Kumar, it must be as you say. BUT, it is unknown to me why EVERY group within the Muslim population worldwide doesn't publically, as loud and many times as they can, denounce the radical Islamists. IF for instance, 18-20 or so people from ANY religious group in the US went to ANY country in the world, and did what was done here on 9-11, I can practically guarantee that we would still be hearing sorrow and breast beatings from whatever group did such an outrage. I personally, and many many other Americans, have wondered WHY this has not happened.
BTW, there was an interesting article in the Sunday Seattle times today with a picture of young children making tissue paper "stones" that were to symbolize the "stoning" of Satan and a bit about the hajj. Couldn't find online that article, but did find this one....
archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com
Travel: Sunday, February 20, 2000
Hajj: The journey of a lifetime
by Reshma Memon Yaqub
Special to The Seattle Times
My husband keeps a map of the world on the wall in the den of our Maryland home. Every place we travel, he marks with a thumbtack. You can barely see the paper anymore.
But this trip would be different. This wasn't for the sights or the sunshine or family or work.
This was hajj - for a Muslim, the journey of a lifetime.
Hajj is a pillar of Islam, a spiritual and physical journey to the core of my faith.
It's a five-day sojourn across Saudi Arabia to the city of Mecca and the holy sites of Mina, Arafat and Muzdalifah, places where the word of God was revealed to mankind 14 centuries ago.
It's a series of rites and rituals that follow in the footsteps of Prophet Abraham and Prophet Mohammed.
The pilgrimage is required, once in a lifetime, of every Muslim who is physically, mentally and financially able.
The reward for a properly completed hajj is monumental: the wiping clean of your slate of bad deeds accumulated over a lifetime. You emerge without sin, as on the day you were born.
Hajj is said to be one of the largest annual gatherings of humans on the planet, each year drawing up to 2 million of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims to southwest Saudi Arabia.
The odyssey begins on the eighth day of Dhul-Hijjah, the 12th month of the Islamic lunar calendar (in mid-March this year). Last year it began on March 25.
And when it began, I was there.
March 18, 1999 - Though we left home today, our hajj began long before the first steps are taken. I have spent months reading, planning, saving.
There is no Fodor's guide, no Let's Go Hajj. But there are books, Web sites, people who have already done hajj.
Typically, Muslims go on hajj with large groups organized by specialty travel agencies, or are led by people who have been on hajj many times.
My husband, Amer, his sister Sajeela and I each pay nearly $5,000 to go with a New York travel agency recommended by friends. We see ads for hajj programs for as little as $2,000, but the cheaper programs require you to share rooms with same-gender strangers. And the hotels wouldn't be within walking distance of the mosques that we're already traveling across the world to be near.
Amer jokes that our package is Hajj-Lite - all the prayer, none of the pain.
Not only is hajj the most important journey of a Muslim's life, it's also the most celebrated. Within the local Muslim community, word quickly spreads of who will become a hajji each year. Well-wishers call and visit and tell me what prayers to say when I'm prostrating to God in the holiest of mosques. I'm asked to pray for people's marriages, people's children, people's jobs, for their long, healthy lives, for their entrance to Paradise.
On the flight, I reflect on the Talbiyah, the supplication that Muslims repeat en route to and throughout hajj, telling God that we are coming to Him. Hajj is considered partly a rehearsal for the Day of Judgment.
March 19 - As I step off the plane in the Saudi city of Medina, my lips parch. Buildings, mountains, desert, palm trees, people suffer in the heat. Everything here is beige. There are no lakes, beaches or resorts.
It's immediately clear that there is little for us to do here but to worship - and that's why God chose this place for this purpose. This is to be nothing but a spiritual sabbatical.
On the bus to the hotel, a guide for our American hajj group leads us in reciting the Talbiyah. The words, in Arabic, are still unfamiliar on my tongue:
Labbayk Allahumma Labbayk (Here I come, oh Lord, here I come). . . .
The next few days in this holy city, I recite my five daily prayers at the Prophet's Mosque, a majestic house of worship that contains the simple, green-domed mosque that Prophet Mohammed built. It also contains the grounds of his home, where he is buried.
Prophet Mohammed informed Muslims that the divine reward for praying in this mosque is 1,000 times more than praying in any other mosque - except the Sacred Mosque in Mecca, where the reward is 100,000 times greater. He also told Muslims that in the area between his house and his pulpit - perhaps a few hundred square feet of empty space - lies a garden of Paradise, the only earthly manifestation of Heaven.
I pray there. It's simple and it's peaceful.
And it's crowded.
March 20 - Praying five times a day is, like hajj, a pillar of the faith. Each prayer takes about five or 10 minutes.
Between prayers we hide from the heat and rest at our Medina hotel.
In the evenings, we walk around the marketplace near the mosque. Many varieties of dates are sold everywhere, from street vendors and from fancy glass cases in glitzy stores.
At 2 a.m., at 3 a.m., at 4 a.m., I watch from my hotel window as worshipers float through the streets toward the Prophet's Mosque. At 5, I walk the two blocks to join them for dawn prayers.
Several hundred thousand worshipers already are there, so I pray outside on the cool marble. I am touched when the woman next to me turns her prayer rug sideways and pushes half of it in front of me. This happens every time I pray outside. I'm moved to tears a few days later when a stranger praying next to us places her prayer rug in front of us and proceeds to pray on the bare ground herself. That, my heart tells me, is the spirit of hajj and the spirit of my religion. That is the kind of person I have come here to become.
I recite the Talbiyah under my breath, and pray.
March 23 - Medina and Mecca are Islamic sanctuaries, cities only Muslims can enter. There is no hunting allowed, no cutting of trees. The streets are safe.
I walk alone in the middle of the night without fear. At the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet down the block from the mosque, the cashiers often stack money on the counter instead of putting it in the register, and no one touches it when they turn around. The stores close at every prayer time so the merchants can hurry to the mosque.
March 24 - Today I will enter the state of ritual purity called Ihram - and officially declare to God my intention to perform hajj.
First I take a ritual bath at the hotel. I'm acutely aware that this same step-by-step washing will be done to my body when it's buried, when I return again to God.
I slip on a jilbab, a loose, ankle-length dress, and cover my hair with a scarf. It's what I've been wearing over T-shirts and drawstring pants since I left home, and what I'll keep wearing, like most women here, throughout this journey.
My husband Amer, like every male hajji, wraps two large towel-like pieces of white cloth around his body. That and sandals are all men can wear for the next few days.
These white cloths - great equalizers that make it impossible to distinguish between a doctor and a street sweeper - are what Muslims are dressed in for burial. Many hajjis save their Ihram cloths for that purpose.
We leave by bus for Mecca. En route, the chanting of the Talbiyah is loud. It consumes the 12-hour overnight bus ride, a 280-mile trip south that would take a third the time if there weren't 2 million people following this route.
To avoid the crowds, we travel at night throughout this journey. It saves time, but we lose all sense of day and night and sleep. Luckily, patience is a condition of our Ihram. We're not allowed to get angry: You must accept what you cannot alter.
The several dozen American Muslims on my bus are drawn from every corner and ethnicity of America's 6 million Muslims.
There's a sprightly 68-year-old jazz musician from Detroit; Pakistani-American doctors; an Albanian man who has brought his aging mother; a board member from the Neutrogena Corp.; two Iranian brothers who own a U.S. carpet store.
We are so very different. But we become intensely attached and interdependent. We share our food, we carry each other's bags, we help lift wheelchairs over steps, we track each other in the crowds, we take old people to the bathroom. We become an integral part of each other's hajj experience.
March 25 - We are in Mecca. No Muslim can forget the first sight of the Kaaba - a brick cube the size of a tiny house, the object that Muslims face as they bow in prayer five times every day.
The Kaaba - first built by Prophet Abraham and surrounded by the open-air Sacred Mosque - stands empty. It is draped with a black cloth, which is covered with Koranic verses embroidered in gold and silver thread.
The Kaaba is not an object of worship; it simply signifies a direction, imposed by God to maintain unity and uniformity among worshipers.
Still, it's nearly other-worldly to be in the first 10 rows of worshippers facing the nucleus of my faith, knowing there are 1.2 billion Muslims worldwide who are praying, in concentric circles, behind me.
Every Muslim family, no matter where they live, knows what direction the Kaaba is from their house. In Saudi Arabia, the hotels have direction markers on the ceiling. Even our Saudi Arabian Airlines flight had a curtained-off prayer room with a digital direction marker.
When I first see the Kaaba, it doesn't seem real. It looks as if somebody has taken the picture of the Kaaba on my parents' mantel and flipped an "on" switch, turning it into a living diorama.
I slip into the slow-moving crowd to walk around the Kaaba seven times - a ritual called Tawaf. In this mass of bodies, Tawaf takes two hours. If the space were empty, which it never is, it would take 15 minutes.
Because it's so crowded, we stop halfway through and walk up the stairs to the second level of the open-air mosque and continue our Tawaf there. The path around is longer, but it's much less crowded.
Later I walk from the huge courtyard that surrounds the Kaaba back into the covered area of the mosque to drink holy water from the Zamzam well. It's a well that has miraculously flowed ceaselessly in this desert land since the time of Prophet Abraham. It sprung up to provide water to his wife, Hagar, as she ran back and forth between two hills in desperate search of water for her baby.
Zamzam is bottled and given away free throughout Saudi Arabia. Trucks full of it slowly roll through the streets with cups attached to the back - people walk behind the trucks, filling the cups and drinking. As a foreigner here, I stick to bottled water, except for Zamzam. This water isn't just safe, it's history. It's healing.
March 26 - The bus has brought us to the Arafat area 12 miles southeast of Mecca. We are here for the Day of Arafat, the most important day of hajj.
The plain is empty year-round, save for this one day, when believers descend and congregate in tents. There's also a huge mosque here, Masjid Namira, which stands empty except for today.
Nearby is the Mount of Rahmah, a rocky hill where Prophet Mohammed stood and delivered his last sermon, during his hajj.
Because our group leaders are afraid we will get lost in the crowd, we don't go to the mosque to hear the afternoon sermon. Instead, scholars in our midst deliver a sermon to our group, and we stay in our carpeted and air-conditioned tents.
I stand and bow in prayer from noon until sunset, counting my blessings, listing my sins, praying for forgiveness, reciting the Talbiyah. I pray for God to accept my hajj, and for my life to change as a result of it.
This is the time and the place where, God willing, the sins I have accumulated in 27 years will be forgiven. This is the time and place where God says to his angels, "Why have they come?" and the angels reply, "They have come to establish the oneness of God." To which God commands, "Let them go, for I have forgiven them all."
The Day of Arafat is the core of hajj. Any other missed step can be made up for, but if you miss being at Arafat on this day, you have missed hajj.
March 26 - This night is spent in the valley of Muzdalifah, five miles north of Arafat. The pedestrian traffic from Arafat to Muzdalifah is horrific.
I peer out the window of my air-conditioned bus. People who don't have $5,000 to pay for a tour like mine, people who have saved their whole lives for this trip, are crammed into cars, vans, buses. And on top of cars, vans and buses. Rooftop luggage racks have somehow become seats. Those who can't afford even that luxury are walking.
As my bus lurches forward, I count 30 human beings inside and atop a nearby minivan that would normally seat nine. I watch their lips move as they recite the Talbiyah. Somehow, through the closed window, through the congested traffic, I can hear their recitation.
It's some time before I realize that the voice I'm hearing is my own.
March 27 - Today is Eid, commemorating the Day of Arafat. At home, I usually spend this day feasting with family, visiting friends, exchanging gifts. Today, I spend the early morning hours in a bus to Mina, where I will stay in a tent for three nights.
Mina, three miles east of Mecca, is a temporary city of tents. There are miles and miles of them. Most tents look big enough to fit a family, but I wonder how many people are actually squeezed in. The streets are filled with people who don't have tents and who just lay down a blanket or a newspaper on the dirt to mark their territory; maybe they sling a sheet over a branch to fashion a roof.
Our group's air-conditioned tents seem barely large enough to hold our few dozen people. There's a dirt floor covered by rugs. Men and women are in separate tents. In our women's tent, we peel back a foot of the Velcroed seam that connects us to our spouses' tent, a makeshift communication portal.
March 28-29 - We have come to Mina to perform a ritual stoning of the Jamarats. The Jamarats - three round, walled basins, chest-high, a few dozen feet in diameter and about 500 feet apart - mark the spots where Satan appeared to Prophet Abraham when he was on his way to Mecca after completing his hajj. The Prophet stoned Satan at each of the three points before Satan gave up.
On this day, thousands of years later, I re-enact Prophet Abraham's trials, throwing seven pea-size pebbles into the largest basin, shouting "Allahu akbar!"- "God is great!" - with each toss.
The crowds at the Jamarats can be overwhelming. The year before, 150 people died in a stampede here.
We are lucky because a 23-year-old Islamic scholar who's with us, and who is on his sixth hajj, knows exactly what times we should go to be safest from the crowds and the flying pebbles. He knows what the surging crowds don't know - that the backs of the basins are empty. We walk right up to the edge of the basins and drop our stones in.
Ihram, the state of ritual purity, ends after the first of the three days of stoning, and to signify it, hajjis cut a bit of their hair. It's preferred for men to shave their heads. We clip a lock from each other's hair with little manicure scissors.
On the bus ride back to Mecca, I see crowds of men on the sidewalks, having their heads shaved with straight razors in makeshift barber shops. Afterward, these brothers, these strangers, hug and congratulate and laugh as they pat one another's bald heads.
On the afternoon of the third day that we prepare to leave Mecca to spend the night in Mina, I break down crying, sick from a vicious flu and exhausted from the physical exertion, from not sleeping through a night from walking for hours with my belongings in hand.
But to my surprise, my internal reserves don't dry up. I keep myself level with the thought that the physical hardships endured by early Muslims, as well as by so many people of all faiths today, are something that I should be compelled, at least once in my life, to better understand. Even on this Hajj-Lite, I am learning how much I can live without.
Later, in our two-room hotel suite, I turn on CNN and watch Albanian Muslim refugees fleeing Kosovo. After a 1 1/2-hour walk with all their belongings, there is no bus waiting to take them to a hotel. There is nothing awaiting them, except maybe another 1 1/2-hour walk. For the first time, I understand a little bit.
March 30 - My last act of hajj is to perform a Farewell Tawaf around the Kaaba. The crowd is so thick that it takes 20 minutes just to walk the five-minute path from my hotel to the Sacred Mosque.
The tide of people inside is so strong, and I am so jostled that by the end, I feel as though I've survived a car accident.
This evening, difficulty awaits me at Jeddah airport. My ticket says Dulles airport near Washington, D.C., but the computer says JFK in New York. I recite the Talbiyah and remind myself that I've come here for God, and he'll send me home when it's time. My patience has been tested so much in the past two weeks that I am now used to, even expect, this kind of random test.
Peace replaces panic. Take me anywhere in America, I tell them. I'll find my way.
Twenty-four hours later, I am home.
Reshma Memon Yaqub, a staff writer for Worth magazine, lives in Rockville, Maryland. Her e-mail is ReshmaY@aol.com.
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