Abdal Hakim Murad – Conscientious Pilgrim
AI: Summary ©
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AI: Transcript ©
From God we come and to God do we return.
So much of Muslim life revolves around circles, the circles of
celestial orbits which determine our prior times, the circles of
the lunar calendar, the circle of Toba, of falling into error,
trying, falling and trying again,
and the circles of our bodily lives formed by an earthen clay,
walking upon the earth for a time and then returning to the earth to
furnish new life. So much of human history has involved respecting
and honoring these interconnected circles of living and returning
for 1000s of centuries in human history, our built spaces,
material objects, and even understandings of ourselves
involved a recognition of returning first to the ground, and
then back to God.
It's hard for me as a modern, to even imagine that the objects I
use in my daily life, my computer, my phone, my clothing, even my
pen, so few of those objects could go back into the ground. Instead,
they will outlive me by centuries.
Like so many aspects of modern life, the hedge has unfortunately
become another instance where human activity causes detrimental
impact upon our environment. From the carbon footprint of air travel
to the jaw dropping amount of plastic used and discarded during
the Hajj itself. Our pilgrimage to the holy cities has become merely
another instance where the lack of wisdom, foresight and
sustainability at the heart of modern progress narratives makes
itself so painfully visible. If the hedge is a return like no
other, then surely, we can imagine a 21st century hedge in which we
honor and safeguard our tradition, and the natural world.
In this final episode of our hedge series, we come full circle to
imagine a hedge of the future, which is ennobled by a return to
wholeness and to the generous sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad
peace be upon him. I'm joined today by Sheikh Abdullah Heike
Murad, who shares his recollections as a * and helps
us imagine what Hajj can be going forward if we all become not just
conscious, but conscientious pilgrims.
Abdul Hakim Murad is the dean of the Cambridge Muslim College and
the Sheikh Zayed lecturer of Islamic Studies in the Faculty of
divinity at Cambridge University. Che have the hikkim this podcast
has focused on the theme of gathering in the hudge through
many lenses of the various rituals and moments in the hajj, as well
as the more macro cosmology of sacred places and secret time. And
since this is the last episode, can you give us your unique
perspective on the Hajj as a truly conscious gathering of humanity?
Well, the Hajj really represents the principle of unity and
multiplicity. Everybody goes for the one, which is what the Tobia
is about the love bake a love of Mother bakers about the
uncompromising unity of nature of the Abrahamic, divine. But at the
same time, of course, there is the almost indefinite and quite
dazzling plurality of human beings. The tension between the
two so beautifully articulated by the sanctuary itself with the
Kaaba symbolizing the SSAT the eternal unknowability, the Veiled
pneus of the one at the center,
categorically unique, but then around it, you've got 2 million
people, 3 million people, every conceivable language,
the genders everything is present. So you have this kind of
juxtaposition, this binary of the one and the many. And the
gathering part of it, of course, is it's supposed to be a crowd.
That's what the word a father means. And a father is the word
that the author and itself use is a photon in artifact when you come
in a crowd from artifact, it's a it's a collective exercise. And
part of the discipline of the Hydra of course, which is quite
emphasized in the relevant hadith is to maintain a
A
beautiful adverb with all of the other people because crowds can be
difficult to crowds have almost a mind of their own sometimes. And
if the
the crowding the bottlenecks, the stampedes are to be avoided and
everybody has to be more attentive to the human men later than they
are really at any other time. Generally, we find that the adverb
of congregation is important in all of our rituals in Ramadan, for
instance, in the prayer, sacred places family life, this is very
much the religion of Edinburgh, but particularly during the Hajj
for that author, well, that was all covered it down if you hedge
there should be no bad language and there should be no
roughness. There should be no argumentation during the Hajj. So
if somebody pokes you in the back with a strangely sharp umbrella
you don't notice or if you do just sneak down with with a smile. This
is part of the usual Muslim add up anyway, of course, but on the how
tos is particularly particularly vital. So the throng of what a dev
disciplined and courteous human beings around the one really is
the kind of mapping out in one place of what the entire Ummah,
ideally want the whole of Benny Adam is supposed to be because of
course, it is the recollection of the beginning of time and the end
of time, which are collective events. The beginning of time.
When we all said Belorussia Hytner, yes, we bear witness
of which the telopea than the baker is supposed to be a kind of
echo. Bella. Yes, love bake is also like, yes, we still remember,
we were present with you in the complete if the holder of all of
Benny Adam at the beginning of time, when we all bore witness to
you which is one of the significances of the Blackstone
represents the reaffirmation of that visa, that covenant,
which was collected, it was taken from the from all of the seed of
Benny Adam. And then the end time of course, which is represented
particularly by the wall for the standing of our effort. There we
recall that as we work together, at the beginning, so two we will
be together, everybody, all the nations all the ages,
believers, unbelievers, everybody present all Benny Adam at the end,
in order to see the consequences of the way in which we responded
to that Belorussia hidden and to that lab bake. So there's a
perfect news cosmological symmetry, really, about the way in
which the plurality of Benny Adam is is managed and represented
during the several minutes of the Hajj.
You spoke of beautiful tension, beautiful add up, and this kind of
timeless quality that's there in the GABA. And is that something
specific to the GABA? I mean, is the GABA a very unique place in
being able to engender this kind of behavior and this kind of
timelessness?
Well, the Kaaba is, of course, veiled, and it's non
representational, and it's mysterious. Everybody has a sense
of the mysterium tremendum to the immense Jalali mystery of the
Divine, when approaching the Kaaba, and as I said, you have the
enormous crowds circling it with the maximal differentiation of
human beings and then you have the complete unicity of that symbol of
that which lies beneath that beta mountain war and which is
ultimately a representation as even the least educated hajis know
of the unknowable eternity the immutability, of, of the Divine.
So as a symbol, which of course, like all Greek symbols, has a kind
of alchemical effect on on those who experience it. It's absolutely
perfect. It's the perfect representation of what monotheism
is about, but of course, the Kaaba has its role in
sacred history as well. The Hodges remember how it was resurrected,
repressed, donated purified by Ibrahim Ismail. And the historic
record that a smile is actually buried in the hedger, which is
next to the cabin. It's very much an Abrahamic century as well as a
primordial and an Adamic. One, so it represents both the
timelessness
the self referential mystery of the Divine, which is the first you
had, but also the divine as experienced and operating in
linear time in history, which is for us preeminently the Abrahamic
story
So there's a kind of chronological as well as eternal dimension,
which is represented by the cap. And I think all of the hajis when
they're, they're part of that reverence for the Kappa, and their
acknowledgement of the perfection of it as, as an active symbol is
due to their consciousness of these two axes of the holder of
the cannabis sacred function.
So it's another tension is between the eternity and the kind of
temporality and ever changing nature of the world itself. I
think, you know, one of the things that we've touched on repeatedly
in this podcast is how
the Muslim community's way of traveling to and experiencing the
holy cities has changed so drastically, especially in the
last 100 and 150 years. So how have changes in Muslim mobility,
as well as changes to the sacred sites themselves, change the way
that Muslims experience traveled to and participation in the hajj?
Well, of course, Muslims down the centuries from the beginning have
recorded that experience of the Hajj we have so many travelogues.
One of my favorites, sadly brief was by the British Muslim *
William Williamson, who saw the hajj when it was still really a
fully traditional event. He went there during the Ottoman times in
the 1870s, I think,
guy from Bristol, who converted and did the Hajj several times and
took the hydro caravan from Baghdad to the hijas. On the road
that was built and watered by Princess Zubaydah in the time of
huddled Rashid, one of the great roots of the Islamic world. It's
the commercial routes like the Silk Road, but there's also the
pilgrimage roads which go everywhere, which sometimes
overlap and sometimes are quite distinct, and the fortresses and
the water systems of elf, the dark Zubaydah still there in the
desert, in Arabia,
you can visit them on a four wheel drive, and you can see the
enormous nature of the infrastructure that classical
Islam developed. But Williamson said that it was a camel train, of
course.
And it took about a month, a month and a bit, Baghdad to NACA, and
that was a very useful transitional time, as well as, of
course, the time waiting for the these 1000s of camels it was
really brilliantly organized by his account could get going, that
on the journey. It was all about sitting on your camera, or as many
people walking next to your camera on or sitting down and watching
the whole thing go by with the flags and the different
nationalities and the women and their penguins, and children
messing around, and goats and sheep that were being brought
along. To feed people as they went 1000s upon 1000s of camels, it was
an extraordinary spectacle and he liked to go up to the front, he
had a very fast camel, and then sit down and rest and watch the
entire caravan go by just to see the sheer kind of Carnival like
festival of it. But of course, what people are doing is they were
singing, they were doing vicar. It was all in shared people reciting
the core and the impromptu classes going on the scholars would still
be teaching that have some of their students with them. It was a
kind of mobiles Zarya or mobile University. So people had as it
were a month to detox and dunya before they cited the holy city,
so they had enough time to get into the zone. As we say nowadays,
today, it's quite different. Of course, you stepped off the plane
having just dealt with terminal B at Gatwick and there you are in
Jeddah and there's a high speed train and whoop. At one moment,
you're in Guildford or somewhere the next moment you're standing in
front of Abraham's ancient house. And we don't really have enough
time to transition, I think, from the profane to the sacred. And I
think that really diminishes the often shattering, transformative
Tober inducing effect that hatred has always had on people.
Obviously, we can't get back to the time of the camel train.
There's just too many people doing it. But there has been, I think, a
qualitative decline. And you can see that sometimes in that paddock
of people, they're grumbling about the hotels, and they're behaving
almost as if it's a kind of tourism experience. Whereas in
fact, of course, it's supposed to be uncomfortable. It is time of
discomfort, that frm is not really a terribly easy thing to manage
for days after days, and it's supposed to be an ascetical
experience.
And nowadays, people don't really have the time I think, to get
themselves into a mental space that prepares them for that and so
they tend to grumble I think a lot more
than they used to, even though the hydro is a lot safer and more
comfortable than it's ever been.
So in addition to our time, and our sort of qualitative experience
being diminished. Another consequence of the modern hedge
certainly is that our impact on the space itself is so much more.
I think that's even just visible through just the sheer amount of
waste that's generated through through our pilgrimage. So one
thing I wanted to speak with you about specifically is, are there
ways we can imagine the hudge of the present and the future, which
enables not just a conscious gathering, but a conscientious
commitment to safeguarding our natural world and our holy cities?
What would this kind of gathering even look like? And does it
require an understanding of communities? You've talked about
this concept of Oman elsewhere? Does it require an understanding
of Oman, that takes us out of ourselves as the only gatherers
there?
Well, in a sense, the idea of a sanctuary, which is obviously what
the visit is all about, extends not just to human beings who have
the right of sanctuary, how close you are in Allah's hospital, so to
animals. Interestingly, there are quite strict rules in a haram
about not killing animals. And if you do, if you go hunting or
something and you're wrong, it can invalidate a lot of the things
have had you have to make a sacrifice and
so that
it's often observed that the sanctuary is a Mecca and Medina
are the world's first sort of national parks or wildlife
reserves, where animals could walk around completely unharmed. Even
the people who are living in Mecca wouldn't dare to interfere with
the pigeons with the wild donkeys with the wild cats that still
exist in the desert. They're ostriches, they have a lot of
stuff in the desert, in Arabia.
So that principle, that it is a sanctuary, not just for human
worshipers, but for the animal orders of creation as well, I
think indicates one of the things that needs to be done in the minds
of the hajis
that they need to connect with the stark beauty of desert nature.
That was always part of the experience. That Medina was this
incredibly kind of lush, green oasis, and maca was about the
driest. most arid desiccated, conurbation on Earth with those
bare mountains. It's like being on the surface of Mars, really,
hardly anything seems to grow that
and experiencing that start Kunis, the
almost vision inducing rigor and beauty of
the mountainous desert, something that I think people need to
reconnect with that on their way, they shouldn't be looking at the
the perfume and the watch advertisement on the billboards as
they go up, but they should be concentrating on the beauty of the
mountains, trying to focus on the aridity of the desert, the miracle
of life, the fragility of life, all of these traditional spiritual
lessons, which the Hajj journey has always helped people with
historically and we need to look past the bright lights and the
kind of Dubai Mall culture aspect of the holy city and try and
reconnect with the beauty of the sky, the beauty of the people, the
beauty of the mountains, wherever we can focus on nature as witness
to the Divine creative beauty, that's what we should be looking
at not at the bright lights
you are also a * yourself, a * yourself. And if I can ask
you now some questions about your own experience as a pilgrim on
camera and of course on hedge. Maybe we can start with your own
hedge and how you how that took place when it was and if you can
tell us a little bit about that and especially how you kind of the
journey preparation for journey to experience of and return from?
Well, in a sense, I almost cheated because I was living in Jeddah at
the time, which is they call it dailies or Haramain, the kind of
portico of the holy cities and as the Hajj season approaches. When I
was living there back in the 80s rhythm of the city really changed
very much and you saw the flocks of sheep being driven through the
streets and people in Iran and crowds starting to move in the
direction of the city. I lived on the Mecca.
route. So, in a sense, all you needed to do is step out of your
front door during all hedger and the crowds would carry along with
you liked it or not, and you'd find yourself at the car Bay, it
was where everybody was headed. So it wasn't. It wasn't anything like
the traditional month getting sore on a camel experience that people
used to have. But
I did it several times. And I found that useful, because,
particularly if you're from the West, where there's a certain sort
of spectacle oriented, experience oriented mentality that goes with
traveling, here's a picture of me next to the Taj Mahal. Here's a
picture of me halfway up the Eiffel Tower, etc, in a strange,
really strange thing to do. To go around taking pictures of yourself
next to monuments that culturally you probably don't relate to at
all. And that that decadent sort of profane tourism really has to
be exorcised. Because the Hajj is, it's really spectacular.
It offers scenes of severe grandiose that aren't rivaled by
anything else on Earth. As far as I know, the view from the
foothills of Arafat of the tent city, the view that you get from
the roof of the harem, looking down at billions of people doing
their toe off with a caliber as it were being carried aloft, almost
in triumph by the by the circling pilgrims, even though it takes
maybe an hour and a half just to go around once because there's so
many people it's shattering. And everybody praying, and everybody's
sort of half in tears. There's nothing like that visually on
Earth. And if God forbid, they ever did lead tourists in it would
immediately become the world's leading tourist attraction because
it's just so sensational. Visually, it's extraordinary. So
it's important to get past that, because that's really not what
it's about. So what becomes particularly interesting as
well, so many things. Firstly, there's the kind of Carnival like
atmosphere that seems to attach to so many Islamic things. Ramadan,
for instance, looks like a time of real severity. It's kind of
killjoy experience on the surface, but it's also very festive time in
an odd kind of way that newcomers to Islam find puzzling.
Juma prayer is kind of again, sort of Carnival but that also on the
Hajj, even though it's certainly not the hedonistic experiences is
that joyfulness that people experience, particularly those
who've been before they find themselves back in the kind of
corrugated iron shantytown of Minar. And it's just absolutely
wonderful. And we're so happy to be back.
So yeah, that kind of euphoria is very interesting, and unexpected
to people who haven't seen that aspect of Islam before. And then
the,
the enigma of the rituals, which are unlike anything else in Islam,
there's nothing else in the film that has power, often sci fi and a
well walk off and all of that it's souI, generous and unfamiliar. But
everybody gets used to it right away. And they seem to know
exactly what to do as if they've been doing it every day of their
lives. There's a certain profound, natural Muslim LIS about those
surprising things that people immediately relax into.
But I suppose the most
revealing thing is the effect it has on people.
I went up a couple of times with a bunch of bankers, as I was doing
some work for a bank. And so this was a cheap way for me to do a
hedge. So we get onto these rather posh buses. And just to see how
different people were, when they went up, grumbling and
complaining, arguing about paperwork, blah, blah, talking
about work. And then four or five days later on the same bus is
coming back. sneezing and coughing and with kind of scratching their
hair catastrophe that ends badly shaved and
now eating things that hadn't agreed with them, it is quite a
quite an ordeal. And the way in which they would look out for
themselves and make sure that everybody in the bus had enough to
eat and to drink and the courtesy and the color and somehow, this
mysterious set of practices, these archetypal geometries of the cube
and the straight line and the circles and this kind of ancient
ceremony.
he'll have some kind of alchemical effect on people's souls. So that
I found very impressive seeing people have been quite profane at
the outset, really being changed within a few days.
How that works, who knows? That is one of the enigmas of the hedge.
But yeah, so hijama broad, to be more broad is the term that we use
means, as it were to be made good to be made innocent, comes from
this better word. And it's a past participle that had your mother or
the 100 is supposed to be the one who is made good made innocent,
washed, even though he really needs a shower.
By this enigma of the cube to circle, the straight line,
throwing the stones, all of these apparently unfamiliar things. So
yeah, what do you end up with is the index applicability of the
hedge and awareness that it really works. It's an incredible sort of
factory of talvez, millions of people turned around, and given
memories that will keep their religiosity going until they die.
But how it works, who knows? It's one of God's mysteries, and it's
to do with the deep workings of the human heart and things that
touch the heart and change it that are beyond the capacity of
any formal discourse, or neuroscience or anything really to
understand. All one knows is that the thing works.
A theme that's come up a lot in our lived experience conversations
in this podcast is how you're part of a crowd in the hedge, but also
somehow alone. And this was surprising for me to listen to as
somebody who's never been on HUD that though you're a part of this
grand crowd, that there's a kind of loneliness in the HUD too. I
was wondering, in your experience, how did you? How did that how did
that tension exists for you to this crowd, but alone?
Well, it's obviously not solitude, because it's impossible to be
alone on the hunch. Really, it is a collective drama, a blessing.
People get lost, of course. And that's one of the things that the
SAUDI Boy Scouts do, they're in charge of lost persons. I remember
once when we were in our tent,
one of the Boy Scouts came to the door of the tent telling her that
there were English speakers there. And he, he was with this, I guess
she was about 12 or 13 years old American girl who had never before
in her life been outside Washington state.
And here she was at the hedge dismissed on familiar thing in the
world with these 3 million people in his tent city and the
shattering some.
And she was lost. she'd lost her parents.
So she stayed with us a little while but she'd be there just
parked with us while they went to find them and I think they would
reunited finally so I guess she was kind of really feeling alone.
Isolated, although of course, hunch is a very safe place and
things like that. It's just too many people around for any sort of
familiar miscreant see to be possible that
I think if there's a sense of loneliness, it is because the Hajj
does confront you with his unfamiliarity with circumstances
that really make you think this isn't familiarity that comes with
praying, mothering, for the 5,000th time, or during Ramadan,
for the 20th time. But the 100 is all new, especially the first time
it's kind of unfamiliar, and much of it is spiritually quite
confrontational, the the, the confrontation with Aqaba, the
first time, the experience of everything, the sacrifice, this
thorough stoning of the peers, that shows your pillars, the
shattering crowds, their mount artifacts, all kinds of new. And I
think that when we're confronted by something really new, that's
when we're more self aware. And we start to think, Oh, well, this is
strange, weird. How do I deal with this and we become more conscious
of ourselves. And bats feel a little bit more vulnerable. So
perhaps it's a vulnerability or that sense of solitude. But of
course, in our life of dark, we're all alone, really. But one of the
beauties of the Hodges late afternoon on artifact when the sun
isn't so hot, and everybody's out there headed under the sky, and
everybody's making sure that you attach yourself to some group or
other somebody who knows what it's doing is reading the long
beautiful door app and yeah, the tears flow and it's staying
Growing up that I think is when people feel that they are alone
and helpless in the presence of the Almighty, they will call that
they will come to God for that as individuals on the last day, and
that they will stand alone for the judgment. And they feel that
immense sense of personal accountability and responsibility
and vulnerability at that time. So I suppose that's the context where
people might feel alone, I did it, perhaps it's just they feel that
they are individuals. Rather than that they feel they're solitary, I
think it's more like that. And of course, a wonderful wake up call
for a lot of people that often, especially in our kind of dazed
times, are over entertained times, are not really in touch with their
own human subjectivity, that is just wandering from distraction to
distraction. It's hard on the house to do that. There's too much
that immediately confronts you and demands full attention and the
fullness of your response. It's a form of thicker.
And what did you take with you, when you finish the head? What did
you bring back with you material object or otherwise? Well,
material objects.
When you can, of course, pick up some nice things the Indonesian
hajis bring along batek fabrics. Some of the things the West
Africans brings to the basket work is really nice, less and less
crafts, I think, more and more sort of chain stores in the malls
of Makkah, that seems to be the model.
There's nothing wrong with shopping on the Hajj, but it's not
really supposed to be the center of things. So I'm not sure that
people get any books. Sometimes that will be useful. I still have
books that I recall, were pressed into my head, sometimes by their
authors.
On the highchair, she often asked why MIDI tunisienne are lame. I
did hedge with him once and he gave me his quite useful fifth
book with some fetters which I still have. So I guess it has the
baraka of the hunch about it, that people basically go back with
a renewed awareness of the absolute seriousness of religion,
the sacrifice that it requires of us, the fact that we have been
given a kind of
pre call of the Last Day, and have been given a little bit of time or
kind of bottler, in order to think about whether we're really ready
for the last gathering or not.
And I think a lot of people have confrontations with themselves
during the Hajj that really helped them to pull their lives together,
sought out family issues, sought out debts.
Try and remember, as one is supposed to when one is really in
a state of good prayer, the things that one most urgently needs to
put right about one's life and about oneself. And other people
have those moments of self awareness, which I suspect are the
real souvenirs, the things that people really bring back with them
that may well treasure so much and considered to be so private that
they never tell anybody about but to kind of do this treasures
diamonds that they keep in their hearts that they consult sometimes
when they're feeling down and help them to remain on the straight
path.
Shake of taking it is there any other reflection you'd like to add
that I didn't ask you about directly any other memory? Well, I
think everybody at this time although we're not on the Hajj
should remember the Kaaba and should remember the Hajj, the
mystery of it and the majesty of it, and should hopefully feel
their heart yearning for the house, remember has led when he
talks about the houses the beginning of it is an SDR Populum
bait than longing for the house, which is a very characteristically
mysterious Muslim impulse. Of course, it's inculcated each time
we pray because
we know that when we die in sha Allah, we will be facing the
Qibla. The houses important is that this worldly orientation that
represents the God would direction which Islam seeks to instill
within our lives. So not only for the house, reverence for the
house, a sense of amazement at the house, and a sense of taqwa, and
some sense of self awareness, and the need for correct added, which
is one of the things that physical proximity to the house inculcates
is something that we can all benefit from, even if we're not on
the Hajj, to think about the Kaaba to feel one's heart move, to
remember where the Fiddler is. To remember that Allah is actually
A omnipresent even though that is his house, these are gifts that I
think we can benefit from in this season.
And we ask Allah to increase his house in protection and in honor
and in the number of its visitors and the quality of his custodians
and child on this day bestow the Toba giving benefits of the house
on the ALMA till the last day, I mean
shake up the hurricanes descriptions of the carnival
atmosphere of the Hajj and the enigma of its rituals. And what he
spoke of as the overall inexplicable bility of the Hajj
and its alchemical effects on the soul really sums up the entirety
of what we have heard in this podcast. From so many different
voices across the world, about the Hajj, it is an experience unlike
any other in a place, so different from every other, a place which is
a sanctuary in the fullest sense for persons, animals, minerals,
and seen and unseen beings, all of whom have protection in this
place, who are shaded by law and Divine Mercy, a place which
requires the utmost courtesy from its visitors, and which we can
show as pilgrims. If we indeed imagine ourselves as custodians,
carers and guardians of the natural world, and travelers in
the fullest sense, here to pass through and return back to God.
That, of course, as Jacob Rahim has left us with today requires
cultivating some slowness in our movement towards and within the
holy cities, so that we may prepare our bodies and spirits for
the transformation to follow. As he said, We need time to
transition from the profane, to the sacred.
As we conclude our series, shake up the Hakim's prayer for all of
us, seems to perfectly encapsulate one of the central themes of this
podcast to increase yearning and longing for the Sacred House, and
peripheral and prayerful intentions to return to it. I want
to thank him once again, and thank all our guests for their generous
contributions to this series, and for bringing life and meaning into
our reflections upon Hajj this year, and most sincere thanks to
all of you for tuning into this series. If you benefited from this
podcast, then please consider making a donation to the college
today to ensure it continues training the next generation of
Muslim thinkers. Thank you very much. And Assalamu alaykum
Warahmatullahi Wabarakatuh