Diabolic Digest
Part II
A
Mecca for pilgrims
Spurred by both spiritual and secular curiosity, Andy Scott jumped at the chance to go to Mecca on hajj and exercise his dormant acquired religion. In part II, he finds himself in the holy city, acquainting himself with the rituals of the Hajj.
October 2004
The Muslim Hajj
is one of the most striking manifestations of religious faith and unity in the
world today and the origins and meaning of its many rituals have been the
subject of debate by Muslim and Western secular scholars. Doing the Hajj
is a duty for every able-bodied Muslim at least once in their lifetime and,
although some two million have been performing it each year since the early
1980s (the result of modern transport and Saudi infrastructure), they form a
small minority of the world’s billion Muslims.
The main rites of the
Hajj last a five-day period starting from the eighth day of the Islamic
lunar month of Dhul-Hijja, so the rite occurs some 11 days earlier each year.
Currently, it’s a winter phenomenon, but, within a few years, it will move into
the hot summer months, stretching faith and human endurance to their furthest.
The Hajj begins and ends with the tawaf, the walking
around the Kaaba – towards which Muslims around the world regularly face in
prayer – at the centre of the Grand Mosque. In-between the tawaf of ‘umra
and the “farewell tawaf” at the end of the Hajj – mimicking the
Prophet’s last, as he demonstrated to his followers the rites of pilgrimage
shortly before his death – this river of pilgrims moves around a circuit over
10 kilometres in length in the mountainous terrain around Mecca.
The house that
Abraham built
The pivotal element
upon which the rite rests is the Kaaba. Simple and unpretentious against the
grandiosity of the mosque, this large cube-shaped structure (its name probably
derives from the ancient Greek for cube, kubo – ed.) houses a black stone which
centuries of veneration through kissing and touching has worn hollow.
The Kaaba and the
black stone are a magical site which was seen as the centre of the world in
pre-Islamic Arabia and where God’s presence is most felt on earth, which is why
this is the place to make your requests to God: here He might listen to you.
“The Kaaba is the heart of Islam and to imagine that you are seeing this place
where the Prophet was, one day, with all his followers touches your heart
immediately,” one Egyptian pilgrim said to me.
Islamic tradition
says the Kaaba was built by Ibrahim (Abraham) and his son Ismail (Ishmael),
who, in the Islamic version of Semitic monotheism, is regarded as the
genealogical father of the Arabs (while Judaism emphasises Abraham’s other son Isaac
as the father of the Jews).
Muslims regard the
house that Abraham built as the first temple to the one true God, and all the Hajj
rituals are linked to this patriarch. Safa wa Marwa is the point where
Abraham’s servant-wife Hagar – the Egyptian mother of Ismail – was left on her
own with her young child and, while searching desperately for food and shelter,
she came upon the well of Zamzam. The walking between the two points inside the
mosque symbolizes that her frantic search which God brought to a happy end.
Set in stone
But while secular and
Muslim historians agree that the Kaaba in Mecca was the centre of pre-Islamic
Arabian cults, Muslim tradition itself notes the obvious point that veneration
of the stone is reminiscent of the idolatry Islam stridently opposes. In fact,
on one infamous occasion, the Caliph Omar is said to have addressed the object
saying: “I know you are only a stone and can do neither good nor ill, and if I
had not seen the Prophet kiss you I would not do so.”
Gerald Hawting, a
British historian of early Islam, says that, from an early period, Muslim
theologians puzzling over the meaning of Hajj saw in the rite the
ultimate test of faith. “In comparison with things like prayer and fasting
which are susceptible to rational explanation, the rites of the Hajj
seem devoid of obvious meaning,” he says. Key Muslim thinkers concluded that
“the rites have to be done because they are part of God’s law, that God tests
our obedience by commanding us to do things which we cannot understand or see
any aesthetic value in”. Which seemed fair enough to me.
Mystical cubism
A common theme among
Muslim scholars has been to attribute mystical, symbolic meanings to the
rituals according to which the circumambulation is seen as mirroring the universal
order set by a divine mover, God. “The planets revolve around the sun, each in
a separate orbit, with specific speed. In the same way, the Kaaba which God
made the first sanctuary for mankind is located at the centre of the earth,”
writes Egyptian scholar Abdel-Hakam al-Sa’idi on popular Islamic website
Islamonline.
A certain Meccan sufi
says Hajj is a symbolic example of the continuity and change that the
Islamic view of the world sees in the order of things. “The constant – the
Kaaba – gives you unity and continuity, the variable – walking around it –
gives you change and diversity. The two create a balance, an equilibrium,” he
told me during a meeting at his stunning self-designed home in Jeddah, built in
a traditional Hejazi style.
“Change happens with
reference to a fixed point, like the planets and atoms. We are part of this: so
where is our part as human beings? This is the Kaaba, a central point and the
closer we get the more we are pulled by its gravity. So we do tawaf. The Kaaba
is a timeless point. All are one at this point, symbolising the house of God
and Mecca and the Kaaba are the heart of the Muslim world.”
Sufis also see in Hajj
an act of purification, like the blood of the body returning to its vital
organs – the hajj circuit of Mecca – before heading back out into the body of
the world. In fact, Islamic tradition has a hadith, or saying of the
Prophet, which goes that “he who performs Hajj voluntarily and without
moral blemish has gone back to the day his mother gave birth to him”. Hajj is
spiritual rebirth.
Talking ‘bout a
revolution
But Hajj is
also ripe for other interpretations and many throughout the ages have seen in
this gathering of Muslims in the universal Islamic city of Mecca a forum for
revolutionary action. Of course, the Saudi authorities insist the Hajj
should be solely a religious affair but, in modern times, there have been
number of occasions when Muslims used it to vent political grievances against
the United States and Israel.
The vast army of police
involved in the Hajj’s organisation includes a special “anti-protest”
force to stop pilgrims staging political demonstrations – Iranians have tried
this on numerous occasions since the 1979 revolution. That same year, the Grand
Mosque was the scene of a dramatic takeover by an armed group opposed to the
Saudi royal family. That did not happen during Hajj, but the Saudi
royals must shudder at the thought that it ever does.
The booklets the
Saudis hand out in various languages to arriving pilgrims stress that the event
is simply about doing things as the Prophet said they should be done in order
to win God’s favour. Similarly, officials at the Lourdes pilgrimage try to
downplay the miraculous curative potential of the site, although their main
custom comes from pilgrims seeking healing of some sort or another.
The issue of what the
Saudis projected and promoted as the meaning and intention of the pilgrimage
struck me constantly for its contradiction with the point of the pilgrimage for
most of the pilgrims. When the pilgrims threw the stones at the pillars of
Jamarat, they were striking the Devil himself and the only symbolism in the act
was that perhaps the pillar-Devil represented a bad husband or wife or perhaps
politician.
Saudi austerity
The official theology
of Saudi Arabia is a rational, no-frills Sunni orthodoxy that, of course,
frowns on these superstitious beliefs and practices. As the Minister of
Pilgrimage Affairs Iyad Madani put it, most logically, at a press conference:
“It’s a symbolic act to get rid of sins and confront weaknesses”. In vain would
the Saudi religious police try to force the mass of world Muslims to conform to
their view of proper behaviour. They stood beside of the Kaaba to stop
worshippers stroking it in veneration, but were having little success.
As I was walking
round inside the mosque on my first tawaf (I did the first of the seven outside
the saha), I found myself poked in the back by a stick. “Lower!” they snapped,
I think, because my robe was pulled high, showing my legs. I came across an
American Muslim in the Jeddah hotel where I was staying who seemed more
preoccupied with the heresies of the masses than anything else.
“Yeah, it’s something
amazing to see people from different countries of the earth come together for
one purpose,” he said when I asked him what he thought about the spectacle in
general. “It really touched me to see a long line of people in wheelchairs, the
old and the pregnant. But,” he added, “you see inside the mosque people doing bida’
(unorthodox innovative acts), like clinging on to the Place of Abraham (a point
inside the saha just metres from the Kaaba).”
“Innovators,
polytheists, Shi’ites, Sufis.” It sounded like a list of crimes hurled at
political show trials against enemies of the regime, any regime.
Culture shocks
Although the ideal of
Islamic pilgrimage is that all differences are eroded in this temporary Utopian
state which is out of time, in effect they are very much there. The Arab
pilgrims stand out simply because they speak the chosen language of the Message
but also the chosen language of the bureaucracy. They share culture and
understanding with the Saudis.
Despite this, Asian
pilgrims dominate numerically, specifically Indonesians, Malaysians and
Filipinos, and Indians and Pakistanis. Their shared language with their Saudi
hosts is more often English rather than Arabic which, as a born English speaker
immersed in the world of Arabic came to me as a bit of a shock, though it is
only logical of course. The disdain that might creep in through lack of
linguistic harmony is confirmed by the cultural practices of the Asians. They
don’t do things like the Saudis. These were just suspicions I had, but they
were confirmed by the events that followed when the pilgrimage later turned to
tragedy for some.
By royal
command
The next day was the
traditional tour of the holy sites made by the Interior Minister Nayef before a
news conference in the evening at Arafat, the huge plain in the mountains outside
Mecca where the pilgrims spend the first two days of the Hajj. First, we
saw a parade of some 5,000 troops, including anti-terrorist forces in black
balaclavas, elite special forces and crowd control personnel as they marched
past Nayef at Arafat.
Nayef was on his best
form – later on we were kept waiting in a large hall for about two hours before
he eventually arrived. But he sat alone, at a long distance on a large podium,
so that with his headdress and robes on, we could hardly see him at all. It was
intended to intimidate, a suspicion born out by the fact that when it came to
questions he was gruff and curt. He was in a bad mood. So there were no
stunning soundbites, just scraps here and there about security forces being on
their guard like any year. “We are ready for anything that could happen”; “We
always say there is no guarantee that nothing could happen, but we trust the
security forces to be able to do their job”.
Earlier the month a
captured “militant”, to use news agency parlance, who was shown on state
television said he had been taken to a training camp outside Mecca. But Nayef
flatly denied any such camps existed. “We have no camps for training or
terrorism today or yesterday,” he said. So that was that. We were then fed on a
large buffet dinner in the open air before being taken back to Jeddah.
Danger in
numbers
Amid all this concern
about al-Qa’ida and terrorists, the real danger was perhaps being forgotten, the
danger inherent in any gathering of some two million people. Safety. In 2003,
14 people were trampled to death on the third day of the Hajj, and there were similar
incidents in 1998 and 2001 that killed at least 158 people. The worst of all
was in 1990, when 1,426 pilgrims were crushed to death in a tunnel stampede.
On every occasion,
the trouble was at the Jamarat, where pilgrims flock above and below a bridge
where there are the three pillars representing where the Devil appeared to
Abrahim. The pilgrimage affairs minister Madani was asked about this at the
dinner on the grass at Arafat after Nayef’s priggish performance. “Any
gathering of people of this size in a limited geographical area could lead to
problems but we have plans to prevent this,” he said.
According to the
Meccan sufi, the best-laid crowd control plans had been obstructed by the
reluctance of the authorities to stop pilgrims coming in cars to the Jamarat
area, as well as the insistence of the Wahhabi religious establishment on everyone
performing rites at certain specific times. Following Wahhabi religious
teaching, Saudi clerics say the stone-throwing should take place in the
afternoon of the third day, as booklets handed out to pilgrims advise.
The sufi said the
problem was that there could be an estimated 50,000 cars at the same time in
one location. “Seventy-five percent of the pilgrims throw stones in 25 percent
of the available time and that’s because of the particular insistence of one
school,” he said. “Now they (government) want to increase the capacity of
Jamarat, but then you create problems at the next stage. They always work on
the space side, expanding roads and tunnels, but there are two factors: time
and space,” he said.
Newspapers were
backing his views. The daily al-Watan wrote that week about the dangers of
“hotel pilgrimage” and fancy cars, as the rich and influential from many
countries rent luxury tents with comforts such as caviar and imported grass
near Mount Arafat.
Arafat calling
On the first day, pilgrims
stream out from Mecca to the plain of Arafat for the following day’s event
known as waqfet Arafat (the standing at Arafat). This is where pilgrims
commemorate the Prophet Mohammad’s farewell sermon 14 centuries ago. Though
hundreds of thousands would come on 20,000 buses in a massive logistical
operation, many come on foot tracing the Prophet’s path through the mountain
passes. Many Egyptians and Algerians had got there early to avoid the crowds
and get settled in.
Arafat consists of a
massive tented village that the Saudi authorities throw up every year to lodge
the pilgrims according to nationality – something that seems to run against the
spirit of the occasion. Before heading there, we again donned the white robes
of ihram which we would be wearing for the next four days, since our Hajj
would be ending on Monday.
The day at Arafat is
the main event of the Hajj, and it is the day that precedes the Eid
al-Adha, a holiday throughout the Islamic world when sacrificial meat is
eaten in commemoration of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son (Ismail to
Muslims, Isaac to the Jews). For the Hajjis though in Mecca, the first
stoning of the Jamarat must take place before Eid prayers on the afternoon of
the third day.
Preying outside
the mosque
On the first night at
Arafat, we headed down to the main mosque to speak to some pilgrims. As a
journalist, the act of springing someone for a quote is rarely anything but
deeply unsatisfying. Laying in wait for pilgrims was worse. The questions are
cliched and the answers even more so. “What will you be praying for this year?”
which we sometimes followed with, as an encouragement or prod in the right
direction, “what with the war in Iraq and…”
Rarely would you get
anything that veered away from standard responses and feelings that Muslims in
the Middle East usually offer. For example, Ribhy Yaseen, a Palestinian: “I
feel like any Muslim who comes to the house of God – we want God to give the
Islamic nation success, to liberate our land from the Jews and to return the
al-Aqsa mosque (in Jerusalem) to Muslims.”
Or Iraqi Qadir Khidr:
“We hope God will give success to the Muslim people around the world and
especially in our region” (though he did add: “We hope God will get us out of our
crisis now like he got us out of the last one,” which I rather liked). That was
among the Arabs though.
Some Africans prayed
for peace but didn’t want to think about Palestine and Israel. “We are praying
for peace. We don’t want all this confrontation between Israel and Palestine
and all of that,” Sufyan from Ghana told us.
Brazen images
I wandered right into
the huge mosque with our cameraman, since I was holding his wires and
microphone and doing the questioning, where we were cursed by a Saudi. “May God
curse all cameramen!” he hissed with Wahhabi disdain for ‘brazen images’ as he
walked brusquely by.
Our cameraman, was
irritated. “You’re meant to have a pure heart and intent for the days of the
hajj, so he shouldn’t say things like that.” Which was true. Amongst ourselves,
in the media group, we would joke everytime someone said something with a hint
of immorality to it in one way or another “higg ya hagg!”—“Just do your hajj, O
Hajji!” We all tried to be as helpful and decent to each other as we could,
even though we were working for rival news media.
Mercy on the
mountain
The morning of Arafat
begins with pilgrims heading to a small rocky outcrop in the area called Jebal
al-Rahma (Mount Mercy). It was at this spot, specifically, that the Prophet was
meant to have given his farewell sermon. The morning at Jebel al-Rahma was, for
me, the most pleasant moment of the Hajj and the occasion for which I
will hold the fondest memory.
We must have risen at
five in the morning in our pilgrim towels, then made our way the kilometre or
so to the Mount. As the sun rose in the mountains surrounding the plains, it
gradually became a blanket of white as pilgrims trekked to the top.
Since we had got
there early, we climbed to the top without much trouble, though getting back
down looked like it would be tricky. There was one main path up between the
huge boulders and hundreds were now streaming up the outcrop. Many had slept
here the night before.
People sat around and
prayed in groups or alone, or chanted the Hajj refrain in Arabic: “O
God, I am in Thy presence again, there is no presence like thine presence, to
you is the praise, the power and domain, there is no equal to you,” a hypnotic
chant which Western scholars say possibly has its origins in Bedouins whiling
the time as they crossed the deserts in caravans in pre-Islamic days.
A view of
Jerusalem
It reminded me of
once when at dawn I had climbed up the mountain at Masada in the West Bank,
where the Jews had died fighting off the Romans. In fact, much of the religious
topography here was familiar: from the coastal metropolis of Jeddah to Mecca’s
sacred Jerusalem in the mountain hinterland. Orientalist historians love these
sorts of connections.
The beauty of the
scene demanded a prayer, which five of us did, with the cameraman leading our
group and us repeating after him, in the Muslim fashion. The essential vocal
element of prayer is the Fatiha, the opening words of the Quran, which bears a
resemblance to the Lord’s Prayer of Christianity.
“In the name of God,
the compassionate, the merciful/Praise be to God, the Lord of heaven and earth,
the compassionate, the merciful, the master of the day of judgement/You we
serve and in you we seek help/Lead us to the correct path, the path of those
blessed, with whom you were not angry and who did not go astray. Amen.”
With other
microphones and notebooks, we asked a few people for some comments. God knows,
some of them must have wondered what pilgrims were doing going around asking
other pilgrims what they thought for the media. We must have come across as
undercover agents. But the media wanted the coverage and the Saudi authorities
wanted to oblige.
A downhill
struggle
Negotiating our way down
the mountain as the crowds swarmed upwards, we had the first sense of the kind
of chaos that was to come. Down at the bottom, I noticed huge multilingual
signposts from the Saudi authorities warning that the Prophet did not sanction
prayer there, but once again the world’s Muslims didn’t seem to care what the
Saudis thought.
A carnival atmosphere
was filling this huge pilgrim city at Arafat which by mid-morning had come
alive. Hawkers by the roadside sold everything from umbrellas, to keep off the
sun, to prayer mats and prayer beads. Men were offering to take pictures of
pilgrim groups for up to $12 a shot and enterprising teenagers were offering
camel rides for around $3.
“It’s God that gives
me my daily sustenance, but I get about 500 pilgrims taking a ride every day
during the season,” one camel boy said shyly at being questioned about the
time-honoured tradition of making money out of the pilgrims. But why should he,
I thought.
Drawing back
the curtains
By night time,
pilgrims began moving on to the next stage – heading back down towards Mecca to
an area known as Muzdalifa and the Jamarat at Mina. I was winging it in the
sense that, as a first-time pilgrim, I really didn’t know what was coming next
at any stage, something that gave the whole experience a magical aspect. I
imagine it was like this for everyone there for the first time.
Everyone was in a
group and learning as they went along about what the Hajj entails and
the numerous booklets the authorities gave out were, in general, pretty useful.
But I didn’t realize that that evening we would do midnight stoning of the
pillars, then head into the mosque in Mecca for night tawaf and Safa wa Marwa,
before heading back to the ministry’s lodge on the mountainside overlooking the
Jamarat bridge.
It was a nice
evening, cool and pleasant. We sat around inside a ministry compound, with
waiters serving us big pots of Arabic coffee and tea, as we lounged around on
cushions and chatted. The compound was full of small stone chips and people
took the chance to gather stones for their trips to the pillars at Jamarat.
Apparently, we would
need 49 in all: later that evening we would throw seven at the central pillar;
sometime in the 24 hours after that, we would throw seven at each of the three
pillars; and, in the following 24 hours, we would do the same again. The
conversation flowed here and there. We got on to who the best ministers in
Egypt were. Ahmed Rushdie, I suggested, an interior minister sacked after the
conscript soldier riots of 1986 over poor pay, but which may have been
encouraged by Rushdie’s enemies because of his clear moves on ending police
brutality and corruption.
The devil is in
the stoning
Later in the evening,
we drove down to the ministry’s lodgings at Mina on the mountainside
overlooking the Jamarat bridge over the three pillars, which lay in a narrow
bottleneck at the end of a deep valley overlooking Mecca. Most of the pilgrims
were housed in camps on a wide part of the valley floor before the bridge area.
As we drove down, we
witnessed the astounding site of hundreds of thousands of pilgrims walking down
the huge nightlit highway the Saudis had built for them. It must have been
around midnight by now. We dumped our stuff in the rooms allocated for us and
where we’d spend the next three days and nights, then got on a bus which took
us down to the Jamarat bridge.
The pillars are
located some 50 metres apart on the road under the bridge but rise up through
special holes so that those on the bridge can throw stones at them from on top
too. We were underneath at the central one and there was a modest crowd of
maybe 500 people. It was an odd atmosphere, sort of celebratory and a big
dangerous with stones flying everywhere.
Since people were
circling the pillar from every side, anyone could easily overthrow and hit
those standing opposite. But mostly you wouldn’t want to risk getting too close
inside the group of people throwing and many timidly move up to the outer ring
of the circle to throw their seven stones. “In the name of God, the
compassionate, the merciful” is the standard utterance when throwing each one,
or perhaps “I seek God’s help from the devil.” Someone who got close to the
pillar noticed that it had “USA” daubed on it near the base in blue writing.
Spiritual
underpass
The occasion was
oddly inauspicious. Perhaps it was the location. It felt like standing at an
ugly underpass in central Cairo. Grey concrete, huge pillars supporting a road
above, stones, even the grey-brown of the mountainside. Earlier that evening
the state Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Abdullah al-Sheikh, the descendent of
Abdel-Wahhab (the father of Wahhabism), defended the teachings named after him.
“This country was founded on this faith and, God willing, will stick to it,” he
said in a sermon.
After that, at around
1 or 1.30 in the morning, we were taken into the heart of Mecca to the mosque
for midnight tawaf and the Safa wil Marwa run that I hadn’t done
before. It was quieter going round the Kaaba, but still there was a huge crowd and
one was constantly trying to avoid being jabbed by an arm or rammed by a
determined pilgrim heading on a new trajectory or having one’s foot trodden on.
In a spirit of
martyrdom, perhaps, one utters non-stop praise and prayer to God and does not
stop moving until the seventh wave is done. At that point, you quickly try to
eject yourself from the swirling circle without more violence being done to
you. The entering and the leaving are delicate processes involving moving
forward, with the crowd but gradually moving outwards too.
Holy water
Once I was out, I
drank holy Zamzam water at the numerous taps around. Pilgrims
would come by and fill whole bottles with the stuff which they would then take
home with them to friend and family, believing in its curative powers. Then I
went over to the Safa wa Marwa circuit.
I was with a
colleague, my Sheikh for the occasion, who was much more informed about these
affairs than I was. There is a special passageway that runs up the middle of
the hall which allows those in wheelchairs to move unhindered by the crowds. My
sheikh and many others decided this was a good way to complete each circuit
quickly without having to negotiate the crowds all around.
I followed,
protesting that this wasn’t an appropriate thing to do. I did two of the seven
this way, then decided to suffer with the other pilgrims. At the completion of
each circuit, the pilgrims look up towards a rocky outcrop inside the mosque,
hold up their hands and say a prayer for Hajar. Such is the reverence with
which her person is treated. It seemed touching to me, a former agnostic
infatuation junkie, feeling the power to believe that this religious
dispensation held for so many people.
Muslim Messiahs
Muslims hold this
reverence too for Mary and Jesus. I used to think it was odd that Jesus was
referred to in Arabic by the term “al-Masih,” or Messiah, which implies belief
that he was the Messiah figure of the Jews. But I realized that this, in fact,
concurs with the Muslim view that he was the awaited prophet of the Jews, and
does not necessarily imply acceptance that he was the Son of God.
Still, Messiah
figures are usually associated with the end of time and the day of judgement,
which is why, I presume, few ever take them that seriously. In Islamic history,
the “end of time” element is usually absent and, instead, they portray
themselves as the bringers of a new order.
A native of the Hejaz
called Mukhtar proclaimed that the Messiah was coming among Arabs and Persians
in southern Iraq’s revolt in 686 AD against the Umayyad caliphs. Messiah
figures (in the form of Imams) were behind the Fatimid dynasty that ruled from
Egypt in the tenth century, and the Almohads who ruled in Spain and North
Africa in the 12th century. There was the Messianic movement of the
Mahdi which ruled in Sudan from 1881-98. And the 1979 mosque siege in Mecca was
led by a warrior and his Messiah.
Historians have even
noted that the Christians of the Levant appeared to believe that the Arab
conquests were all about proclaiming a Messiah figure (and historians Patricia
Crone and Michael Cook once memorably suggested that the warrior was Mohammad
and the Messiah was the second caliph Omar).
Back to the Hajj.
It was between 8 and 8.30 in the morning by the time I collapsed on to the
mattress on the floor I was sleeping on at the ministry’s. We had been up for
24 hours and had only slept four hours the night before that. No on had had a
proper shower in two days and we were wearing these white robes. Then, at 9.30,
my colleague’s phone rang. There had been some accident down at the Jamarat, he
said.
In the final instalment of Andy Scott’s Hajj
story, read about how tragedy strikes for some pilgrims.
ãAndy Scott is a writer and journalist in the
Middle East.
ã2004 K. Diab. Unless otherwise stated, all the content on this website
is the copyright of Khaled Diab.