By Dr Muzaffar Iqbal
Mina is no more what it used to be when Prophet Ibrahim took his young son there to sacrifice him because he had seen a dream in which he had been instructed to do so. That enormous act of faith, enshrined in rites sanctified by none other than Allah has remained central in the lives of believers ever since that day. Year after year, Haj brings, to a very large number of humanity, the fruits of spiritual revival which no other religious ritual does. This very special and transforming aspect of Haj has been the experiential basis of certain mystique which the returning pilgrims continue to narrate. Something happens to them during the three days they spend in Mecca, Mina, Arafat, and Muzdalifa; something so deep and so transforming that thousands of men, women and children return from Haj and start to live a different kind of life, different from what it used to be prior to their pilgrimage.
There are no words to narrate the experience of Haj, but the transformed men, women, and children are seen by all walking in the streets of almost every city throughout the Muslim world. Their faces reflect it; their words state it; their deeds communicate it. Somewhere in the process of performing the rites of Haj, something very deep takes hold of them and transforms them, cleaning the decades of rust from their hearts and renewing their commitment to their creator to live a life of piety, justice, and high moral order.
If every single person who performs Haj were to experience this and return to his or her homeland as a transformed person, the entire Muslim world would be transformed in a few decades. Obviously, this is not the case. Thousands of pilgrims return home just as they had left, with only a superficial coloring of the experience which does not take long to disappear. What is the difference between those who return transformed and those who do not? What happens to some and not to others, and why?
There is no way to analyse this. Only the pilgrim and his or her creator know this most intimate situation, but the tradition points to several factors: intention, abidance of rules, and striving (juhd). If something is missing from these three important aspects of Haj, then one is denied the benefits.
The greatest of all rites of Haj is, of course, the standing vigil at Arafat, as there is no day on which Allah frees a greater number of His slaves from the hellfire than the Day of Arafat. Sayyida A'isha r narrated from the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH): "Allah draws near to His slaves and boasts about them to the angels and asks [a rhetorical question]: 'What is their desire?'" (Sahih Muslim).
The Prophet also said: "The best supplication is the one on the Day of Arafat, and the best thing that I and other Prophets before me have said is: There is no deity except Allah; He has no partners; to Him belong the dominion and all praise; He has power over all things." (Mu'ata, Imam Malik)
It is at Arafat that the last verse of the Quran, containing legal injunctions, was revealed on the "day of two Ids, as Ibn Abbas, may Allah be well-pleased with them both, called that Friday, when, shortly after the delivery of his farewell sermon at Araf?t and while he was still sitting on his camel Qaswa, the Prophet received the third verse of Surat al-Ma'ida," a verse which Ibn Kathir calls the "greatest blessing of Allah on this Umma '…today I have completed your religion for you and have bestowed upon you the full measure of My blessings; and it has been My pleasure to choose Islam as your religion…' ."
"I was with the Prophet on the farewell pilgrimage," related Asma bint Umays, "we were moving when suddenly [the angel] Jibril came; and the Prophet leaned down on his camel and the camel started to bend down with the weight of the revelation and I put my shawl over the Prophet" (Tafsir al-Tabari).
Fourteen hundred and twenty years after the first and the only Haj of the Prophet (PBUH), it continues to be the greatest annual gathering of Muslims in one place and one time. Just like the time of the Prophet (PBUH), this greatest gathering of Muslims also continues to be a barometer of the spiritual state of the ummah as a whole, for there is no other time or place where one can find a representative sample of all men, women, and children who make up the ummah -- the community of believers now living one of the most difficult times of its existence.
If dysfunctional institutions, political anarchy, illiteracy, ignorance, violence and poverty are indicators of the state of the Muslim world, there is, simultaneously, the silver lining of a rite which can (at least potentially) transform each and every pilgrim, and thereby revive the ummah. There would never be a time when every returning pilgrim would be a revived person, as experience tells us, but may be this year the benefit of Haj will spread far and wide and deep in the body politic of the Muslim world.
The writer is a freelance columnist. Email: quantumnotes@gmail.com