Zamzam Water

Zamzam is a well, and it is inside the Masjid al-Haram at Mecca, a short distance from the Kaaba. Its water is the only substance in Islam that is holy by where it comes from rather than by anything done to it. There is no rite of consecration and there is no officiant; the water is drawn and it is drunk.

The tradition explains it through Hagar. Abraham leaves her in the valley with the infant Ishmael and a little provision, and when that runs out she goes up the hill of Safa to look for help, sees nothing, crosses to Marwa, sees nothing, and goes back and forth seven times. The water then appears at the child's feet, and she contains it by banking earth around it. Islamic accounts add that had she left it alone it would have run as an open spring; because she confined it, it is a well.

The connection between the story and the ritual is direct rather than commemorative. Pilgrims performing hajj or umrah walk the same course between Safa and Marwa seven times, a rite called the sai, and the well sits in the same sanctuary. The narrative accounts for the rite and the rite keeps the narrative in use.

Hadith collected by al-Bukhari and by Muslim record the Prophet speaking of the water in strong terms, describing it as blessed and as sufficient nourishment, and one widely transmitted report has him say that it serves whatever purpose it is drunk for. That last has shaped how it is used more than any other statement about it.

A further tradition holds that the well was lost for generations after the tribe of Jurhum filled it in, and was rediscovered by Abd al-Muttalib, the grandfather of the Prophet, who was shown its location in a dream.

Drinking from the well is not one of the obligatory acts of the hajj, and a pilgrimage is complete without it. In practice almost nobody omits it, and the reason is that the water is the one part of Mecca a pilgrim can take away. The Kaaba cannot be brought home and the rites cannot be repeated elsewhere; the water can be carried, and it is.

That portability has shaped the whole social life of the substance. Returning pilgrims distribute it in small quantities to relatives, neighbours and people who could not travel, so a single journey supplies a much larger circle, and receiving it is a recognised way of sharing in a pilgrimage one did not make. It is given to the sick. It is used to moisten the lips of the dying. Some carry a portion specifically to be used in washing the body at their own death. In several regions it is touched to the lips of a newborn.

The scale of that demand has made the well an administrative problem as much as a devotional one. Millions of pilgrims arrive in a compressed season, all of them drinking and most of them carrying water away, and the modern arrangements for pumping, treating, testing and bottling it, and the regulation of how much a pilgrim may take out of the country, exist because of the volume. Export in unregulated quantities has been restricted at various times, and counterfeit water sold as Zamzam has been a recurring concern in importing countries.

None of this is peripheral to what the substance is. A holy thing that can be carried home becomes a holy thing that has to be managed, and Zamzam is the clearest case of that in Islamic practice.