About the Pilgrimage
By Abdul Wadod Shalaby
(From “Islam: Religion of Life”)
It has been God’s will, as He has unfolded history, to give preference to certain places and to certain times. Although people and peoples pass away, God’s earth and its geography remain. Thus certain places honored and blessed by the presence of great prophets can be of benefit to us long after those people have gone. For it is a Muslim belief that where the light of God descends upon a certain person, a trace of that light remains for those who are able to see it....
To understand the inner significance of the Hajj ceremonies it is necessary to remember that Mecca is in many respects a town apart from all others. Good actions and bad are more clearly discerned, and the reward or punishment for them is held to be proportionately greater. Within the limits of the city, fighting and all aggressiveness are forbidden. No pilgrim is allowed for any reason to harm a human being or an animal during his sojourn in the city. In the state of ihram, the special state the pilgrim enters into when he puts on the dress of the rites, he feels that he is ridding himself for a while of all that linked him to his former life, with its desires and enmities, and can now devote his attention wholeheartedly to his Creator.
The circuits around the Ka‘ba themselves symbolize the circulation of the heart around the holiness of God. In the same vein, the running between the two hills of Safa and Marwa in the great hall now built to enclose them suggests moving between the two aspects of God’s mercy, compassion and acceptance.
The culminating point of the Hajj is the most simple rite of all. Here millions of people stand together in a scene of great beauty, surrounded by mountains on all sides. As the hours pass, one’s thoughts, already focused on God by days of uninterrupted worship, have time to look deeply into one’s life. What have we done in the service of God and humanity? What recurrent weaknesses must we strive to combat? Whom have we wronged? What is holding us back from the purity which is the prerequisite of spiritual knowledge? And at the same time, another symbolism inherent in the psychology of the Hajj becomes clear. Standing on the Plain of ‘Arafat, we cannot but remember the day on which God will resurrect us together with all mankind, when the time of repentance will be irrevocably past. Now, however, there still remains a path back to the world, for soon we will be going home: an opportunity to set our lives right before we die and await the Day of Judgment. |