The holy of holies, is a place - the presence of God, not as much an object. Which btw you plunked a giant mosque on top of the general area. Not gonna cause conflict there . . . oh wait!
What does the black stone symbolize? Why touch it? Just because Muhammad did it?
The veneration of the black stone on the kaabah is likely a holdover from pagan ritual, which your prophet retained to help pacify the pagans of the time. I find it rather humorous it is such a central part of Islam today.
From the Wiki article on the Black stone:
| The Black Stone was revered well before the preaching of Islam by Muhammad. By the time of Muhammad, it was already associated with the Kaaba, a pre-Islamic shrine that was revered as a sacred sanctuary and a site of pilgrimage. In her book, Islam: A Short History, Karen Armstrong asserts that the Kaaba was dedicated to Hubal, a Nabatean deity, and contained 360 idols which either represented the days of the year, or were effigies of the Arabian pantheon. According to Ibn Ishaq, an early biographer of Muhammad, the Ka'aba was itself addressed as a female deity, three generations before the advent of Islam.[9] The Semitic cultures of the Middle East had a tradition of using unusual stones to mark places of worship, a phenomenon which is reflected in the Hebrew Bible as well as the Qur'an,[10] although bowing to or kissing such sacred objects is repeatedly described in the Tenach as idolatrous[11] and was the subject of prophetic rebuke.[12] Some writers remark on the apparent similarity of the Black Stone and its frame to the external female genitalia,[13][14] and ascribe this to its earlier association with fertility rites. |
