Glancing at other worshippers, I tried to follow the prayer movements: standing straight, bowing with hands on the knees, placing the forehead on the floor as in yoga.
As I prostrated myself, the rear end of a man in front of me hit me in the face; later his heels were almost in my mouth.
EQUALITY BEFORE GOD
The close mingling of men and women here is remarkable, when in all other areas of life — particularly in Saudi Arabia — the two genders are strictly segregated. In much of the Arab world, men and women are separated when they pray in mosques, and many conservative men consider it a sin to shake hands with women.
But here in the most sacred place in the Muslim world, men and women pray side by side and touch without the slightest inhibition.
A major theme of the hajj is the equality of all mankind before God — man or woman, rich or poor, young or old.
But it’s not without friction. In the lineup for prayers, a man chastised two women sitting comfortably in front of him for “not giving room to men” to pray.
“It’s not right,” he barked, pointing his finger at the women, who ignored him.
After prayers, we entered the Grand Mosque — stepping with the right foot first as required — to perform the tawaf, the circling of the Kaaba. Inside the giant, multilevel mosque is the mesmerizing sight of a river of people moving around the shrine, as if in a slow ice-skating motion.
The roots of the hajj go back to Abraham, known to Muslims by his Arabic name Ibrahim and considered part of a line of prophets completed by Mohammed in the seventh century. Abraham and his son Ishmael, or Ismail, are believed to have built the Kaaba, the focal point of Muslims around the world when they pray every day.
DISTRACTING SIGHTS
But it was difficult to get into the state of spirituality that many secular friends promised I would arrive at, despite my skepticism and doubts. I was distracted by the pilgrims pushing and shoving — and by the view out of the open-air mosque, with the heavy construction cranes and colorful towers of the five-star hotels around the Kaaba visible.
I tried to pay attention to the rules, laid out in a small booklet provided by pilgrims, but kept forgetting things like raising my hands to the sacred black stone at one corner of the Kaaba at each circuit as all pilgrims do.
In the mosque’s halls surrounding the Kaaba, many pilgrims rested, napped, ate or chatted with each other or on cellphones plugged in to charge in sockets on the marble columns above shelves of copies of the Koran.
The next station was the saii, where pilgrims move back and forth seven times — at a slight run — between the hills of Safa and Marwa, now enclosed within the Grand Mosque complex. The rite reenacts the search by Abraham’s wife Hagar for water for her infant son Ishmael in the desert. After her seventh run, the spring known as Zamzam sprang miraculously under Ishmael’s feet.
Over the next days, the mass of pilgrims moved outside Mecca to sites in the nearby desert. On Tuesday, they gathered on the Plain of Arafat to perform the woqouf, standing in the presence of God in a daylong vigil that marks the zenith of the hajj. Afterwards, they migrate to nearby Mina to perform a ritual stoning of the devil.
RSS