Abdal Hakim Murad – Welcoming Dhul Hijjah
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
Bismillah R Rahman r Rahim Al hamdu Lillahi Rabbil Alameen wa
salatu salam ala extrafill NBS even more serene CD now Mohammed
in no other early he was happy ah mine.
So we're beginning the season of these lectures on the fifth pillar
which is the pillar of, of the homage at Cambridge Muslim college
and over the next few days we've got a bouquet to offer you of
various fragrant perfumes from the extraordinary Cornucopia that is
what turns out to be not just the fifth, but in many ways an
extraordinarily profound and complex pillar that raises so many
questions not of fear alone but of Syrah and of Tafseer. And of
theology as well and doctrine and in a sense, encapsulates the very
meaning of Islam as a militant honey via that primordial
Abrahamic religion. So what I'm going to do just to set the ball
rolling today is to talk about some, some generic issues and to
as it were producing mood music, just to put us in the zone.
Because the hedge is to do first of all with a kind of magnetism.
Emanuel has early rock metal light down the alley, when he talks
about the throttle hedge the secrets of the hygiene, his ear
here says that it all begins with an SDR called eel bait.
The longing for the house, not even near but a kind of longing.
It's even pre intentional, pre rational, it's a kind of desire of
the part for the whole, a kind of magnetic impulse, a kind of
gravitational force, but one that brings us to, to reality. And in
order to get us back into that zone, we'll begin in sha Allah
with the relevant or Anneke verses, because
n is the last word, literally. And I just found today our CMC copy of
the British must have under the law it's great that the most
beautiful currents in the world more or less are being designed
and created in this country notices by Donald Sutton and it's
really a treasure if you can get it there's different versions. I
remember how difficult it was in the Middle East when I first
arrived there to find a really beautiful copy of the Quran I
found that really strange but 100 Other things have moved on in 3040
years and even we British Muslims are producing these these wonders
very easy to read, as well.
So this is the initial passage from from Bukhara how older
bIllahi min ash shaytani R rajim Bismillahi Rahmani Raheem
with Janelle beta method butterly Nursey. We're Amna we're toughie
though me McCormick, Ibrahim and masala What are hidden Isla
Ibrahima, what is SMA I ILA and thought here are BTLE thought if
you know well RT fi in our Roca ISO road.
And when we appointed the house as a place of resort for mankind and
a place of sanctuary, and take as a place of worship, the standing
place of Ibrahim only took a pledge from Ibrahim and Ismail to
purify my house for those who go around it. And those who stand in
worship, and those who bow down and those who prostrate.
What if called the Ibrahim or a big ol head ballad, and Amina was
also a hula hula minister, Marathi min M and Amin homebuilder he will
yo mill Akkad Paula woman Katha Rafa Almighty oho kalila sama
Atoll, Roho, Illa, orderBy, Na, Orbitz and mahseer.
And when Ibrahim said, this is famous doc, oh my Lord, make this
township or this place this land, safe
and bestow upon its people fruits, whoever amongst them believes in
Allah and the Last Day
and he said, and whoever disbelieves I shall give him brief
respite, and then certainly compel him to the punishment of the fire.
An evil place of resort.
What he the other fire or Ibrahim will cover item in Al Beatty where
Isma I yield? Rob banner, Taka Balbina in the Qantas me Oh,
Lolly.
And when Ibrahim and a smile raised up the foundations of the
house, our Lord accept this from us truly you are the hearing and
the knowing
Robina watch alna mostly mainly Leca Huaming Dori attina Alma Tim
mostly meta Leck. Well Irina mana see can our tube Alena indica
entered the wobbel Rahim
our Lord and make us believers in you submitters to you and of our
offspring of our descendants, a community that is submitted to you
and show us our ways of devotion and relent towards us truly you
are the web a Rahim the acceptor of repentance and the merciful
Robina weboth fee him Rasul and min home yet slow Allah him a Tico
you Ali Mohammed Al Kitab al Hikmah will use a key him in the
kantele Aziz will of Hakeem
our Lord and raise amongst them a messenger from amongst themselves
who will recite your verses to them, and teach them the Book and
the wisdom and purify them.
Truly you are the mighty the wise
woman Yakubu unmilled that he Ibrahima, Elam and Sofia, NAFSA
Welaka. Justify now houfy Dunya what in the whole field of Irati,
lamina Salatin
and whoever turns away from the way of Ibrahim, he is one who has
made a fool of himself and we have chose him in the world and in the
next world, he shall be amongst the pure the righteous.
So in these verses, we get a summary of what this is all about.
It is a place of safety for mankind, a place of resort for
mankind. It is Abrahamic, it is a place of dark.
It is a sanctuary. The Haram is a sanctuary, that very powerful word
haram linked to haram. In other words, that which is set aside as
being beyond levels of permissibility and taboo.
So
this is where from the point of view of the armor of
Islam, it begins. But one of the complexities of the Hajj is that
it is not only Islamic in the specific sense, but it is archaic
primordial, prehistoric. And one of the things we need to get our
heads around as we begin our as it were, to offer on this subject is
to try and see what it is that Islam is here Abrahamic, Klee
restoring from that which is archaic, because after all, the
Hajj doesn't seem to be biblical, doesn't seem to be associated with
any of those Sunday School stories. This is something
different, but as we'll see, it's something that is ultimately even
pre biblical and Adamic. So if we look at the historians, and what I
want to do, today, particularly is to,
to do this by reading our texts so that we stay very close to the
sources and particularly the early sources. The first great historian
of Islam really is Imam Tabari. And this is the famous story.
One of the pre stories as it were, of the Hajj, you think when does
it begin? does it begin with the final pilgrimage? does it begin
with per se? does it begin with Ismail and Hajra? does it begin
with nor does it begin with Adam? does it begin before Adam there's
different ways of going back in time in order to get a sense of
where the story of the city and the rituals begin? So this is
covering
the famous
story of the apparent contestation between Sartre and Heidegger, so
this great Abrahamic bifurcation, which is to define in
extraordinary ways that inshallah we'll get back to at the end of
this talk, the, the nature of the economy of of Abrahamic salvation,
Sara said she will not live in the same town with me. This is why God
told Abraham to go to Mecca where there was no house at that time.
He took her into Santa Monica and put them down.
According to Mujahid, and other scholars. When God pointed out to
Abraham the place of the house, and told him how to build the
sanctuary, he set out to do the job and Gabriel went with him.
It was said that whenever he passed a town he would ask is this
the town which God's commandment or Gabriel, and Gabriel would say,
pass it by?
At last the rich Makkah, which at that time was nothing but acacia
trees, mimosa, and thorn bushes, and those are people called
Amalekites outside Mecca and its surroundings. The house at that
time was about a hill of red claim.
Abraham said to Gabriel was it here that I was ordered to leave
them?
Gabriel said yes.
Abraham directed hodgen Ishmael, to go to El Hagar, and settle them
down there. He commanded Hotjar mother of Israel to find shelter
there. Then he said, My Lord, I have settled some of my posterity,
in an uncomfortable valley near your holy house, that they may be
thankful that he journeyed back to his family in Syria, leaving the
two of them at the house. So we know this extraordinary as it were
second sacrifice. We know the story of Sedna Ibrahim and his son
and his commandment to sacrifice his son but this is like another
commandment to sacrifice his son Ismail because he seems to be
leaving them in this desert scrub land with his Amalekites prowling
to what must have seemed like certain death. And then we know
the story.
Then Ismail became very thirsty. His mother looked for water for
him but could not find any.
She listened for sounds to help her find water for him. She heard
a sound at a software and went there to look around, but found
nothing. Then she heard a sound from the direction of a Mattawa.
She went there and look around, looked around and saw nothing.
Some also say that she stood on a sofa, praying to God for water for
Ismail and then went to El Manoa to do the same.
Then she heard the sounds of beasts in the valley where she had
left his smile. She ran to him. She thinks to some animal
attacking her child and found him scraping the water from a spring
which had burst forth from beneath his hand and drinking from it.
It smells mother came to it and made it swampy, she kind of
stopped it and made it muddy, then she drew water from it into her
water skin to keep it for his male. Had she not done that the
waters of Zen Zen would have gone on flowing to the surface forever.
We all know this sort of almost
nursery story in a sense, one of the first things that we hear
about Islam and this pre Foundation and the centrality of
Hotjar in it, and it said that she is the only woman known to have
instituted and obligatory practice in any world religion, because the
Safa and Marwa is instantiated by herself and
represents the high principle of maternal sacrifice. And so the
Hajj from that prehistory then goes into
the practice of Islam with the purification of the temple. And
then, having been about the most obscure out of the way place on
Earth, it becomes the world's leading pilgrimage center.
A kind of spiritual Silk Road, connects it to everywhere, in the
abode of Islam and beyond.
You can see classical maps of the Islamic world with NACA at the
center, and everybody's heart was connected to Mecca, because they
were facing it five times a day, and they all yearned to see the
caliber before they died. And it even affected the demography. So,
in Sudan, for instance, along a kind of straight line, you can see
it an ethnic map of Sudan, there's little communities of Hausa
speakers, these are people who come from what's now Nigeria
hundreds of years ago, walking sideways, east to west across the
Sahara Desert, to get to Mecca, walking, and then on the way back
there think, another 3000 miles of walking barefoot across Sandy, and
I'm gonna stay here and so they formed these houses speaking
communities, in the Sedona, they're still there. And that's
the case with the demography of the people of Makkah, who has DNA
has shown inconceivably diverse, every possible bit of the ALMA is
there in their blood, and across the Islamic world, and it becomes
kind of a heart. The ALMA comes to Makkah every year, and is
dispersed again, and is this vital hub for the sharing of
information.
until very recent times, the harm in Morocco was like university and
every scholar who got there early for the 100 be there teaching and
sharing books. It had over 30 libraries, it was an astonishing
place, the city of Mecca, and astonishing place. And
that's the power of monotheism. That's the power of the heel of
Ismail as it were zum zum comes and the miracle begins. And
one of the genres that we have that hopefully will contribute to
this mood that I wanted to start with this reverential longing for
the house, this yearning that the believer has to see the car but to
touch the car, but to go back to that place, a shell called ill
bait. So many great travelers tales give us quite a good image
of how things were in the classical Islamic world one I like
is it Andrew Bayer, who was from Valencia 13th century
Me, who has a famous wrestler which is a travel boxer. His his
famous account of
what it was like I witnessed account in the 13th century.
This assemblage of people of Iraq, horison, and muscle as well as
those of other countries who have joined them to accompany the Emir
of the Hodge made up a crowd whose number is known to God alone.
The vast plane at holy space was filled with them and the flat
immensity of the desert was too narrow to encompass them.
You could imagine the earth attempting to maintain its balance
under the crowds heaving, and wave streaming from the force of its
current you could picture in this crowd a sea swollen with waves
whose waters with a Mirage is and who ships with the camels, their
sails, and 50 litres and round tents. They all went forward,
gliding in and out of a great rising of clouds of dust, their
sides colliding as they passed. On the immense extent of the plane,
you can see the thrust of a crowd filled with pain and frightened
the knocking together of letters, who has not seen with his own eyes
this Iraqi Caravan has not experienced one of the genuine
marvels of the world, worth the effort of describing and who's
telling can seduce the listener by its marvelous character and the
physical spectacle of the Hajj having been the place just of the
Falon Hydra and her son by God's power becomes the place that half
the world wants to see and strives and spends their life's savings
trying to see and these huge seas of humanity, and it is, to this
day, the world's largest multicultural gathering the Hajj.
There's larger pilgrimages in Hindu India, but they're mono
ethnic, they're for Indians, whereas the Hodges the entire
world seems to be there. So another one that I particularly
like, one of my favorite books is a biography of the who was the
first British Muslim who went to Hajj and left us with an account?
Well, it seems that the first one who actually
had their Hajj recorded subsequently is Abdullah
Williamson, who when he was only, I guess, about 22, or 23.
converted to Islam. He was from Bristol, and gave us an amazing
description of the Hajj in the time.
Before modernity, really so he's seeing the end of the world that
Evan debayer has described. So his current he dies I think in about
1960s. He was part of our identity, but he sees the hedge
before the truck before the motorway before Burger King, he
sees the spectacle of it. And I really liked his
his his account of it.
He is traveling, it takes 40 days on the famous darab Zubaydah,
which is one of the hydro roads from Iraq where he's found work
down this ancient road built by lubaina, who is the wife of Haroon
Rashid, and you can still see the systems and the fortresses that
she built
along the road. So he's he's doing this medieval thing, but in the
1890s.
The camping area allotted to Williamson and his followers was
close to the Amir's tent, there's always an Amir al Hajj, and each
of these groups that comes and with each town they go through,
the numbers grow. And there's always the Bayrock which is the
famous flag. So if you get lost in the desert, the flag has held
really high and it's white with a crescent and it has led you to
hate Allah Muhammad Rasul Allah is about 10 feet long. And at night,
there's a kind of globe lantern suspended from it. So if you're
lost in the desert at night, you can find your way back to the
caravan. So he's with me and his near to the Ameer this had special
advantage for the young devotee, since it enabled him to join the
concourse of elders after the evening meal, and to listen to
whatever wisdom and law fell from their venerable lips.
Occasionally, a Mullah would deliver a short sermon, or a
singer chant verses from the Quran and praise of the Holy Prophet
always share enjoyment to young Abdullah Williamson, whose
knowledge of Arabic enabled him to follow most of the discourse
without difficulty. And then he talks about because he's kind of
younger, this is an amazing site. And so this caravan, which when it
leaves the bear, which is where he's starting in Iraq, is already
about 3000 camels long. And if you stop at the beginning, and you
sit, it takes an hour for the whole caravan to go by. So he's
always doing this. And then he's got a good camera, so it gets to
the end, and he can ride up to the, to the front, so it took a
full hour to pass and a rare spectacle was presented by that
desert parade, upon which Williams and feasted his eyes with never
failing interest. Following the standard bearer, drama and Amir's
entourage came the main cavalcade of pilgrims, more than 3000 of
them with their hundreds of riding and pack camels.
Most of the company were men and for intermittent spells, many
marched stolidly
Beside the animals, among those who rode were heavily veiled women
and the children, making this hallowed journey to the beloved
city.
Often the attitude of men perched Camelback on their belongings
suggested easy sleep. Numbers of camels board the shelf door for
kind of how they're draped over by a carpet or other covering or the
more fanciful Chabrier curtain with Brocade and softly cushioned
within here and there to animals carried between them a woven read
litter, in which the fortunate owner repose peacefully to the
swaying motion.
At night under the white moon, and when the Southern Cross hung low
in the sky, there was a mystical fascination about the shuffling
progress of the great caravan. Another scene that became
indelibly etched in young Williamson's mind was the
nocturnal halt when hundreds of campfires illuminated the desert
with an orange globe unforgettable days of purposeful travel,
punctuated by the call to prayer and always the hope of the Muslims
supreme spiritual experience but the journeys and they sense just
the sheer bubbling up power of monotheism that from the well love
of halogen Ismail this, one of the world's great institutions that's
transforming so many lives is continuing and of course,
continues to this day,
this year, rather diminished but
the Hydra is a permanent fixture of God's world. So yeah, there's
other accounts it's interesting to reflect on how many British
Muslims from our community have actually done this. A lot of
people like
the travelogue of Mubarak church word. And when I was in
Johannesburg couple of years ago, I managed to find his grave he he
was from London, but ended his life in South Africa. And he left
us with a really beautiful account of life in that car and rituals
during the Ottoman period that is booked from Drury Lane to Makkah,
which is very charming. It's worth looking at leading evil in Cobalt
is is another one, but nobody knows who was the first British
Muslim to go to those places. We know that there was somebody
called Thomas Keith, who was born in Edinburgh, who was one of those
sort of very improbable adventurers. At the time of the
Napoleonic Wars. He was with one of the Highland regiments that
ended up joining the Ottoman army in Egypt, and fought a duel with
another genocide of the Ottoman soldier who is of Sicilian origin,
tend to forget how European the Ottoman Empire was. They find a
deal which is not legal in the Ottoman world, they get into
trouble. And somehow he manages to get a letter from the wife of the
governor of Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha saying let him off but send
them off on active duty. And so he joins us on pastures Egyptian
expedition, which leaves the beginning of more or less, I
guess, in 1814 1815, in order to crush the Wahhabi rebellion, first
of all, heartbeat rebellion in Central Arabia, and they succeed
in crushing it. And as a result of services rendered Thomas Keith,
who by this time is Ibrahim Agha is actually appointed to be the
governor, the Welly of the city of Medina. It's interesting you see
the cosmopolitanism of that was also a globalized world if willing
to travel and take risks.
Anything could any door could open to you. So I'd like to think of
the Scottish Muslim who was the governor of the Holy Prophet city
and presumably he went to Makkah as well, we may assume that he
did his Hajj and there's a book about him by the sort of rather
popular novelist, Sutcliffe rhythm and rosemary Sutcliff Blood and
Sand, which is kind of dramatized account of his sort of rags to
riches story, in 1815. Unfortunately, he was assassinated
by the Wahhabis who are carrying out a kind of terror campaign and
killing scholars and Ottoman governor. So I guess he achieved
Shahada. But what a great story.
But the whole point of this is the centrality of the city, despite
its remoteness, and its aridity and the fact that the hearts of
the believers have been attached to it for so long. Now.
Of course, we have in our libraries, a super abundance of
writing about the hedge, not just the rules of the hedge, which are
important because it's, it's ritualized, and if you don't get
the rules, right, you miss rfl or something. You've basically you
have to come back the next year, which in pre Modern Times was just
meant you had to wait for a year in times before before the air
bus. And the rules are very significant because one is
approaching one of God's
great sanctuaries and symbols so that will end urges us to have to
Azeem shut out Ariella
a reverence for Allah's rituals and visuals
symbols and this is linked to the actual name for the Hajj itself.
Everybody says when they start doing the hex they do sort of
dress and the first and then a few surah is in the middle.
Right and walk walk us in itself and then they go start from from a
Bukhara so they get to this verse quite soon. Well Allah here Allah
Nursey hedgesville bait and I think,
a misprint in the Quran a hedgerow bait. I've never had anybody
calling it hedge, but it's there. And in other places, it's hudge.
Both of these are valid and you find the grim Aryans talking about
the difference, the hedge is the essence and the hedge is the
Nastar technically, which means something like the hedges the the
fact the event itself, the hedges, the doing of the ceremony, it's
more more active. But some in our tradition will also say that it
has to do with the horizontal and vertical dimensions of the
hydrogel the inward and the outward. And this is this is quite
common amongst Ottoman writers on the Hajj in particular, we also
find this route hat gene gene gives us other common words such
as Hajah. Hajia, means an argument. So there is a sense
semantically in which not only is this a journey, had you heard when
Arabic originally mean, to travel to replace.
But also an argument in other something has been proved as a
result of this. So it's educational, and convincing. And
what is the proof? Well, that's really what I want to try and get
out.
And what some of my colleagues will be talking about in the next
few days. What deep down is going on in the hedge? What is the
alchemy that it brings about? Why do we have this longing for it? Is
it just oh, well, I've done my pillar.
No, it's more than that. We know that there is something about the
caliber, and about those rituals, that represents the fulfilling of
a need that is not just ticking a box, but is some kind of rather
deep need. What is that? Well, this is not a matter of Aikido,
and it's not a matter of fact. But of course the Muslims have really
tried to conceptualize this. And if you're explaining the
importance of these things to non Muslims,
it really helps to know what the Omer said about the meaning of
these things. And these rituals, of course, are not meaningless.
And the believer, as he does these things, is well aware that some
kind of combination lock is being turned within his soul and
something is going to open. And that's really what I want to look
at. And some of our writers say that it is about the Quranic verse
that says, Learn Melda mean Allah Illa II lay,
there is no refuge from God, but to him.
In other words, it's to do with the federal Elan love flee to God.
So we are traveling from something false, to something true from the
bad aspects of our lives and complexity and overwhelming back
to something that represents primal simplicity. And nothing is
more simple than the cabinet itself in all the history of art
and music and sculpt nothing more simple than the black, almost
invisible cube, its primordial ality itself.
We crave the journey from the many to the one. So there's no refuge
from God except in Him.
In the complexity of his world, full of kufra multiplicity, we
seek water, because multiplicity is is complicated even though our
desires are multiple, but it's not deep down what we want.
So
clearly, the Hajj is about a human yearning,
which is very deep, with sub rational, elemental. It's a kind
of love in a sense, and very often the Kaaba is compared to the
paradigmatic Arabic beloved Layla. In our literature, the black male
and so forth as a kind of sense of the feminine beloved there with
some of our poets were like a sense that we want to return. It's
about nostalgia. We want to go from the edge to the center, from
complexity to simplicity, and from the brokenness of our own and
selves, back to the wholeness of the place of origin. So getting
back to this idea of the heart
is having a horizontal and a vertical dimension. The horizontal
is the obligation and the filkin making sure that you follow the
filter Exactly. And you have to be attentive because it's all new.
And you don't want to come back next year, if you can help it,
but the vertical dimension, we note that the Kaaba is clearly
identified with certain metaphysical principles in a
necessarily mysterious way because the unseen world is very hard for
us.
The conception of the Israa and the Niraj originating by the car
but the Holy Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam is sleeping next
to the cat van that's where the spiritual combination of his
career begins. Subhanallah the SRB AB de minimis studio haram ILAs
messenger the Ark saw Allah the Baroque now how Allah holy Nordea
who Minaya Tina bless it Glorified is here who took his slave by
night from the sacrosanct sanctuary, to the further
sanctuary, the environs of which we have blessed in order to show
him of our signs. So here we have
up there's a verticality here.
It's a kind of, there's the but hot the plane, but when you're
there, you really notice what's above.
And one of the meanings of the Kaaba, which originally had no
roof is that whereas other sacred spaces in Islam paradigmatically
are a kind of cube with a dome on top the cube representing the
world, the four points of the compass, speciality,
the the dome representing that which is infinite, circular, but
the car doesn't have a dome, it's had a roof in many periods of its
history. Ibrahim's Cabot seems didn't have a roof. So as it were,
its dome is Heaven itself. You look up or you looked up, there
are the stars and before the floodlights and advertising, and
the Hilton Hotel and all of that light pollution. It was
extraordinary. And if you look at the older narratives of what the
home was, like, when it was just oil lamps.
At night, it was absolutely astounding, the most most
staggeringly beautiful place on earth. It still is, but it's kind
of artificial iced, in some ways, necessarily. In other words, in
other ways, regrettably. But the presence of Heaven is very, is
very palpable there as it is in Jerusalem at the sanctuary there.
Those are the two places on Earth where the heart intuitively feels
that heaven is as it were, just a little bit above our heads, you
could always reach up and touch it. So
if you look at this text, William Chittick recently published
a translation of Cemani he's raffled Ottawa,
rest for the spirits, which is a early Persian commentary, suddenly
Commentary on the 99 names. So he has this to say, this is some
irony.
Know that in reality, most of us Mirage did not begin in Morocco,
or Medina.
Rather, it began when at the outset of his work, they called
him Mohammed Al Amin, the Muhammad the trustworthy from being
Muhammad the trustworthy he was pulled to prophethood and from
prophet hood, he was pulled to messenger Hood. Then he advanced
in Messenger heard until he reached poverty
faqeer then he was made to advance further in poverty until he
reached indigence miskeen poverty want to need an indulgence with
the embroidery on the mystery of his prophethood.
And there'd been a belt in the beginningless and endless house of
good fortune more exalted than the belt of poverty and indulgence. It
would have been sent to most of us so that he could bind it to the
waste of the covenant of servanthood.
It's, it's tragic read in other stripping away dunya, which is one
of the features of the Hajj, or should be that it is an ascetic
experience 40 days in which you basically have to walk from Iraq
to Makkah, and there's wild animals and it's really basic.
And you engage with nature and anywhere that haram which is not
particularly comfortable, and certainly not stylish and all your
dunya stuff has gone. You're in this MACOM of Taiji read of
stripping away of poverty. And when dunya is not really around
you that's when you can you can focus and this is one of the
secrets of prophecy.
When the substance of Allah's Messenger Muhammad rose up and
advanced on the steps and ladders, one attraction took his person by
were following from before the gate of the Kaaba to the place of
Ibrahim's prostration
from the furthest mosque he was
Taken with one pole to two bows length, or Bacau seen.
Then the Lord's jealousy let down the exalted curtain before the
Virgin secrets and gave nothing out of the people save this. For
our heart, you know Abdi Maha, he revealed his servant. What he
revealed all the fluent and eloquent speakers stayed empty of
the story. Only that paragon of the Empire knew the flavor of that
wine.
For 70,000 years, the folk of the heavens were waiting to see when
this man would show his head from the hiding place of the secret.
What gift would he bring to the exalted presence? When the night
arrived, concerning which the splendid book says, Glory be to
Him who took his servant by night, the proximate angels and the
cherub him with the higher plenum stuck out their heads from the
grazing, gazing pieces of glorification? hallowing how would
that Paragon stall into the majestic presence? At the very
first step he took at the threshold he said, I do not number
thy laudation Subhanak Allah ox Ethan and Alec and to come up with
Anita Lnf SIG. You are as you have praised yourself,
inescapably, those who step into that Paragons road with a feat of
following will have a mirage in the measure of their own present
moments.
We said concerning their mirage that they will reach aspiration by
way of need, or that they will reach seeking by way of
aspiration.
So,
this, again, very characteristic in our civilization, which reminds
us that the prayer connects us to the Kaaba, in not one, but two
ways. Firstly, it is our Kibler. And secondly, the prayer was
initiated on the night of Ellis Rottweil Mirage, it is gifted
through this vertical dimension of the Kaaba, and where could be more
appropriate than that. So it is clearly a journey. And it is a
spiritual journey. And it's very sad, those people who think I'm
just following the book from the Ministry of Alkaff, and I've done
my Hajj and I can put on my suit again. Allah's rituals are a good
deal more profound and more interesting than that. And some
people say, I just need to know what are the rules, and that's my
Hajj. That's the Sunnah.
The experience is that those who read about the meaning of the Hajj
and tried to understand the greatness of it will have a much
richer experience and will have much more reverence for those
places because they get to see at least a drop from the ocean of the
immense profundity of the, the place of the the syrup.
And this is one meaning of the Hadith that says Alhaji Surah
Barnea to have you on the Hajj is the monasticism of this ummah.
There was a monk has to wear a rough hair shirt and takes all
kinds of vows chastity, poverty, obedience, and can't really get
into dunya. When you're in the state of haram, you're in that
monastic state, basically, male or female, has very severe limits on
what you can do. You can't kill animals, you can't. You can't comb
your hair, and really without taking a risk of violation. It's
it's strict.
And this Iran is clearly part of the Hydras technique of snapping
us out of our comfortable, worldly ways. And giving us the state of
Taiji read, stripping away and directing us towards the real. So
if we're looking for some way of putting into words, this thing
that we feel, and in religion, we know this is important. Why is it
when we finished the prayer, and it was a good prayer with a good
Imam, and we come out and the sun has set and we feel different,
something has happened. Can I put that into words? Is it just some
kind of emotional high, something firing in the brain or something
deeper going on? It's difficult, but we have 100 Allah in our
tradition, rich ways of indicating by ishara why these things are so
powerful. And one of the books about the Hydras that I
particularly like is
by shells on the Julius who is a French Muslim, who has
this book published some years ago now.
The doctrine in idiotic, so new in French, I think, do pillory
knirsch and Amis on Tala in initiatic doctrine of the
pilgrimage to the house of Allah.
Paris 1982. They wrote it long time ago still going Hamdulillah.
And if you've looked at my little book on Muslims in Europe, you'll
see that I cite his book on Muslims and integration quite a
bit. Here's a student of somebody called Mohammed Abdullah Aziz
Michel vessel who was a very interesting Romanian diplomat who
settled in Paris
After the rise of communism and became
a leader of tariqa, and wrote quite a bit, so Julius is one of
his, his, I guess, last surviving active disciples and is written,
written quite a bit and this whole book which is about the meaning of
the head, what is the carpet what is the throw off what is artifact?
Looking at our tradition, he says that basically is all summed up as
being about realisation of the McConville or Bodia.
The degree of servanthood, or slave hood is rich word Abbot. And
it's in that verse from about the Surat, the abbot of the slave,
that the meaning of the Hajj is to remind you of, and to urge you to
be aware of the fact that you're Allah's slave. And that's the
meaning of the Lubbock Allahu Allah bake Lubbock is what you say
to your slave owner, when he's asking you for a cup of tea, a
baker
can't object.
And so we come as slaves as I bed. And all of the rituals, according
to Julie's are there in order to remind us that that's what we are.
And also to help us to demonstrate in actions that this is what we
are that we are hybrid on, everything is about slit
servanthood, not to dunya.
You do the top off and you forget which way is Burger King and which
way is it who knows and dizzy. It's only the Kaaba, it takes us
into a new, new space.
And all of those practices are there in order to realign us
according to this basic human reality of the mahkamah Obaldia of
servitude of slave hood, to God and it is all about therefore,
complete self Abnegation, this is the rap Ania monasticism dimension
of it, the self is left behind. And to the extent that self is
there, it's going to be grumbling, and people do grumble a lot on
Hajj. And it's become a decadent thing with the comfort. People no
longer have the the months of walking through the desert in
order to kind of settle down.
You can be in
California, and then the next day you can be on artifact and we
haven't had the chance to decompress spiritually and this,
this has really trivialized a lot of people's experience of it. But
this is the world that we're in. But nonetheless, the rituals if
you're focusing will help to knock that stupid distraction and ego
out of your head and remind you of what is important. So if we
go great. Tafseer of Rashida Dean may body
has this nice incident where he's talking about Ibrahim building the
Kaaba, and he offices commentary Rabbana Taco Bell Mina, we had
this is my Abraham appraising a warlord, accept this from us.
A rebuke came,
I commanded you to build the house, and then you lay a favor on
me for doing so. I gave you the success to do it, or you're not
ashamed to lay a favor on me and say accept it from us. You have
forgotten my favor toward you and mentioned your own act and favor.
In other words, there's a sense that they're kind of saying we've
done this accept it from us, which is not full Obadiah according to
this ishara
because of the harshness of this rebuke, Ibrahim prayed, keep me
and my sons away from worshipping idols.
So this is the end of that passage and nabooda SNAM protect me and my
family from worshipping idols. Lord God in the road of my bosom,
friendship and my children's prophethood. Seeing our own
activity and ascribing it to ourselves, our idols that line
ambush for us by your gentleness, remove these idols from the road
and remove our being from the Midwest. Keep on bestowing your
favorite upon us. So from the point of view of this tafsir
the Ahmadiyya the servanthood has to be so complete that you claim
credit for nothing at all.
And on the Hajj, a lot of people said I managed to throw all of my
stones and then I lost my plastic sandal. As if it's some kind of
endurance event like running a marathon and you kind of can tell
people about how you've done things and I did my seven tawaf
well it was really busy and it took me 10 hours and Masha Allah.
People kind of boast a lot about their experiences
that shows that they haven't had the experience of those things are
there in order to break you and make you realize
Is that you're a lost slave and they're not there to kind of test
you as if you're breaking some kind of record. It's not like that
at all. It's the opposite of that. So let's talk about Amina
even Ibrahim is My Allah kind of reproached only Ahmadiyya, it's
Simona wild partner.
So that
one of the things that we notice
when the prophets Allah, him or Salam are described as Abd Allah
slave is that the idea of return also comes into it.
So for one profit now, I will add, in the whole aware but excellent a
slave was he always a web Abba is to return constantly returning.
The idea of Toba is like returning Tabea toolbar to turn around to
return
in coolamon, is similar where it will allow the ILA to Rahmani R
but that everything in heavens, the heavens and the earth shall
come to Allah as a slave. In other words, that's the mad as an ABD,
we returned to him
in Wadjet, Nerville sabe raw. Now I'm logged in now a web, we found
him to be patient, an excellent slave, he is a web returning
Taapsee return was dechra, decode the abdomen Muneeb
as an illumination and Reminder for every ARB to his Muneeb. And
again, it's an Abba has that sense of turnings. Turning means that we
go from the periphery to look at the center again, like that
spacecraft near Pluto, whatever it was called New Horizons, and they
couldn't contact it and it was going to be a dead loss. And then
they managed to get the thing to turn back towards the Sun which is
really distant and face but it can charge itself up and it gets back
into contact and that's how we should be not facing nothing.
Because what is other than Allah and His power, His name is not
real. We need to turn around and face face the reality of Tober
over coming around and this kind of circularity is implied by this.
So ABD, and in ABA, are closely connected as prophetic qualities
prophetic names in honors book, which is why muhammad shah of
history says in his Gulshan eras, that the Hajj basically is only
two steps.
One step away from yourself a one step towards the Lord. That's the
essence of it, just two steps. And if you don't have either, that you
spent a lot on your fivestar nonsense Minar.
That's not a hedge, there has to be this step away from the self
and as to be the step towards a white hawk. So the realization of
servanthood when you realize that you are ABD, then you return to
the center, because that realization is the return to the
center. Because in reality, the center is what exists. So this is
the meaning of ABD, more Neva, which is what we are supposed to
be now.
This idea of the Kaaba somehow being representative of the divine
mystery, so that our journey from God and back to God is somehow
represented sacramentally in the heart shall we go from the edges
of the earth, to the center of the Earth
is also very important in our literature. So we find the city of
Makkah, sometimes described as soul rattle, or Surah, two, which
means the navel of the Earth, nav L. What does that mean? Well, the
navel, it's about birth, it's about maternity, it's about the
point of origin. So Michelle valsartan. Remember I was talking
about Tim
muck and most of Abdullah says maca was the first terrestrial
point to emerge from the primordial cosmic ocean we have a
lot of material some of which isn't Tonberry about this, it is
from here or underneath her that the remainder of the earth came to
be just as a human being comes into being through the umbilical
cord.
So this is this what it means when you find in a lot of our poetry
for instance, MCE as the navel of the earth. That which supports us
is the Divine Will you seem to be disconnected because we're into
our stuff? But we can be reconnected
because of the Divine Generosity. So we find a lot of metronome on
maternal language in the
A conception of the Hajj and one of the things that one could do
would be to talk about gender symbolism in the Hajj rituals,
which is a big topic.
Don't have time for it. But we note that Maca is described as a
male Quran in the Quran, the mother of cities.
And Abraham also described as Alma. And the city is, as it were
kind of the Imam of all of the Muslims as they are praying, which
leads all of the believers back to the source the point of the city
and these rituals and the Kaaba is to give us an earthly
representation of what is an inward journey, not ultimately a
physical journey, but an outward enactment that helps us to move
along in the spiritual journey within so
we find therefore the lot of place names connected to the Hajj, our
female place names, you think about them. Kaaba Naka Mina was
Delhi for suffer Marwa Arafat all of the big places have kind of
feminine resonances and there's a lot that can be said that about
the source that kind of natural idea of returning back to the
point of our our creation
time we had to nother perm I think
so is such a huge topic.
Yeah, sorry, the Dean of thought.
So this is an example of how one of our classical poets uses the
language of moving from ritual to ritual and place to place in the
Hajj as an indication of the inward journey back to the place
of the raw, and the divine inspiration and the divine
presence which is the heart.
So sometimes we find in our literature the world described as
kind of a body of which Mecca is the heart and the heart. There's
nothing really the heart just like the the heart that pumps blood
throughout the whole organism with the armor and it comes back again
with Nicklin It beats every year. But there's also an inward meaning
of that, which is that it's through the purification of the
heart, and that inward journey that we make that inward SoloQ,
that inward pilgrimage that we come to,
to be purified and to discover reality. And
the Holy Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam in his Mirage, it was
his heart that saw the great mystery Murca the bell foo. Mara,
the heart did not deny what it sought. So here is our Torres
Fitzgerald's translation.
And first the veil of search and endless maze branching into
innumerable ways, all quoting entrance, but one right and this
beset with pitfall golf and precipice where dust is embers air
a fiery sleet, through which with blinded eyes and bleeding feet,
the Pilgrims stumbles with hyenas howl around and hissing snake and
deadly Gall, whose prey he falls if tempted, but to droop. Or if to
wonder famished from the truth for fruit that falls to ashes in the
hand, water that reached recedes into the sand, the only word is
forward, guidance sight after him swerving, swerving, neither left
nor right, by cell for the final victory will by day, at night,
thine own selves caravanserai, till suddenly perhaps when most
subdued and desperate, the heart shall be renewed, when deep in
utter darkness by one gleam of glory from the fall remote Hareem
that with a scarcely conscious shock of change, so light the
pilgrim towards the mountain range of Arafat of knowledge.
The original Persian Of course, the terminology is more easily
recognized as hedge language, but this idea of the journey to the
Hydras being a kind of microcosm of life's journey back to the
Divine Source, that mystery of the eternity
of the Creator. And also the journey within to the heart is
something that
has always resonated with Muslims.
Now, another thing also needs to be borne in mind, we've already
mentioned the primordial ality of the Hajj. And the fact that
Ibrahim alayhi salam, who with his son is credited with the creation
of the Kaaba that we have today
is somebody who is pre Christian, pre Jewish, and is honey Finn
Muslim, Muslim, but Hanif in that kind of ancient primordial,
monotheistic sense.
And
one of the effective things
About the Hajj is that it takes us through certain symbols and
certain geometries and certain experiences
that in a way that we might struggle to define, reconnect us
with truly ancient times and with some primordial need in human
beings.
And this is the case with all of our bad debt. And human beings
have always had rituals that are timed.
With the seasons and the rising setting of the sun, the phasing
phases of the moon,
a lunar calendar, we've always had forms of fasting and so forth.
This is what we mean by Dino fitrah religion of the primordial
natural disposition, even though these are enacted in this specific
Muhammad and form, which is never to be tampered with. Still, the
form that we have is something that recalls in us something that
is truly archaic.
And, of course, the belief is that the
the Kaaba is on a site, which was established for worship by Adam
Ali salaam, when it was just a rubber hammer up just a Red Hill
hillock.
So let's think about this primordial ality, and the effect
that that has on us. And it clearly has something to do with
the Deep Impact that HYDRA clearly has on people, this yearning that
we have for the house.
The sense of recognition that we have,
when carrying out the rituals,
and the sense of change that people experience after, after a
good hedge.
And let's try and get our heads around this. Well, human beings
always just they've always had forms of worship, just that
they've always had
secret ways of getting married, secret ways of saying farewell to
the dead, sacred ways of fasting for our species, which is old.
This is normative to us. And there's something in us in our
brain structure that that requires this and finds it finds it
natural.
The idea of a sanctuary attending us with liminal degrees, whereby
you progress into an area where more things are forbidden, and
there is a greater degree of sanctuary. Well, we have that, as
you approached the city there is first of all, the me thought
the place where you have to put on the Haram if you're heading
straight for ombre, or for Hajj. That's the kind of outer boundary
that indicates a transition between the profane and the
sacred. And then as you approach the city maybe 10 miles from
from the mosque, there is the Haram beyond which non Muslims
cannot pass and where there are strict rules traditionally about
that you can't hunt there and
during the the Hajj season, and generally there's all kinds of
rules like traditionally, you're not allowed to build in Mecca with
material that isn't sourced inside the Haram area.
I think that most of the modern hotels there perhaps have not been
aware of this particular fatwah, but that that was to dritten out
of respect that you didn't bring in matter from outside but the
stone had to be from the mountains of Mecca and the wood whatever was
available. And so that's one reason why the city was always
quite simple. Historically, it wasn't an elaborate place like
Damascus or Baghdad.
So that is another degree of sanctity and then you step into
the mosque itself and Masjid Al haram, where things are stricter
still. And beyond that those the Kaaba and this is something that's
pretty universal in ancient humans structuring for the sacred a three
fold delineation of a sanctuary. This is something that is from the
fitrah. And Ibrahim and his family are declared in the Quran as
Chanukah de la vida emotionally, Kenobi, Hana, fat prime primordial
monotheists, not
attributing any partners to God. So
isn't here's one example of this. And it's complex, because it's to
do with aspects of human psychology that are ancient and
inherited, and we don't really understand. And of course,
modernity has taken us away from so many of these things, which
were normative were quite damaged really. And as a result, we're
anxious or depressed, because we're not living in ways that
human beings are designed to live.
But one of the beauties of the forms of Islam is that they
haven't been tampered with. And if you go to Makkah, nobody has
really had the temerity to interfere with any of those
rituals, either
And if there's escalators and floodlights, and God knows what,
but the thing itself is still intact, then still accessible. And
this is part of the the blessing of Islam. So as Rocky, the
earliest historian of Makkah, who is quite early, he had said that
his teachers knew that the turbine has this book called The stories
of NACA Baraka
attributes this
as a divine saying, oh, Adam, this is my temple. This is God's speech
to the first of mankind, I made it Descend onto Earth along with you.
around it, men shall turn into off as the angels turn around my
throne, and they shall pray towards it as the angels pray
towards my throne. So again, this is the verticality of it. This is
the idea of a beta more, that the hajis somehow mysteriously earthly
representation of something that is not earthly are not subject to
the four points of the compass. But as we make the tawaf, we are
somehow enacting and in touch with in some symbolic and very
unfamiliar way with the action of the angels who are completely in
the state of Obaldia necessarily, as they go around the throne with
to speak in the Tobia. So this is an idea from very early Islam, and
we find that the throne is in the Quran. The throne of God is
supported by eight angels or below Arusha. Rebecca Yama is in Felker
home yoga is in the Manaea Angel support the throne of Ablon,
because we're not going to literally interpret that it's
known without how Villa cave,
but we find that eightfold principle is also part of the
architectonics of the Meccan sanctuary,
the traditional eight minarets, the traditional eight paths that
lead from the arcade to the cabinet itself, visible until
quite recently, between which there was just just a gravel this
eight this was something that were was understood. And you'll find
this eight fold dimension in other sanctuaries as well.
Other things we find it would be the idea of the circle, primordial
humanity, recognize the circle as a symbol of endlessness and
therefore of transcendence and if the sacred
which is why the Sikh wears a bangle because circularity
represents the eternity the endlessness of, of the Divine. So,
in this country, you have all of those ancient Celtic stone
circles, stone hinge, the seahenge thing that they found in North
Norfolk, which is on the beach at Huntington, but was made of wood
but was circular and has the progressive adjustment from the
profane, to the sacred. And this is often juxtaposed with a square.
So the square is a symbol of emplacement. In the world, the
four points of the compass, and the circle is the symbol of
transcendence of the square within a circle is all a circle within
the square, classical forms of articulating the heaven Earth,
juxtaposition, and and meeting. Tenderness is a term that
sometimes used for a sacred space. In Union psychology. For instance,
there's again the idea of
a sanctuary within ourselves a circular space, which we have to
clear which has a fountain in the middle, which can be received when
the male and female principles are imbalanced, where spirit has
triumphed over self, where there's a kind of resolution we enter this
10 ministers the sanctuary within.
So
yeah, we have this idea of circularity indicating
sanctuary.
And again, you can see even at something like the Stonehenge and
we didn't know what Stonehenge was, what its functionality was
those people 5000 years ago. And there's a word circle though,
which is from 8000 BCE. So that's like, really back in the middle
Stone Age very ancient. We have no idea what those people were,
whether they were even druids, it's all mythological. So all of
those ravers who go on the summer solstice, and hum and meditate and
do yoga and take ecstasy and so forth. It's just,
it's sad. But in a sense, it's also a reminder that even in this
profane work culture of ours, people have a sense that they need
to recognize these ancient sacred things of the rising setting of
the sun, the moon, the land, the circle, the sacred space, the
terminus, yet we still know despite this
Since from Scripture and organized religion, that there's something
in this for us
it's
interesting an attempt 1000s of years after those people died to
revive a sanctuary because the human desire for religion and for
the sacred is, can't be killed. So the Octagon the eight points, the
four points, the circle, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, another
classic example of that, and the dome of the rocks that puppet
Asakura is the one of the other great sanctuaries of Islam. And we
could say quite a bit about the Temple of Sedna Suleyman the mount
about the Heiko in Jerusalem, which has resemblances with the
Moroccan sanctuary, but different as well.
What sort of differences are we looking at? Well, if you've been
to Oak woods, and it's required in the Hadith, it's one of the places
that holy prophet tells us we have to go to an handler, if you've got
a Western passport, you can go there,
that the foundation stone of the Crusaders thought that that was
the Holy of Holies, the rabbi is really not sure whether that was
the Holy of Holies, or whether it's some other site, maybe it was
the place of the outer altar. They're not sure but they're still
in the design of the temple in Jerusalem, a sense of this
universal human desire to have concentric quartz
leading towards something that is that is extraordinarily sacred, of
course, the holy of holies in Jerusalem is also kind of
rectangular or square like the Kaaba. So this is just something
that came to my attention recently that indicates our awareness like
these kids at Stonehenge that we are called, that we have this
yearning for the sacred, and that we need intrinsically in our
fitrah the sense of
a ritual that returns us to the center. So this is a poem by
somebody called Shabana Aliana. And it's in this nice collection
of poems I found recently shadow of the one an anthology of
inspirational poems from Xiao Jia Ibrahim.
So it's called Answer the call. Come, is it fair to ignore what
you've known but forgotten, and can no longer recall except in a
dream? How does the secret reveal itself suddenly, without thought
or effort or help that can be seen? Who is talking when you
weep? Who is listening deeper than deep? What call is your heart
yearning to answer that is beyond the symbols we use when we speak.
answer this call, even if you think you can't hear it. This my
friend is the problem that you think, answer this call in
whatever way you know, kiss the ground with your forehead dance,
madly sing loudly. Talk to trees. Don't silence your heart answered
this call before it's too late. That's precisely the that when we
say the Tobia, love bake, we are saying yes we need this we need to
go through this, this earthly maze of rituals in order to enact
within ourselves this recentering that will connect us once again to
the vertical, fundamental ancient human yearning to engage with the
axis mundi, this center of, of the world. So the Kaaba, symbolizing
the heart, symbolizing this inward journey that is enacted by outward
forms
is another one. This is by my late friend Abdullah high more
which
Sparrow on the prophets to collection of poems and this is
one about
the city of MOCA. I've been to the center of the earth. Jules Verne
didn't get it right. It's not down in cavernous bowels of igneous
rocks waved in sulfurous fumes. The Serpents of the self and it's
idolize distractions are the only monsters to come at you out of the
rocks.
I have been to the caliber at Makkah, as pure as a heartbeat, a
stunning in time and space as a precious diamond decreed by God to
be cut by the hand of man to mirror His glory.
All his clarity there and concentration. The ears are filled
with a joyous noise. The eyes behold God's plan in the masses of
humanity that passed there that reduce in every case to one, one
heart before one God in one moment in time, the most public place on
earth, for the most private encounter with our Lord.
I've sat among its people. I've stood in the first rows of prayer
facing the house, black cloth covering stone. I've bowed and
frustrated, a swallows wheel and a sky so saturated with light as to
scintillate with a jagged, indelible brightness.
This is still man's major crossroad.
around the Kaaba, even the worst of men for a while regain their
innocence and
renewed,
if they lost in all and tears flow, and they call an Allah with
each heartbeat, they're in paradise. If they walk around the
house of Allah chatting and distracted, they are still in
God's garden. So powerful is the presence though.
The Kaaba is of a blackness that is not black, of a dimension that
has no size of a Cubanas that has no shape in space, that the size,
shape nor color define it. Yet it is such and such a dimension, in
roughly cube shape, with a golden door set in its side, and the
golden rain spout over one edge at top, made of square blocks of gray
stone caught with white and covered over with fine black
brocade to the ground, embroidered top
with golden calligraphy of God's Word.
I'll skip a bit.
This is the heart of the world, the self of the human, the spirit
of our consciousness in life and death. Distinctions blurred and
distinction sharpened at the same time.
Heavens rolled up, seas, dried, Earth prints erased, no one's gone
anywhere. No one's done anything. No one's taken a step. Even the
minute is breathtaking space of separation,
away from the house of Allah, at the center of the earth of
mankind,
in space in Mecca, in what is now Saudi Arabia, January the sixth
1996.
That's a recent example
of this extraordinary outpouring of poems that the ALMA has
produced that indicate that one is when one is there. One is in a
different type of space, that there is a form of recognition, a
kind of sharpening, that the unfamiliarity gives us a sense of
Homecoming.
So
NACA has all of the classic features of a sacred sanctuary,
that embedded somewhere in our human collective consciousness, we
crave and also recognize, one of the things you see when you go on
Hajj is that most people who you are a pilgrim with, I've never
been there before.
And the practices are more or less, all new,
unfamiliar, really unlike anything else in Islam, going round
something, throwing stones at pillars, standing on a plane,
connecting stones, it's all new. And yet, there's an extraordinary
sense that they know what this is, and that they are immediately
relaxing into something that comes naturally to them.
And what that natural thing is, is something deep down inaccessible
to human reason, in the fitrah, that we are pilgrims naturally
because our distant, unknown nameless ancestors did these
things and knew that they were healing.
So maca has all of the classic features. And you can, for
instance, go to Glastonbury in this country, which is kind of new
age pilgrimage place but has sacred significance, supposedly
the oldest church in the world, Glastonbury tour and this
Neolithic circles and things that a very resonant and spiritual kind
of place, although it's only point 00 1% of anything you'll find in
in the hijas. But still, there's something that there has been a
Muslim presence there witnessing presence for several decades now
that you find in these places that there are certain features that we
do find in Macau, in a kind of purified and absolute sense.
A sacred Well, maybe you could do a chalice Well, in Glastonbury,
for instance, there's a secret well in Lucker, a sacred mountain
Jebel and nor sacred geometry. So there are circles, straight lines,
planes.
There is
circled squares rules of purification.
So, you have all of these things that you will get even in small
sanctuaries, and that human beings by their Fitri nature, recognized
as good and healing unnecessary to us. But what's different
is not something Oriental. Because the hygiene is universal. And
there's something about it which is so ancient that it transcends
cultures. If you're wearing the ROM, you don't really belong to
any particular look or style. The Kaaba is pre architectural, it's
just a cube. Everything there is, is really ancient and it doesn't
belong to east or west. It's
Everybody Muthiah bottlenose, a place of resort for mankind. And
it has a universality as a result of this.
Contrast it then with the sanctuary in Jerusalem, but the
time of sadness totally man Alehissalaam, there is the holy of
holies Oddish, her Oddish, which is kind of the Jerusalem cover.
But it can't be approached by everybody. Or their Sharia was
different to wash area.
So, only the high priest can go inside their sanctuary,
and only on the Day of Atonement, and he puts the blood of sacrifice
on the place where the Ark of the Covenant used to be. And he liked
incense, and he's the only one who's allowed and even if builders
have to go they walk in, they have to be lowered in on ropes. And
it's a whole thing. It's very exclusive. And then there are
boundaries, which clearly limit the universality of it all.
So
one of the boundaries is that there is
certainly Gentiles as it were not allowed into the Meccans
sanctuary. Apart from a few exceptions, it's the city just for
Muslims a Forbidden City. But in the temple in Jerusalem, women had
their own cord, the cord of the women which is second quarter of
the temple, they could not go any closer to the center of the
sacred. Whereas in the Ishmaelites sanctuary which is hydro
sanctuary, she's buried in the hedger after all,
which is included in the area we do tawaf around. That is, as we
indicated, there's a very feminine and maternal dimension to this and
the women are there and in many ways less segregated in our most
sacred place, than they are just about anywhere else in the
traditional ummah. Because women have a kind of wedge that comes
towards the cat, but then it's moved and they try to, but it's
very difficult in the Toa, actually to enforce any kind of
real gender segregation, especially if people with their
families. So in our instantiation of the architecture of the sacred
the women are certainly included. So Abrahamic but universal,
because the Holy Prophet says sallallahu alayhi wa sallam other
prophets were sent only to their own people were boys truly nursery
care for I'm sent to all mankind. And our effect is the anticipation
of the final judgment than the ad when everybody is together. Just
as the stone and Hydra S word is the sign of the day of Elasto be
Rob become Am I not your Lord and when we salute, may still have the
stone we are reaffirming, that balharshah hidden, which we said
to the Creator at the beginning, before the beginning of time, the
map that is the beginning but also the end of artifact when
everything is brought together again and we stand Yomi Akuma,
Nestle Rob Bill Alameen, when all mankind stands to the Lord of the
world, there was an anticipation of the piano of the walk off of
out of fat, and that will be an inclusive time. We were all
together at the beginning of sacred history altogether at the
end of sacred history and the Hajj
reminds us of both of those things. So it is not a
particularist Sanctuary it is not the sanctuary of a particular
people or tribe or place.
One of the things that he does and Allahu alayhi wa sallam when he
purifies the sanctuary, he is sitting on Nakazawa and pointing
with his rod at each of the idols of the Arabs and he says general
Harper was a heck of a battle in Alberta, Canada, hookah truth has
come, full set has fled away, falsehood will always fall away,
and they will fall down on their faces and they break. Now that is
not only a purification of idolatry, but also purification of
the tempo of tribal particularity. The Arab religions are at an end,
tribal specifics and places are at an end and now the sanctuaries of
Islam are to be for all nations, which is what happened when the
temple was opened up again. I said no Omar ibn Al Khattab, the Third
Temple, which is there to this day, which they Nisa says, shall
be a house of prayer for all nations, which it never was the
time of Solomon. So everybody, the whole almost together, and their
ethnic specificity didn't matter.
So, universalism,
that the idolatry which was connected with tribalism, has been
banished, and it's myth arbiter leanness, and when you go there
you see us the most multicultural
multi ethnic place on Earth.
So
we have this and the inclusion of women I found a very
nice thing which I didn't want to leave out, which is that
women Macker have always been, you know, they, they want wanted to be
near to Allah's house and one of the, the old traditions of
Makkah was the day of the women,
which was the 29th of Raja Raja was always an important time of
celebration in the city of Mecca. But even Jubeir on his trip from
under Lucia reports this
the 29th of Rajab, which was a Thursday, was reserved exclusively
for the women that emerge from each of their lodgings after many
days preparation, similar to the ones made before visit the noble
tombs. There is not on that day a single woman in Makkah, who does
not present herself at the Sacred Mosque, the manual shaper after
they come to open the noble door, according to custom, hastened to
leave the Kaaba and leave it empty for the women, men to leave the
area of the tawaf and the hedger. There remains not a single man
around the blessitt house. The women hastened so quickly to enter
that the bento shea butter scarcely able to go down from the
noble house, through the midst of them. The women form themselves in
lines and then get all mixed and tangled as they try to get in all
together. There are cries shouts to healers, tech beers, and the
jostling repeats the spectacle of the Yemenite sorrow a Bedouin
during their stay in Mecca.
After continuing Thus, for half a day, they sort themselves out into
circumambulating. tawaf visiting the hedger. They find peace and
kissing the Blackstone touching the corners of the Kaaba. It is
for them a great date, their day brilliant and radiant.
Usually, when they're with the men they left apart, they look upon
the noble house without being able to go in, they contemplate the
Blackstone, but do not touch it at all. And all that which is their
lot. It is only looking and shagger and confuses and shakes
them. They're permitted only the circumambulation and that
segregated. So this particular day, which comes around again,
every year, they celebrate as the noblest of feast, and they make
elaborate preparations. So it's a reminder that the harem maintain
certain forms of decorum, but it is in principle, even the holy of
holies itself, open to women, and this is part of the metabo tell
the nurse that differences of race as Malcolm X on his Hajj and these
other contingent human differentia become insignificant because
everybody is in the state of OBO dia equivalent.
And the hearts and the caliber have this relationship that pays
no attention to gender, race or anything else. So I just wanted to
end again with
my last little text, lady, even Cobbold, another of the English
hedges and the first British woman to have left a, an aeration she
was there in the 1930s. And this is her first
visit to the holy city and
the meaning of the Blackstone.
It stands for a symbol, the stone which the builders refused is
become the headstone of the corner. This is in the Psalms. The
stone which the builders refused, is become the headstone of the
corner. Ishmael was looked upon as rejected, and the covenant made
with the children of his half brother, Isaac, the Israelites.
Yet it was that rejected stone, the black stone that became the
headstone of the Kaaba, the place where Hydra and Ishmael were cast
out.
The Blackstone is unhewn, cut out of the mountains without hands,
the book of Daniel, Christ made reference to it when he told the
Israelites that the vineyard, the kingdom of God will be taken away
from them, and given to other husband men, and again, did he
never read in the Scriptures, the stone which the builders rejected,
the same is become the head of the corner, Matthew 2142. And again,
the kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation
which bringeth forth the fruit thereof, Matthew 2143 So this
stone is kissed, not as an idol, but as that symbol of the
rejection of a form, which eventually became the cornerstone
in a symbol of the rejection of a nation which eventually became the
cornerstone in the divine order of the universe. And that's the other
aspect of that, the inclusivity of unless Judo haram,
gender ethnicity, but also rich and poor, and it is the
Ishmaelites sanctuary and as I've said before,
For in today's age, that story of the bifurcation, The Parting of
the Ways but in Isaac and Ishmael has turned out to be gigantically
significant. Look at the walls in Palestine, who is on one side who
is on the other, walls everywhere, rich and poor have never been more
fiercely differentiated. The disparity between rich and poor,
powerful and powerless in today's world, accentuated by technology
and forms of control has never been more extreme, but we as
Muslims are the bene Isma Ayala,
and that one which, which is the tribe cast out by the dominant
narrative, but which in the wisdom of Allah subhanaw taala, as the
great kind of
surprise, of sacred history becomes the one who are chosen who
become the people who maintain these principles in a sanctuary
when all the other sanctuaries have been desecrated or lost. So
we are the bene Ismail. And as the outcast and the poor and the
misunderstood.
When you go on Hajj, you see most people are pretty poor, not
particularly educated. They all love the house, and they all know
what to do. But that is also not only is it the world's greatest
gathering of races, but it is also the world's greatest place where
rich and poor stand together. And when the poor of the world get
together. There's nowhere else where they can be together, engage
with each other. Equally. I bet Allahu Juana as slaves of Allah as
brothers, united by this indispensable principle of Abu
dia, which is really the only principle of a true humanism. So
may Allah subhanaw taala, bring back the crowds to the harem, and
they get the great place on earth that demonstrates Allah's special
love for the poor, for the outcast for the refugees, people who are
underestimated. And may He bring repentance to the hearts of the
global elites, and he make it as it has been, for so many people
down the centuries, a place of turning from the outward to the
inward from the periphery to the center, from falsehood to truth,
from idolatry to tell heed, from injustice to justice, and from
illusion to the reality of the true God. Robber Alameen the lord
of Ibrahim Ismail he'll and his Huck alayhi wa sallam at remain.
So may Allah insha Allah give us a strong Nia now to make the Hajj
and the Amara Amara is also required, and insha Allah to bring
us together in those places and to give us a good hydrogen
undistracted, Hydra Hydra fraternity that cleanses us and
inshallah sets us up through these amazing, mysterious but purifying
rituals, so that the rest of our lives are insha. Allah lived in
the state of attachment to the Kaaba, unto the Lord of the Kaaba,
medical or physical life form income was salam o aleikum wa
rahmatullah. Support the next generation of Muslim thinkers by
donating today at Cambridge Muslim college.ac.uk