Zam! (fill! fill! i.e. the
bottle), Hagar’s impatient exclamation when she saw the stream. Sale
translates it stay! stay! and says that Hagar called out in the
Egyptian language, to prevent her son wandering. The Hukama, or
Rationalists of Al-Islam, who invariably connect their faith with the
worship of Venus, especially, and the heavenly bodies generally, derive
Zemzem from the Persian, and make it signify the “great luminary.” Hence
they say the Zemzem, as well as the Ka’abah, denoting the Cuthite or
Ammonian worship of sun and fire, deserves man’s reverence. So the
Persian poet Khakani addresses these two buildings:—
“O Ka’abah, thou traveller of the heavens!”
“O Venus, thou fire of the world!”
Thus Wahid Mohammed, founder of the Wahidiyah sect, identifies the
Kiblah and the sun; wherefore he says the door fronts the East. By the
names Yaman (“right-hand”), Sham (“left-hand”), Kubul, or the East wind
(“fronting”), and Dubur, or the West wind (“from the back”), it is evident that
worshippers fronted the rising sun. According to the Hukama, the
original Black Stone represents Venus, “which in the border of the
heavens is a star of the planets,” and symbolical of the
[p.163] generative power of nature, “by whose passive energy the universe
was warmed into life and motion.” The Hindus accuse the Moslems of
adoring the Bayt Ullah.
