023, Mataf and Mas’a capacity figures
• Ummid.com, 2015, Ottoman-era dome restoration
• Diriyah Biennale Foundation, “Seven Columns” heritage installation
• Historical account of the four maqams and their demolition
• Hisar Tour, phased Zamzam well relocation history
• Life in Saudi Arabia, on the “chilled pipes” myth
• The Pilgrim, tawaf distance by level
• Al Maqam Transport, tawaf distance and timing guide
• Hisar Travel Singapore, timing guidance
• UH Umrah, crowded times guidance

A note on method: this article draws primarily on Saudipedia, Arab News and other Saudi state and press sources for modern engineering and capacity claims, cross-checked against independent academic papers where available; on the German Wikipedia’s detailed flood chronology, itself compiled from named classical Arabic historians, for the flood record; and on a range of contemporary pilgrim-guide and travel-advisory sites for current practical conditions, which change often and should always be reconfirmed by the reader against official Saudi sources such as Nusuk before travel. Where sources gave materially different figures — for capacity, for demolition dates, or for tawaf distances — this article has attributed each figure to its specific source and date rather than silently choosing one, and has flagged genuine scholarly and historical disagreements by name rather than resolving them.