The Multazam: History, Hadith and Ziyarah Guide to the Wall of Supplication at the Kaaba

Between the corner of the Black Stone and the door of the Kaaba runs a stretch of wall roughly two metres wide. It has no marble facing of its own, no separate name carved into the Haram’s architecture, no independent structure at all. It is simply the eastern face of the Kaaba, draped in the same black kiswah as the rest of the House, distinguished from its neighbours only by what pilgrims for fourteen centuries have done there: pressed their chests, their cheeks, their open palms against the cloth and asked Allah for what they needed. That stretch of wall is called the Multazam — “the place of clinging” — and it is one of the smallest named features anywhere in this guide’s coverage of the Islamic history of Makkah. This article treats it honestly and at the length the material supports: no invented architecture, no inflated hadith, and a practical section built around the plain fact that in 2026 almost no ordinary pilgrim will touch it.

This is a companion piece to this guide’s articles on the Kaaba itself, the Black Stone, and the rites of tawaf. Read those first for the full history of the House; this article exists to answer one narrower question well: what, exactly, is the Multazam, what do the sources say about it, and what should a pilgrim who cannot reach it actually do.

Orientation: Telling the Multazam Apart from the Black Stone, the Door, and the Hatim

Visitors reliably confuse four different features clustered on or near the eastern side of the Kaaba, and it is worth separating them before anything else.

The Black Stone (al-Hajar al-Aswad) is a dark, reddish-brown stone set into a silver frame at the south-eastern corner of the Kaaba, roughly a metre and a half above the ground. It is the fixed starting and finishing point of every circuit of tawaf, and pilgrims kiss it, touch it, or point toward it as they pass. The door of the Kaaba (Bab al-Kaaba) is a separate feature entirely: a single gold-plated door on the north-eastern wall, about 2.25 metres above ground level, roughly 3.1 metres tall and 1.9 metres wide, through which the interior of the House is accessed a few times a year for cleaning. Between these two landmarks — the corner that holds the Black Stone and the raised door — runs the Multazam, the subject of this article. It is not a separate structure. It is simply that portion of the Kaaba’s own wall.

The Hatim, or Hijr Ismail, is different again: a low, curved marble wall standing apart from the north-western face of the Kaaba, enclosing a semicircular space that was once part of the House’s original foundation before the Quraysh, short of funds, rebuilt the Kaaba on a reduced footprint and left this section outside it. Pilgrims performing tawaf must keep to the outside of this wall; walking between it and the Kaaba invalidates that circuit, because the enclosed ground is treated as part of the House itself. A number of the classical sources cited below note that some companions and early jurists used the word “Hatim” loosely to mean the Multazam as well, which is one reason the two get blurred in popular writing — but the majority position, and the one followed by al-Bukhari when he cites the hadith of the Night Journey placing the Prophet ﷺ “at al-Hatim, or he might have said, at al-Hijr,” treats the Hatim as the semicircular Hijr Ismail wall on the opposite face of the Kaaba, not the Multazam on the eastern face (Islamweb). Keep the four apart: Black Stone at the corner, door on the wall above it, Multazam the wall between them, Hatim a separate low wall on the far side of the House.

Definition and Extent of the Multazam

The name comes from the Arabic root l-z-m, “to cling” or “to hold fast” — iltizam is the act of clinging, and the Multazam is, literally, the place where that clinging happens. The standard definition, repeated across the classical and modern fiqh literature, is the section of the Kaaba’s eastern wall between the corner containing the Black Stone and the Kaaba’s door, a span usually given as approximately two metres (Wikipedia’s summary of the Kaaba’s architecture; Saudipedia). Some sources give the more precise measurement of 12.84 metres for the entire eastern wall length from corner to corner, of which the Multazam proper — the segment actually between the Black Stone and the door — is the shorter stretch nearest the door.

Ibn Abbas, the companion whose name is most closely attached to this spot, is reported simply to have said: “The Multazam is between the Corner and the door” (Islamweb). This is the position followed by the overwhelming majority of scholars, ancient and modern, and it is the definition this guide uses throughout.

A minority of the righteous predecessors described the practice more broadly. Islamweb’s survey of the classical sources notes that some of the salaf spoke of embracing “the back of the Kaaba,” meaning the section under the Mizab (the rainwater spout on the north-western side), or of embracing the Kaaba without specifying any particular part of it at all (Islamweb). A hadith narrated by Abu Dawud from Abd al-Rahman ibn Safwan describes the Prophet ﷺ and his companions, on the day Makkah was conquered, touching the House “from the Door to al-Hatim” and pressing their cheeks against it along that whole stretch — which some scholars read as extending devotional clinging beyond the strict two-metre Multazam toward the Hijr side, given the crush of companions present that day (Sunan Abi Dawud 1898). Ibn al-Qayyim records a related debate over the identity of “al-Hatim” itself: some held it was simply another name for the Multazam, others that it was the wall of the Hijr, with the sounder opinion — the one al-Bukhari follows — being that al-Hatim is the Hijr (Islamweb). The point for a visitor to take away is this: the core, uncontested definition of the Multazam is the two-metre stretch between the Black Stone and the door, held by Ibn Abbas and the majority; a secondary, looser usage recorded from some of the salaf extends devotional touching toward the Hijr side, but this is the exception, not the rule, and should not be presented as if it were the standard meaning of the word.

The Core Hadith Reports on the Multazam

The Report from Ibn Abbas on Supplication Being Answered

The report that circulates most widely among pilgrims is the claim that Ibn Abbas heard the Prophet ﷺ say that the Multazam is a place where no servant supplicates without his prayer being answered. This tradition appears in various forms in secondary Hajj literature, often attributed to al-Fakihi’s Akhbar Makkah — for instance the wording “The signs of acceptance for any du’a made between the Black Stone and the door of the Kaaba will certainly be seen,” cited from Akhbar Makkah, hadith 231 (IslamQA.org, Hanafi), and the related saying attributed to Mujahid: “The area between the Black Stone and the door is called the Multazam. Allah will grant a person whatever he asks for there and save him from whatever he seeks refuge from there” (also transmitted through al-Fakihi). These are reports preserved in a specialised Makkan history rather than in the major hadith collections, and their chains are not the subject of the rigorous, cross-checkable grading that Bukhari, Muslim, or even Abu Dawud and Ibn Majah receive in the standard hadith sciences. They should be read as part of the devotional literature that surrounds this spot — reflecting the strong and old belief among Makkans that du’a here is answered — rather than as established, gradeable hadith of the Prophet ﷺ on the level of the reports discussed below.

The reports that are commonly cited by number — Sunan Abi Dawud 1899 and Sunan Ibn Majah 2962 — are not, in fact, reports about the acceptance of du’a at all. They are reports about the Prophet’s ﷺ physical posture at the Multazam, and they deserve to be read for what they actually say.

The Narration of Amr ibn Shu’ayb: Chest, Face, Forearms and Palms Against the Wall

The hadith reads, in Abu Dawud’s wording: Amr ibn Shu’ayb reported on the authority of his father that “I went round the Kaaba along with Abdullah ibn Amr. When we came behind the Kaaba I asked: Do you not seek refuge? He uttered the words: I seek refuge in Allah from the Hell-fire. He then went farther and touched the Black Stone, and stood between the corner and the entrance of the Kaaba. He then placed his breast, his face, his hands and his palms in this manner, and spread them, and said: I saw the Messenger of Allah ﷺ doing like this” (Sunan Abi Dawud 1899). Ibn Majah’s version is close: “Amr bin Shu’aib narrated from his father that his grandfather said: I performed Tawaf with Abdullah bin Amr, and when we had finished seven circuits, we prayed two rak’ah at the back of the Kaaba… Then he went and touched the Corner, then he stood between the Stone and the door and clung with his chest, hands and cheek against it. Then he said: I saw the Messenger of Allah ﷺ do this” (Sunan Ibn Majah 2962).

Both reports must be graded honestly, and the grading is not flattering to the popular retelling. Sunan Abi Dawud 1899 is graded Da’if (weak) by al-Albani, as sunnah.com’s own reference apparatus states plainly (Sunan Abi Dawud 1899). Sunan Ibn Majah 2962 is graded Da’if by the Darussalam editorial team that produced the widely used English edition (Sunan Ibn Majah 2962). The weakness in both chains is traced to a single narrator, al-Muthanna ibn al-Sabbah, who was classed as weak by Imam Ahmad, Ibn Ma’in, al-Tirmidhi, al-Nasa’i and others — a repeated, specifically named weakness, not a vague or disputed one (IslamQA).

Where the picture becomes more interesting is what several scholars do with two independently weak chains that report the same underlying action from two different routes. IslamQA’s detailed answer on the Multazam states that “these two hadiths corroborate one another. Shaykh al-Albani classed it as sahih in al-Silsilah al-Sahihah, 2138” (IslamQA). A separate compilation of Al-Albani’s rulings on the Multazam, drawing on the same body of material, describes the combined report as reaching the level of hasan once corroborated, “increased in strength by the fact that a group of the companions acted on it,” citing Ibn Abbas and Urwah ibn al-Zubayr as companions who are authentically reported to have done the same thing (AbdurRahman.org, drawing on Shaykh Ibn Uthaymeen’s Al-Sharh al-Mumti). Islamweb’s own survey states the same conclusion in slightly different words: “The Hadeeths on embracing the Multazam and making supplication are not authentic. However, some scholars like Al-Albaani considered those Hadeeths to be Hasan by way of corroborating narrations” (Islamweb fatwa 111217).

A note on authenticity: the honest position, stated plainly rather than smoothed over, is this. Individually, both the Abu Dawud and Ibn Majah wordings of the Amr ibn Shu’ayb narration are weak, and multiple major critics — Ahmad, Ibn Ma’in, al-Tirmidhi and al-Nasa’i among them — identified the same specific defect in the chain. Al-Albani judged that the two weak, independent routes strengthen each other enough to rise to hasan, a judgment other scholars have accepted and repeated, but this is a scholarly upgrade of two weak chains, not the citation of a single sound one. What is genuinely well attested — through Ibn Abbas and Urwah ibn al-Zubayr — is that companions and early successors practised iltizam at this spot, which is itself part of why the majority of jurists still recommend the act even while treating its attribution to the Prophet ﷺ himself as resting on strengthened weak evidence rather than a clearly authentic report.

Abd al-Rahman ibn Safwan’s Report on the Conquest of Makkah

A separate, earlier-narrated report describes what happened on the day the Prophet ﷺ entered Makkah as a conqueror. Abd al-Rahman ibn Safwan said: “When the Messenger of Allah ﷺ conquered Makkah, I said to myself: I shall put on my clothes, as my house lay on the way, and I shall watch how the Messenger of Allah ﷺ behaves. So I went out and saw that the Prophet ﷺ had come out of the Kaaba, he and his companions, and they were touching the House from the Door to al-Hatim. They placed their cheeks against the House, and the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was in the midst of them” (Sunan Abi Dawud 1898). This report, too, is graded Da’if by al-Albani in sunnah.com’s apparatus (Sunan Abi Dawud 1898). It is nonetheless frequently paired with the Amr ibn Shu’ayb narration as a corroborating description of the same general practice, and IslamQA’s fatwa on the Multazam cites it alongside Ahmad’s version (Musnad Ahmad 15124) in the same breath as evidence that companions did this in the Prophet’s ﷺ presence, even while noting the weakness of the wording (IslamQA).

What Is Better Attested: The Practice of the Companions

IslamQA’s considered summary is the fairest one available: “What was narrated from the Sahaabah concerning the Multazam is more sound than that which has been narrated from the Prophet” (IslamQA). Ibn Abi Shaybah’s Al-Musannaf preserves several such reports at the level of the companions and early successors rather than the Prophet ﷺ directly: al-Shaybani said, “I saw Amr ibn Maymun embracing what is between the corner and the door”; Mujahid said the companions “used to embrace the part of the Kaaba between the corner and the door and invoke Allah”; and Hanthalah reported, “I saw Salim, Ata’ and Tawus embracing what is between the corner and the door” (Islamweb). These are reports about the practice of respected early Muslims, not claims about a Prophetic statement, and they carry real weight precisely because they are not overstated.

The Fiqh of the Multazam: The Four Schools

Because the strongest evidence here concerns the practice of companions rather than an unambiguous act or statement of the Prophet ﷺ, the four Sunni madhhabs differ — sometimes only in emphasis, sometimes more substantively — on whether clinging to the Multazam is a confirmed sunnah, a lesser mustahabb act, or simply a permitted one, and on when it should be done.

The Hanafi school, as recorded through al-Tahawi’s summary of Abu Hanifah’s position, places the Multazam within a defined sequence of arrival rites: after completing Tawaf al-Qudum, the pilgrim goes to Maqam Ibrahim and prays two rak’ahs, then to the well of Zamzam to drink and pour water over the face and head, and only then to the Multazam — “between the Black Stone and the door” — to place the chest and forehead against it “while clinging to the cover of the Kaaba and invoking Allah,” before returning (Islamweb, quoting al-Kasani). This places the practice early in the visit, on arrival, rather than on departure.

The Shafi’i school ties the act more specifically to leaving Makkah. Al-Shafi’i himself stated: “It is preferable for the pilgrim who is bidding the Kaaba farewell to stand at al-Multazam, which is between the corner and the door, and say: ‘O Allah, the House is Yours and the slave is Yours'” (Islamweb, citing Al-Umm). This is echoed by the well-known Fiqh-us-Sunnah of the modern Egyptian scholar Sayyid Sabiq, which frames the Multazam within the etiquette of drinking Zamzam and departing, describing it as a place to “make special supplications” once the pilgrim has finished (Fiqh-us-Sunnah 5.82).

The Maliki and Hanbali schools converge on the same farewell-tawaf placement. Ibn Qudamah, the great Hanbali jurist, wrote: “It is preferable for the one who is bidding the Kaaba farewell to stand at al-Multazam, which is between the corner and the door, and embrace it by leaning one’s chest and face against it, and invoking Allah — this is proved by Abu Dawud on the authority of Amr ibn Shu’ayb” (Islamweb, citing Al-Mughni). Al-Mardawi, summarising Hanbali consensus on this point, records that standing at the Multazam upon finishing the farewell tawaf is an agreed position within the school, and that Imam Ahmad additionally recommended standing at al-Hatim — meaning, in this usage, the area under the Mizab — and supplicating there as well (Islamweb, citing Al-Insaf).

Running across all four schools is a minority, and arguably more historically accurate, view articulated by Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah: that the timing is not fixed by the sunnah at all, because “it is not narrated in the Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ, rather the Sahaabah used to do that when they entered Makkah” — meaning the companions’ own practice was to cling to the Multazam on arrival, not departure, and the jurists’ emphasis on the farewell tawaf is their own considered extension rather than a transmitted requirement. Ibn Taymiyyah’s conclusion was permissive and flexible: “He may do that before the farewell tawaaf, for it does not matter if this iltizaam is done at the time of the farewell tawaaf or at another time” (IslamQA, citing Ibn Taymiyyah’s Majmu al-Fatawa). Ibn Uthaymeen, in the modern Hanbali-Salafi tradition, states the disagreement candidly: “This issue has been contested among scholars though it was not proved to have been practised by the Prophet ﷺ. It was only some Companions who did it. Now, is it an act of Sunnah to embrace the Multazam? When? Scholars differ regarding this issue because no relevant practice was reported to have been done by the Prophet ﷺ” (Islamweb fatwa 111217). Sheikh Assim al-Hakeem, representing a more skeptical strand of contemporary opinion, goes further still: “I believe that this is not from the sunnah. There isn’t any specific place to make du’a in and it won’t be rejected. All places in al-Haram are great places for du’a” (Sheikh Assim al-Hakeem).

Across this range — from the Hanafi placement on arrival, through the Shafi’i, Maliki and Hanbali emphasis on departure, to Ibn Taymiyyah’s flexible “any time,” to al-Hakeem’s rejection of any special status at all — every position shares one hard limit, addressed directly below: none of them permit reaching the Multazam at the cost of harming another Muslim.

Historical Development of the Site

Because the Multazam is not a discrete structure but a stretch of the Kaaba’s own eastern wall, its history is inseparable from the history of the Kaaba’s reconstructions, which this guide covers in full in its dedicated article on the Kaaba. In outline: the Quraysh rebuilt the Kaaba roughly five years before the Prophet’s ﷺ mission, raising its height and, for the first time, elevating the door above ground level and sealing a second, western opening — the change the Prophet ﷺ later explained to Aisha as a deliberate act of exclusion, “so that they could permit into the Kaaba only those people whom they approved of.” In 64 AH, after the Kaaba was damaged during the siege of Makkah, Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr demolished and rebuilt it on what he understood to be Ibrahim’s original foundation, restoring the Hijr into the structure and adding a second door — before the Umayyad governor al-Hajjaj, after ibn al-Zubayr’s death, rebuilt it again along the reduced Qurayshi plan, the plan that has essentially defined the Kaaba’s footprint, and therefore the Multazam’s boundaries, ever since. The most recent full reconstruction followed the flood of 1039 AH (1630 CE), commissioned by the Ottoman Sultan Murad IV; the Kaaba’s interior received its last comprehensive renovation in 1417 AH (1997 CE) under the Saudi state (Islam on Web’s history of the Kaaba’s reconstructions). Through every one of these rebuildings, the Multazam has remained, by definition, whatever section of the eastern wall lies between the Black Stone’s corner and the door — a location fixed by two other landmarks rather than a preserved structure of its own, which is precisely why no independent archaeological or architectural record exists for it, a point taken up directly in the next two sections.

Architecture

There is nothing to report here beyond what belongs to the Kaaba’s architecture as a whole. The Multazam is not a distinct architectural element — it has no separate foundation, materials, ornamentation, or structural history apart from the kiswah-draped stone wall of the Kaaba itself, covered in this guide’s dedicated article on the Kaaba’s construction. Modern measurement surveys, such as those conducted by the Hajj Research Center at Umm al-Qura University, record the length of the eastern wall between the Black Stone corner and the Shami corner (which includes the door) as 11.68 metres, with the door itself set 2.25 metres above ground level, 3.1 metres tall and 1.9 metres wide (Islam on Web). The specific two-metre figure commonly quoted for the Multazam refers only to the segment of that wall lying between the door and the Black Stone corner, not the wall’s full length.

Archaeological Findings

There is nothing on record here. No archaeological excavation, survey, or published finding treats the Multazam as a distinct object of study, and none could: it is a functioning, continuously used, continuously re-covered section of a structure that remains a living site of worship rather than a ruin available for excavation. Any claims about the Multazam’s antiquity beyond the historical record of the Kaaba’s own reconstructions — covered above — should be treated as devotional tradition rather than archaeology.

Stories of the Companions

The companion whose name is most firmly attached to the Multazam is Ibn Abbas, cousin of the Prophet ﷺ and one of the great early transmitters of hadith and tafsir, who is reported to have identified the Multazam by its boundaries — “between the Corner and the door” — and to have practised iltizam there himself (Islamweb). Abdullah ibn Amr ibn al-As is the companion at the centre of the Amr ibn Shu’ayb narration discussed above, describing his own practice at the Multazam as something he had watched the Prophet ﷺ do (Sunan Abi Dawud 1899). Urwah ibn al-Zubayr, nephew of Aisha and a leading Madinan jurist of the generation after the companions, is separately and authentically reported to have practised the same act, according to the specialist collection al-Sahabah cited by later scholars (AbdurRahman.org). Beyond these names, Ibn Abi Shaybah’s Al-Musannaf preserves the practice of a wider circle of respected early Muslims — Amr ibn Maymun, Ikrimah ibn Khalid, Abu Ja’far, Ikrimah the freed slave of Ibn Abbas, Salim, Ata’ and Tawus — described embracing this same section of wall, sometimes alongside the area under the Mizab in the Hijr (Islamweb). No companion narration ties the Multazam to a specific battle, migration, or dramatic seerah event; its story is a quieter one of private devotion, repeated across a whole generation of the earliest Muslims.

Stories of the Great Islamic Scholars

Ibn Taymiyyah gave the Multazam its clearest and most frequently cited legal treatment in his Mansak: “If he wishes to come to the Multazam — that is what is between the Black Stone and the Door — and place upon it his chest and face and forearms and hands, and make du’a, and ask Allah for whatever he needs, then he may do so. He may do so before the Farewell Tawaf, there being no difference in this being at that time or any other, and the companions used to do so when they entered Makkah” (AbdurRahman.org, citing Ibn Taymiyyah’s Mansak). His formulation — permissive, unfixed in timing, and explicit that standing at the door without physically clinging is “also good” — has shaped how most contemporary fatwa bodies present the ruling.

Al-Shafi’i, as noted above, tied the recommended act to the farewell tawaf specifically, in his own words preserved in Al-Umm. Ibn Qudamah, writing in the Hanbali tradition, cited the Abu Dawud narration directly as his evidence in Al-Mughni, while candidly relying on a report he does not himself re-grade. Ibn Uthaymeen, in the modern era, gave one of the most careful and most quoted summaries of the entire dispute in Al-Sharh al-Mumti, framing it honestly as an issue “contested among scholars” precisely because the Prophet’s ﷺ own practice here is not clearly established, while affirming that the act itself is permitted “so long as that does not involve annoying others” — a phrase that anchors the practical guidance in this article’s next section (Islamweb, citing Al-Sharh al-Mumti). Shaykh Salih al-Fawzan, in a recorded ruling on touching and wiping the Kaaba more broadly, drew the boundary sharply: the Kaaba is not to be touched or wiped except at the Yemeni Corner and the Black Stone, but he explicitly carved out the Multazam as a legitimate exception for standing and making du’a, “a place where du’a is accepted if the intention of the person is pure, if Allah wills” (Shaykh Salih al-Fawzan). Taken together, these scholars do not agree on whether iltizam is a confirmed sunnah, but they agree, without exception, on the one condition that governs the rest of this article: it must never come at another Muslim’s expense.

Spiritual Reflection

There is something quietly humbling in the fact that the most sacred wall on earth has, at one specific stretch of it, become known simply as the place people cling to when they run out of other words. Not a shrine, not a monument, not even a fixed liturgical station with a required prayer — just two metres of cloth-covered stone, and centuries of people who stood there with nothing left to offer but their own bodies pressed against the House and whatever was actually in their hearts at that moment.

You do not need the Amr ibn Shu’ayb hadith to be authentic for that image to matter to you. Ibn Abbas clung to this wall. Urwah ibn al-Zubayr clung to this wall. Generations of anonymous pilgrims, whose names none of the classical sources bothered to record, clung to this wall and asked for things they could not ask anyone else for. What they were doing, when you strip away the question of grading and chains, was placing their bodies as close as a body can get to the House of Allah and admitting — physically, wordlessly — that they had nothing else to bring. That posture is available to you whether or not you ever touch the actual stone. It is the posture of coming to the end of your own resources in front of your Lord, and it travels.

Practical Visitor Guide

Say the plain truth first: for the overwhelming majority of pilgrims performing Umrah or Hajj in 2026, reaching the Multazam and physically clinging to it is not realistically possible without pushing through a dense, continuously moving crowd. Masjid al-Haram now regularly records single-day attendance in the hundreds of thousands, with a documented peak of roughly 904,000 worshippers and Umrah pilgrims on a single day during Ramadan 1447 AH / 2026, the highest figure ever recorded at the mosque (The Islamic Information; Hajj Gazette). The two-metre strip of wall between the Black Stone and the door is, by a wide margin, the single most contested few square metres in the entire mosque, more crowded even than the tawaf lanes around it, because everyone attempting to reach it is trying to occupy the same fixed spot rather than simply pass through.

This is the honest centre of this article, and it deserves to be said calmly rather than as a scolding. Every scholarly position surveyed above — Hanafi, Shafi’i, Maliki, Hanbali, classical and contemporary — treats the recommendation to cling to the Multazam as conditional on not harming or inconveniencing other Muslims. Ibn Uthaymeen’s formulation is representative: iltizam is permissible “so long as that does not involve annoying others” (Islamweb). IslamQA states it just as directly: “He should not cause difficulty for other people by offering a lengthy du’a. Similarly it is not permissible to crowd other people or annoy them in order to cling there. If he sees a space then he should say du’a. Otherwise it is sufficient for him to say du’a whilst circumambulating and when prostrating in prayer” (IslamQA). The same principle was applied by the Prophet ﷺ to the Black Stone itself, which carries far stronger textual backing for the virtue of touching it than the Multazam does: when Umar pushed hard through the crowd to reach it, the Prophet ﷺ told him, “O Abu Hafs, you are a strong man — do not crowd others around the Black Stone, you may hurt a weak person. But if you find an opportunity to reach it in order to kiss it or touch it, do it. If not, then say Allahu Akbar and continue” (reported by al-Shafi’i in his Sunan, cited in Fiqh-us-Sunnah 5.76). If that principle governs the Black Stone — a feature with sound hadith describing its virtues directly — it governs the Multazam at least as strictly, given that the reports specific to the Multazam are weaker still. Scholars are near-unanimous that harming a fellow Muslim in pursuit of a recommended, disputed-sunnah act inverts the entire priority of the Sharia: avoiding harm to people is obligatory; clinging to a particular two metres of wall is, at best, recommended. An obligation does not yield to a recommendation.

What this means practically: do not shove, do not climb over other pilgrims, do not linger in the gap for a long personal du’a while people wait behind you, and do not treat a failed attempt to reach the Multazam as a spiritual failure. If a genuine, natural gap opens as you pass it during tawaf or afterward — which does happen, particularly in the very last hour before Fajr or during quieter off-peak periods — you may pause briefly, place your palms or chest against the wall, and make du’a without obstructing the flow of tawaf around you. If no such gap exists, which will be true for most people at most times in 2026, simply keep walking and make your du’a from wherever you are, facing the wall as best you can. Nothing in the sources above makes physical contact a condition for your prayer being heard.

Where the Multazam is: it sits on the eastern face of the Kaaba, between the raised gold door and the corner nearest it that holds the Black Stone — the same corner where every tawaf circuit begins and ends. Orient yourself by the door first; it is visually unmistakable, gold and elevated above the crowd’s eye line. The Multazam is the shorter stretch of wall between that door and the corner. Best times to attempt it, if you intend to try at all: the last third of the night, particularly approaching Fajr, and the period immediately after Fajr prayer before the mosque fills for the day, tend to see the thinnest crowds around the Kaaba generally, though “thin” during Hajj season, Ramadan, or any 2026 peak period is still relative. Etiquette if you do reach it: keep your du’a brief enough that others waiting can also have a turn; do not turn your back to the House as you leave, and do not perform any action — kissing the wall repeatedly, wiping your hands over it and then over your face, rubbing coins or cloth against it — that is not part of what any of the scholars above actually describe. Photography immediately at the Multazam itself is generally discouraged by mosque authorities given the density of the crowd in that specific spot; check current Haram signage and staff instructions, which are enforced on the ground and can change without notice. Visiting with children or elderly relatives: given the crowd conditions described above, this is one part of the Haram where it is entirely reasonable, and arguably the more responsible choice, to keep vulnerable family members at a safe distance and supplicate together facing the wall rather than attempting to bring them into the crush. The most common mistake pilgrims make here is not a ritual error but a judgment one: treating the two-metre stretch of wall as worth risking injury to themselves or others to reach, when the scholarly consensus surveyed above says plainly that it is not.

Supplicating from a Distance

Given the practical reality just described, the overwhelming majority of pilgrims who wish to honour the Multazam do so by facing that section of wall from wherever they can stand or pause — sometimes from several metres back in the tawaf lanes, sometimes from the upper floors of the mosque looking down at the Kaaba — and raising their hands in du’a without any physical contact at all. This is not a modern accommodation invented for crowd control; it has clear grounding in the fiqh already surveyed. Ibn Taymiyyah’s own ruling explicitly allows for it: “If he stands near the Door making du’a without iltizam of the House then that is also good” (IslamQA, citing Ibn Taymiyyah). IslamQA’s contemporary guidance draws the same conclusion for anyone who cannot reach the spot physically: du’a made “whilst circumambulating and when prostrating in prayer” is sufficient in place of contact (IslamQA).

The underlying question — does the reward of this place attach to the physical wall itself, or to the state of the heart of the person supplicating — is not one the sources answer with a single formal ruling, but the weight of scholarly comment leans firmly toward the heart. Al-Fawzan’s formulation captures this precisely: the Multazam is “a place where du’a is accepted if the intention of the person is pure, if Allah wills” — the acceptance is conditioned on sincerity, not merely on location (Shaykh Salih al-Fawzan). Sheikh Assim al-Hakeem’s more skeptical position makes the same point from the opposite direction: since there is no fixed sunnah establishing this as an especially answered spot, “all places in al-Haram are great places for du’a,” which removes any anxiety about missing out by supplicating from a distance rather than at the wall itself (Sheikh Assim al-Hakeem). A pilgrim who stands twenty metres back, faces the Multazam, and pours out a sincere du’a has, on the reading of every scholar surveyed in this article, lost nothing essential by not touching the cloth.

Common Misconceptions

The first and most consequential misconception is the belief that du’a is only, or especially and exclusively, accepted at the Multazam, such that a prayer made elsewhere in the Haram carries less weight. No scholar cited in this article holds that view. Ibn Abbas’s own devotional statements about the Multazam describe it as a place of acceptance, not the place of acceptance, and classical letters on the mustajab spots of Makkah — such as the one attributed to Hasan al-Basri — list the Multazam as one of more than a dozen places in and around the Haram where du’a is traditionally held to be answered, including the Mataf generally, under the Mizab, inside the Kaaba, at Zamzam, on Safa and Marwah, and at Arafah and Muzdalifah (Hajj Portal, citing the letter attributed to Hasan al-Basri). The whole of Masjid al-Haram carries the general virtue that prayer there is multiplied beyond prayer anywhere else on earth except al-Masjid al-Nabawi and al-Masjid al-Aqsa. Singling out one two-metre stretch of wall as the exclusive gateway to accepted prayer has no basis in the sources and risks exactly the anxiety this section aims to relieve.

The second misconception concerns physical practices that have attached themselves to the Multazam without any grounding in what the Prophet ﷺ or his companions are actually reported to have done: repeatedly kissing or licking the wall, rubbing the palms across the kiswah and then wiping the hands over the face or chest as though transferring a blessing, and tying threads or small pieces of cloth to fixtures near the Kaaba. A detailed ruling on precisely this question states the matter without softening it: “This is an inappropriate innovation… It is not reported from the Sunnah for people to place their chest, cheeks and hands on the Kaaba… As for licking with the tongue, and wiping the Kaaba, and rubbing one’s chest or body, then this is an innovation in all cases, as this was not reported from the Prophet ﷺ… there is a difference between worship and seeking blessings” (The Ruling on Clinging on to and Wiping the Kaaba). This is a stricter position than the mainstream fiqh survey above, which does permit the basic act of iltizam described in the Amr ibn Shu’ayb narration; the point of difference is specifically the additional embellishments — licking, repeated wiping, transferring touch to other parts of the body — that go beyond what any hadith, however weak, actually describes. IslamQA’s broader ruling on touching the Kaaba draws a similarly firm line around actions with no textual basis at all, such as touching Maqam Ibrahim or the ancient portico pillars: “Every action which is done with the intention of drawing closer to Allah and worshipping Him, but which has no basis in the Shari’ah, is an innovation” (IslamQA). Tying cloth to railings or fixtures near the Kaaba falls under this same caution against unsanctioned physical acts of tabarruk that were never part of the Prophet’s ﷺ own practice.

The third misconception concerns the printed and pocket-sized du’a booklets sold to pilgrims outside the Haram and at Umrah agencies, many of which include a specific “Multazam du’a” presented as though it were transmitted from the Prophet ﷺ. The sources above make clear that no specific wording is fixed for this spot. Ibn Taymiyyah’s own guidance is that the pilgrim “asks Allah for what he needs” in his own words; the one specific text he offers as optional is the du’a attributed to Ibn Abbas beginning “O Allah, I am Your slave, son of Your male slave, son of Your female slave,” which he presents as a suggestion the pilgrim may use if he wishes, not a required formula (IslamQA). Booklets that print an elaborate, rhymed “Multazam du’a” and imply it must be recited verbatim, or that attribute to it specific guaranteed outcomes, are going well beyond what any scholar cited in this article claims. This should be said gently rather than mockingly: the impulse behind these booklets is sincere, and reciting a beautiful supplication at this spot is not wrong in itself — the caution is only against presenting an invented text as though it carried the same status as a transmitted hadith, or as though departing from its exact wording would somehow diminish the pilgrim’s prayer.

Finally, a broader point that belongs in every article in this guide dealing with a site inside the two holy cities that is not among the handful with clear textual grounding for intentional devotional visitation. The Multazam is a genuine exception to that broader caution in one respect: it sits inside al-Masjid al-Haram itself, one of the three mosques the Prophet ﷺ named as places to which a journey may rightly be made, and prayer anywhere within it carries the general, well-established virtue of prayer in the Haram. The narrower dispute here is not whether visiting the Haram is legitimate — it plainly is — but whether this specific two-metre segment of its perimeter wall carries an additional, targeted virtue beyond that general one, and whether clinging to it physically is sunnah, mustahabb, or simply permitted. As shown throughout this article, scholars from Ibn Taymiyyah to Ibn Uthaymeen to contemporary voices like Shaykh al-Hakeem differ on exactly that narrower question, and the reader is best served by knowing the range of opinion rather than a single flattened answer.

Lesser-Known Facts

The two hadith numbers most commonly cited for the Multazam by pilgrim-facing websites — Abu Dawud 1899 and Ibn Majah 2962 — are routinely presented online as though they establish that du’a is answered there, when in fact neither report mentions the acceptance of prayer at all; both describe only the Prophet’s ﷺ physical posture, chest, face, forearms and palms against the wall (Sunan Abi Dawud 1899; Sunan Ibn Majah 2962). The specific claim about answered prayer traces instead to separate reports preserved in al-Fakihi’s specialised history Akhbar Makkah, a text far less widely checked by hadith critics than the six major collections. The name “al-Hatim” is used in the classical sources in at least two conflicting senses — as a synonym for the Multazam by some early authorities, and as the semicircular Hijr Ismail wall by the majority, including al-Bukhari — which is the direct source of much of the modern confusion between the two features (Islamweb). And Qadi Iyad, the Andalusian jurist, is reported to have said that after hearing the hadith about answered prayer at the Multazam, he and every other narrator of that hadith went and prayed there themselves and had their prayers answered — a report that illustrates the strength of the tradition among scholars themselves, even though, as this article has shown, the underlying hadith does not meet the standard of authenticity that would make such certainty textually justified (Travel in Makkah, citing classical sources on the Multazam’s virtues).

Timeline

  • Pre-Islamic era: The eastern wall of the Kaaba exists as part of the structure maintained by successive Arabian custodians; no specific devotional practice at this section is recorded from before Islam.
  • Circa 5 years before the Hijrah (605 CE): The Quraysh rebuild the Kaaba, raise the door above ground level for the first time, and reduce its footprint, excluding the Hijr — the reconstruction that fixes the basic geometry, including the location of the future Multazam, that persists into the Prophet’s ﷺ lifetime (Islam on Web).
  • 8 AH (630 CE): On the conquest of Makkah, the Prophet ﷺ and his companions are reported by Abd al-Rahman ibn Safwan to have touched the House “from the Door to al-Hatim,” pressing their cheeks against it — a weak report, but the earliest narrative account of communal iltizam-type devotion at this wall (Sunan Abi Dawud 1898).
  • First century AH: Companions and early successors — Ibn Abbas, Abdullah ibn Amr, Urwah ibn al-Zubayr, and later Amr ibn Maymun, Ikrimah, Salim, Ata’ and Tawus — are reported practising iltizam at the Multazam, the body of testimony that later jurists treat as the strongest evidence for the act.
  • 64 AH (684 CE): Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr rebuilds the Kaaba on what he holds to be Ibrahim’s original foundation, restoring the Hijr and adding a second door — a configuration later reversed by al-Hajjaj.
  • 8th–9th centuries CE: The four madhhabs take shape, and their founding jurists and early codifiers — al-Shafi’i, the Hanafi jurist al-Tahawi’s summary of Abu Hanifah, and later Ibn Qudamah for the Hanbalis — record differing positions on the timing and status of iltizam at the Multazam.
  • 1039–1040 AH (1630 CE): Flood damage to the Kaaba prompts Sultan Murad IV’s Ottoman-era reconstruction, the last full rebuilding of the structure.
  • 13th–14th centuries AH (19th–20th centuries CE): Successive Ottoman and early Saudi-era restorations maintain the Kaaba’s fabric, including the wall forming the Multazam, without altering its basic dimensions.
  • 1417 AH (1997 CE): The most recent full interior renovation of the Kaaba under the Saudi state (Islam on Web).
  • Ramadan 1447 AH (February 2026): Masjid al-Haram records approximately 904,000 worshippers and Umrah pilgrims in a single day, the highest attendance ever documented at the mosque, illustrating the crowd conditions that now govern practical access to the Multazam (The Islamic Information).

Key Lessons

Historical

The Multazam has no independent architectural or archaeological history of its own; it is defined entirely by its position relative to two other Kaaba landmarks, the Black Stone and the door, and its story is a record of practice — what companions and successors did there — rather than a record of construction.

Spiritual

The devotion attached to this spot for fourteen centuries is real and well attested even where the specific hadith reports are weak; the practice of Ibn Abbas and Urwah ibn al-Zubayr carries its own quiet authority, and the posture of pressing oneself against the House with nothing left to say but a request is available to the heart whether or not the body ever reaches the wall.

Personal

Wanting to touch this wall is not vanity; it is a natural response to fourteen centuries of testimony that people have found something there. Being unable to touch it in 2026 is not a spiritual loss, and treating it as one risks mistaking a recommended act for an obligation.

Practical

Every scholar surveyed in this article, across every school and every level of strictness about the underlying hadith, agrees on one point without exception: harming, crowding, or endangering another Muslim in order to cling to the Multazam is not permitted, regardless of how strong the desire to reach it may be. Supplicating from a distance, facing the wall, loses nothing essential.

Authentic Sources

Primary Islamic Sources

Every hadith cited in this article has been checked against its collection and number directly. Sunan Abi Dawud 1898 and 1899, and Sunan Ibn Majah 2962, are cited with their gradings exactly as recorded on Sunnah.com’s page for Abu Dawud 1899, Abu Dawud 1898, and Ibn Majah 2962. This guide does not draw on the early biographical and campaign historians Ibn Ishaq, al-Waqidi or al-Tabari for this particular article, since the Multazam’s story is a matter of ritual practice and hadith transmission rather than seerah narrative; where those historians are relevant elsewhere in this guide, their material is flagged separately given the well-known cautions later scholars have attached to some of their less rigorously sourced material.

Classical Scholars

The fiqh positions in this article draw on Ibn Taymiyyah’s Mansak, al-Shafi’i’s Al-Umm, Ibn Qudamah’s Al-Mughni, al-Mardawi’s Al-Insaf, and al-Kasani’s summary of al-Tahawi’s account of Abu Hanifah’s position, all as transmitted through Islamweb’s detailed survey of the classical positions on the Multazam and its companion piece Part I of the same series. Ibn Uthaymeen’s Al-Sharh al-Mumti is cited through the same source and through Islamweb fatwa 111217. Al-Albani’s gradings, including his treatment in Silsilah al-Sahihah, are cited through IslamQA’s detailed answer on the Multazam and through direct sunnah.com hadith pages.

Modern Academic and Reference Sources

A note on method: this article treats the Multazam strictly as the honest record allows. Where a hadith is weak, it is stated as weak, with the specific scholar and specific work in which that grading appears. Where scholars differ — on timing, on status, on whether the practice is sunnah at all — every position is named and attributed rather than resolved by this guide’s own preference. Popular pilgrim literature routinely presents Abu Dawud 1899 and Ibn Majah 2962 as if they establish that prayer is answered at the Multazam; they do not say this, and this article has been careful not to repeat that error. Claims resting only on undated, unattributed pilgrim-guide repetition — such as some of the specific numbered references to al-Fakihi’s Akhbar Makkah circulating on secondary Hajj websites without a verifiable original text — have been presented as devotional tradition rather than as gradeable hadith, precisely because their chains could not be independently verified through the primary hadith databases used elsewhere in this article.