Some of the powerful
emotions experienced during this great act of worship are described in the four
accounts bellows:
Ahmad Kamal of the Soviet Union; Michel Jansen – USA; Malcolm X – USA; Muhammad Asad - Austria
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Ahmad Kamal of the
Makkah is not a place. It is
the Beginning, the Present, and the Forever, and whoever enters Makkah feels this and is shaken.
Most pilgrims come here
gratefully to discharge a duty owed to God. But ever since the beginning men
have come to the Kaa’bah to seek refuge with God,
bodily refuge from harm at a foe’s hand, or sanctuary where the confused heart
can find way and the wounded soul be healed. Today, again, there are pilgrims
for whom Makkah and the holy places are a haven after
savage truals and relentless persecution – pilgrims escaped
from Muslim lands under foreign, atheistic rule. Countless devout Muslims
trapped in nations now Soviet, forbidden by the Communities to worship God or
perform the Pilgrimage, have perished attempting to cross closed frontiers and
come here. A few thousands, survivors, have made Jeddah and Makkah
their house of exile, taking some solace from their nearness to the holy
places.
Before, - and again one
day, God willing – pilgrims came from Albania and Bosnia and Hertzgovina, from Poland and the Caucasus and Crimea, from
Turkistan and Kazan and Siberia, from China and from
all the other lands where today, Pilgrimage is banned. Some of these peoples,
like the Crimeans, have been annihilated and never
will be seen in Makkah again,
the others dwell in slavery….
And now the eyes of the
pilgrims will behold the Ka’bah. Master the emotions.
This is an hour for awareness and conscious reverence. This is one of the great
experiences of life…
The soul-shaken pilgrim
entering the Sanctuary of Makkah and for the first
time beholding the Ka’bah knows a
humility and an exaltation which are but a prologue for Arafat. Here, by
the mountain, the pilgrim will pass what should be spiritually and
intellectually, the noblest hours of life. The tents of the Faithful will cover
the undulating valley as far as the eye can see. This immense congregation with
the sacred mountain at its center is the heart of Islam. This is the day of
true brotherhood…
We are promised that in
these hours by Arafat, God will send down His forgiveness and mercy to those
who are deserving and they will feel His presence.
This is the day of
brotherhood and heartbreak – heartbreak that we have not yet learned to cling
to this solidarity where we dwell and labor in valleys and on mountains far
from Arafat. This is the day of promise: the guarantee of what Islam shall be
when Muslims everywhere achieve the oneness today known only at Arafat.
(From The Sacred Journey by Ahmad Kamal,
London, 1964) (top)
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Michel Jansen
–
I have deep roots in
At sixteen however, I
discovered the Qur’an. These words (of the first
chapter), simple, and direct, so impressed me that I immediately set out to
memorize them. Indeed they drew me into Islam, an example perhaps of Prophet
Muhammad’s assertion that everyone is born a Muslim and made a Jew or a
Christian by his parents.
From that time forward I
charted my life on the direction of
Before I had embarked on
the Pilgrimage, its rituals seemed to me just so many curious exercises. But as
I participated in the event of the Pilgrimage, the meaning of these rites
unfolded, my understanding of Islam was deepened and I learned more fully what
it meant to be a Muslim. Indeed, this is why God had commanded Muhammad to
issue the call for the pilgrimage: ‘That they (the pilgrims) may witness
things that are of benefit to them…’ (The Qur’an,
(For example, towards the
end of the Hajj when the time of making the Sacrifice came), I began to feel
uneasy. Since I have not completely outgrown the tender-heartedness I had known
as a child, I had balked at the idea of the Sacrifice long before being confronted
with it and now the time had come to do it. What was I to do? As a girl I had
cared for lost dogs or stray cats, adopting any fledgling that had fallen its nest, splinting a bird’s broken leg with
matchstick and feeding injured butterflies on sugar syrup. But a companion had
been adamant. ‘You must do the Sacrifice’.
Back at our building in
Mina I turned to the Qur’an. I found that the
Sacrifice has many meaning: it commemorates Abraham’s offering of his son’s
life and God’s rejection of this sacrifice in exchange for Abraham’s submission to God’s will; it marks the
end of idolatry among Arabs; it is an offering of thanksgiving to the God of
Creation Who has been so benevolent to mankind; and it teaches the well-to-do
to share their blessings to ‘eat thereof (the Sacrifice) and feed the beggar
and the suppliant’. (
As I pondered what I had
read, a great weight was lifted from my conscience. I suddenly saw that the
Sacrifice upholds the sacredness of life, that it, in fact, constitutes a pledge by the pilgrim
that he will slay for sustenance only. And where I had felt reluctance before,
I know felt eagerness to fulfill all the requirements of my pilgrimage.
(From Aramco world Magazine, Nov-Dec 1974) (top)
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Malcolm X –
There was
then thousands of pilgrims, from all over the world. They were of all colors,
from blue-eyed blonds to black-skinned Africans. But we were all participating
in the same ritual, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my
experiences in
You may be shocked by
these words coming from me. But on this pilgrimage, what I have seen, and
experienced, has forced me to re-arrange much of my thought patterns previously
held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusion. This was not to difficult for me. Despite my firm convictions, I have
been always a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as
new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary
to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent
search for truth.
During the past eleven
days here in the Muslim world, I have eaten from the same plate, drunk from the
same glass and slept in the same bed (or on the same rug) – while praying to
the same God with fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of the blue, whose
hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white. And in
the words and in the actions and in the deeds of the ‘white’ Muslims, I felt
the same sincerity that I felt among the black African Muslims of Nigeris,
We were truly all the same – brothers.
All praise is due to
Allah, the Lord of all the worlds.
(From the Autobiography
of Malcolm X, New York, 1964)
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Muhammad Asad –
... hidden from my eyes in the
midst of this lifeless wilderness of valleys and hills, lies the plain of
Arafat, on which all the pilgrims who come to
As I stand on the
hillcrest and gaze down toward the invisible Plain of Arafat, the moonlit
blueness of the landscape before me, so dead a moment ago, suddenly comes to
life with the currents of all the human lives that have passed through it and
is filled with the eerie voices of the millions of men and women who have
walked or ridden between Mecca and Arafat in over thirteen hundred pilgrimages
for over thirteen hundred years… I hear the sounds of their passed-away days,
the wings of faith which have drawn them together to this land of rocks and
sand and seeming deadness beat again with the warmth of life over the arc of
centuries, and the mighty wingbeat draws me into its
orbit and drawn my own passed-away hays into the present, and once again I am
riding over the plain…
We ride on, rushing,
flying over the plain, and to me it seems that we are flying with the wind
shouts a wild happiness that knows neither end nor limit…and the wind shouts a
wild paean of joy into my ears. ’Never again, never again, never again will you
be a stranger’
My brethren on the right
and my brethren on the left, all of them unknown to me but none a stranger; in
the tumultuous joy of our chase, we are one body in pursuit of one goal. Wide
is the world before us, and in our hearts glimmers a spark of the flame that
burned in the hearts of the Prophet’s Companions. They know, my brethren on the
right and my brethren on the left, that they have fallen short of what was
expected of them, and that in the flight of centuries their hearts have grown
small and yet, the promise of fulfillment has not been taken from them… from us…
Someone in the surging
host abandons his tribal cry for a cry of faith: We are brethren of him who
gives himself up to God!’ – and another joins in ‘ALLAHU
AKBAR’ – ‘God is the Greatest – God along is Great!’
(From The Road to Mecca, 1st ed., 1954) (top)
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