The Keeper of the Keys 25essence, what Qusayy had managed to do was unite those clans who
were nominally bound to each other through blood and marriage into
a single dominant tribe: the Quraysh.
Qusayy’s genius was his recognition that the source of Mecca’s
power rested in its sanctuary. Simply put, he who controlled the Ka‘ba
controlled the city. By appealing to the ethnic sentiments of his
Qurayshi kinsmen, whom he called “the noblest and purest of the
descendants of Ismail,” Qusayy was able to capture the Ka‘ba from his
rival clans and declare himself “King of Mecca.” Although he allowed
the pilgrimage rituals to remain unchanged, he alone held the keys to
the temple. As a result, he had sole authority to feed and provide water
to the pilgrims, to preside at assemblies around the Ka‘ba where mar-
riage and circumcision rites were performed, and to hand out the war
banners. As if to emphasize further the sanctuary’s power to bestow
authority, Qusayy divided Mecca into quarters, creating an outer and
an inner ring of settlements. The closer one lived to the sanctuary, the
greater one’s power. Qusayy’s house, it seems, was actually attached to
the Ka‘ba.
The significance of his proximity to the sanctuary was not lost on
the Meccans. It would have been difficult to ignore the fact that the
pilgrims who circumambulated the Ka‘ba were also circumambulat-
ing Qusayy. And because the only way to enter the Ka‘ba’s inner
shrine was through a door located inside Qusayy’s house, no person
could approach the gods in the sanctuary without first going through
him. In this way, Qusayy bestowed upon himself both political and
religious authority over the city. He was not just the King of Mecca,
he was “the Keeper of the Keys.” “His authority among his tribe of
Quraysh, in his life and after his death, was like a religion which peo-
ple followed,” recounts Ibn Ishaq.
Qusayy’s most important innovation was the establishment of
what would become the foundation of Mecca’s economy. He began by
strengthening his city’s position as the dominant place of worship in
the Hijaz, collecting all the idols venerated by neighboring tribes—
especially those situated on the sacred hills of Safah and Marwah—
and transferring them to the Ka‘ba. Henceforth, if one wanted to
worship, say, the lover gods, Isaf and Na’ila, one could do so only at
Mecca, and only after paying a toll to the Quraysh for the right to