Americans on the Hajj
JANUARY 13, 2007 Listen to this Story
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This weekend tens of thousands of Americans are recovering from a long spiritual journey. The Hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, is one of the pillars of Islam--all able-bodied Muslims who can afford to go must make the pilgrimage at least once in their lifetime. This year the Hajj fell at the end of December, when a lot of the U.S. is on vacation anyway, and that made it easier for many American Muslims to make the trip. Ulises Mejias and Asma Barlas are a married couple from Ithaca, N.Y. They returned last Saturday. And they had very different experiences.
Ulises Mejias Blogs About His Trip to Mecca:
Some exercises in spiritual renewal involve a retreat into the solitude of nature or the quietness of the inner self, and focus on the cleansing of the body and the mind. The Hajj, on the other hand, hits you with the sudden force of 3 million people from all corners of the world descending on the vicinity of Mecca (in Saudi Arabia) over a period of a week--probably the largest flash mob of our times. It is an awesome enactment of the unity and purposefulness of God's creation. It is also an apocalyptic laboratory of pandemic viral outbreaks. The environment the pilgrims create is not what one would think of as being conducive to spiritual growth: they bring sickness, pollution, selfishness, prejudice, tiredness, and the bad temper these combined factors create. When you are stuck in a bus inhaling carbon monoxide for 12 hours (moving all of 6 kilometers during that time), hungry, tired, sleepy and in need to go to the bathroom, and you and everyone around you has some form of respiratory ailment or is in the process of getting one, what chance of realizing taqwa--consciousness of God--can possibly exist?
But the pilgrims also bring devotion, communal love, compassion, a predisposition to solidarity, and a thirst for knowledge. Perhaps it is the impact of the collective worshiping that facilitates an awareness of the divine amidst the grimy reality of the world. As a Muslim, you face a particular direction when praying, as does every other Muslim in the world. But when you actually reach the focal point of the prostration--the Ka'bah--and witness masses of people bowing down in synchronicity, the collectivity of the action takes over a certain part of the consciousness. Perhaps it is this mob mentality, increasingly associated with Muslims in the media, that scares the individualistic sensibilities of the West. (If I was still doing film theory, I would like to explore the connection between the re-emergence of the zombie genre film and post 9/11 Islamophobia...)
Since information about the specifics of Hajj can be found elsewhere, I will instead offer some disjointed, non-chronological snapshots of my experience...
Crush
There is that moment when you go from a theoretical to a practical understanding of what it means to be crushed by a mass of people. It is not any one individual's fault. The mass acquires a will of its own. You find yourself surrounded by people on all sides, pushing in opposite directions. Telling the people next to you to stop pushing is futile, as they themselves are being pushed by somebody else, the source being somewhere far away. You are simply experiencing the accumulated aggregation of a thousand little pushes. No one can stop it. You move without necessarily using your feet. Bodies are jammed so close together that eventually there is no room for the lungs to expand. If the situation worsens, you realize you could asphixiate. Fortunately, this does not happen this time. The force finds other outlets. ...
Voiceless
Entering Mina, you cannot believe your eyes. It is a city--or more accurately, a slum--of thousands of identical tents. There are 3 million people living here, but not all of them can afford a tent. All the roads and sidewalks are crammed with poor people's make-shift camps. It's hard to walk without having to step over some family sleeping on the ground, or cooking, or going to the bathroom. It is filthy. Bulldozers push piles of trash to clear the roads. Police cars constantly patrol the area and force people sleeping on the roads to move in order to clear the roads so that cars transporting more people and provisions can go through. There are 'sections' for different nationalities: Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Turkey, Iraq, Indonesia, and on and on. It is a microcosm of the world. Of course, the European and American camps are surrounded by a fence and the tents are considered 'upgraded', although you wouldn't know it by looking at the bathroom stalls which double as showers, and which are perpetually flooded.
By the time we reach our camp, I am sick as a dog. My cold has gone from viral to bacterial, a doctor traveling with our group informs me. I completely lose my voice, which I take as a positive step towards the death of the self. The doctor says I should start taking antibiotics. We brought one course for my wife, which she took when she began her cold almost as soon as we reached Saudi Arabia (she is quite susceptible to respiratory problems). A Muslim brother, who overhears our conversation (I mostly communicate by grunts and signs) offers me his medication. I say I feel bad taking the antibiotics--what if he needs them later? He insists. He says, with a smile, that I should allow him to earn the reward of a good deed. In our tent, people are sharing their medication and food, and looking out for each other. It is only a spontaneous and momentary show of communal solidarity, but it's genuine and touching. One forgets the value of such moments in restoring one's faith in humanity. My wife, however, informs me that in the sisters' tent the good will is not as abundant. ...
Aunties
After a while, you become one with the shoving and the pushing, and you learn to incorporate them into your own movements. Except for the pushing of the Aunties. These little frail old ladies from the Sub Continent have a way of poking you and shoving you aside with their bony hands that leaves bruises afterwards. I call it the Auntie Vulcan Maneuver. ...
Foot
It is considered bad manners to cross right in front of someone praying, but in a Mosque with thousands of people moving about, it is impossible to avoid this sometimes. I am praying at the Holy Mosque of the Prophet in Medina, before Hajj begins. I am immersed in meditation, and feel particularly attuned to my prayers. I'm on the floor, about to bow down and place my forehead on the floor as part of the prayer. As I am about to prostrate, a foot plants itself right in front of me, on the spot where my forehead is supposed to touch the floor. It is no ordinary foot. It is the most disgusting foot I have ever seen, verging on leprosy. The skin is scaly and replete with oozing sores... the sole is cracked, with bloody lines as deeps as canyons... there is stuff growing on the "nails" that is straight out of a horror film. My first reaction is extreme repulsion. My second reaction is extreme anger: I feel like violently removing this foot from my prayer space. But the foot moves away soon enough, leaving the space free for me to place my forehead where it was just standing. Needless to say, my concentration is broken. Only later does it occur to me that none of my initial reactions was of compassion for the owner of such a limb. Surely, it could not have been comfortable to perform Hajj under such conditions (I doubt this person was traveling First Class). Did my personal outrage outweigh his discomfort, and justify my lack of compassion? My experience of the Hajj begins to change at the moment of that realizationa€¦.
...That is the Hajj, a reminder that we are nomads, immigrants, ceaselessly going back and forth--simultaneously losing and finding ourselves in the crowd.
--by Ulises A. Mejias
Excerpted from his blog, The Faith & the Filth: Performing Hajj in 1427
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- Music Bridge:
- Astral Travelling
- Artist: Pharaoh Sanders
- CD: Boozoo Bajou remix- Impulsive! (impulse)
Comments
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From Greenwich, CT, 11/07/2011
MasyaAllah brother. I read your article and found so annoying. You complained too much, even disgraced someone foot as disgusting foot. This is wrong. You may need to redo your hajj.
05/22/2008
Very nice story! Thanks
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