Mecca made the Capital of Islam.--In fact Mecca gained new importance from this conquest. It was constituted by the irresistible power of Mahomet the central sanctuary of the true religion. A year after the victory Mahomet again visited Mecca, and performed the pilgrimage with all its rites in his own person, setting the correct pattern in every detail, which all pilgrims were to observe in all time coming. Those who wish to know what the rites of Mecca are, will find them graphically and minutely described in Captain Burton's _Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Mecca_; that gallant officer was one of the three Europeans who, during the nineteenth century, assumed the disguise of pilgrims and took part in the observances. The kissing of the sacred black stone in the wall of the Caaba, the sevenfold circuit of the building, the drinking of the water of the well Zem-zem, the race from one hill-top to another in the neighbourhood of Mecca, the throwing of seven stones at a certain spot, and the sacrifice of an animal in a certain valley--these form a collection of rites each of which had probably a separate origin, and of some of which the original meaning can scarcely be made out.[4] This "block of heathenism" Mahomet made part of his religion. He could not have abolished it, and by adopting it in an improved form as a part of his own system he served himself heir to the national religious traditions, and acquired for his own religion the authority of a national faith. "This day have I appointed your religion unto you," are his words after fixing the forms of the pilgrimage, "and applied Islam for you to be your religion." Islam adopts the Mecca rites, and thereby becomes the national religion of Arabia. Hubal, the chief god of the Caaba, disappears; Allah becomes the sole god of the shrine. The legend that Abraham founded it is put in circulation, and it is thus connected with the supposed earliest Arabian religion, the religion before idolatry, the Islam before Islam. As Paul appeals to the faith of Abraham as being a Christianity before Christ, so Mahomet claims the Caaba for the pure worship of Allah in primeval times. It is sacred henceforth to him alone. The rule was set up that no idolater should be admitted to the pilgrimage, and it thus lost its character as a heathen, and became instead a Moslem, institution. [Footnote 4: See for this Wellhausen's _Reste arabischen Heidenthums_, pp. 64-98.]