In his Akhbār Makka (Reports of Mecca), the ninth-century historian Muḥammad b. Isḥāq al-Fākihī includes a short report about a man named George (in Arabic, Jurayj), ‘who was either a Jew or a Christian and became a Muslim while he was in Mecca’. The very night of George's conversion, a particularly sacred Meccan landmark went missing. The Maqām Ibrāhīm, or ‘Station of Abraham’, was a stone believed to contain traces of the prophet Abraham's footprints, miraculously impressed there during the period when Abraham built the Kaʿba – the House of God in Mecca – with the help of his son Ishmael. After the Maqām's disappearance from its seat near the Kaʿba was discovered, a search found the stone in George's possession, as George ‘wanted to take it to the king of Rome’, the Byzantine emperor. Caught red-handed, George was stripped of his stolen treasure and beheaded.

A Jewish/Christian man becomes a Muslim in Mecca, steals an ancient stone to bring it to a Christian ruler, and is subsequently executed for this theft. Since we have no additional sources to corroborate this story, it is difficult to know how to read this terse report. Anonymously cited by al-Fākihī from what ‘some people say’, there is a gossipy or folkloristic air to the short story of this man George and his unusual scheme – otherwise unknown to Islamic history – to bring the Maqām Ibrāhīm to the Byzantine emperor. However, rather than an isolated record of an obscure figure and a strange incident in local Meccan history, this brief report illustrates a cultural dialogue that extended throughout a wide temporal and geographical milieu: namely, the conceptions of (and conflicts over) relic veneration among communities of the late antique and early medieval Mediterranean and Near Eastern world.

Referenced in the Qurʾān as one of God's ‘clear signs’ in this world, the Maqām Ibrāhīm was believed to mark the very spot where Abraham had called humanity to perform the ḥajj to Mecca. Another tradition in al-Fākihī's Akhbār Makka describes this momentous historical occasion in wondrous terms.