In the Qur’an, Bilqis asks her advisors what to do about the man who has sent her a “noble letter,” in the name of God (Soloman). Their advice was pretty standard: we have a big army, let’s kick his butt. She says, Kings do that, they lay people low. Then she decides to use diplomacy instead, and sends an embassy. I pointed this out to my advisor when I was writing my dissertation and he suggested, rather condescendingly, that she was being feminine—as if it was a bad thing.
So I used her story of diplomacy and acceptance of the one God to suggest that perhaps men need to be feminine, if that’s what it takes to get it right. (On another occasion I am sure I will return to Bilqis as the ONLY example of a goodly ruler in the Qur’an who is not a prophet—and yet some say women cannot be leaders!)
Still, I used the idea of Ramadan as a visit from the Queen, and hajj as a visit to the king. I think it works. Maybe because I think being laid low, spiritually, is part of the rebirth that as successful hajj is supposed to grant. We all carry a pretty heavy weight of ego-self which surrounds our being. This we must shed, like the skin of a snake, in order to don a new, purified version of the self.
But then, one really has to buy into the whole ritual thing for that to happen.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of humankind is evidence tracing back through the years, that we have always oriented ourselves towards something Sacred, Ultimate, or wholly (holy?) Other. In burial sites, from the wealthy Pharaohs to the poor desert nomad, this evidence is manifest in the form of elaborate relics, indicating fundamentally that there is more to life than meets the eye. Maybe we do not know exactly what the Aztecs believed, but we do know they believed in something beyond the ordinary every day. We also know they developed elaborate means to somehow mediate between their ordinary everyday lives and that Something Else. These means were sort of a “go between.”
That’s what rituals are for: to mediate between the everyday ordinary and what we take to be sacred, holy and Ultimate. Somehow, an extra-ordinary approach is required with elaborate preparations, costumes, foods, sacrifices and performances. We indicate our status, as ordinary human beings, some times as servant, worshiper or believer, and we approach the Something non-ordinary. Like the approach to a king, you don’t just go up, slap him five and say, “Whazzup your highness”? (Wow! Check that word out: high-ness… we are where then? low.)
It’s important for me to get this conversation started, because hajj is a few days of various rites and rituals. In order to explain not only my experience while performing them, but also, their significance from the perspective of Islam, we need to have some idea about the function of rituals. Then we can look at the ones performed in Islam, in particular. We believe in a single Creator of the entire universe, including ourselves, Who is not created. We live in a state of forgetfulness, all of our lives: in between the moment we were created, from the nano-second of our atomic DNA, up to and then through the moment of our physical demise.
According to the Qur’an each and every human being was asked “A lastu bi-rabbik; Am I not your Lord?” To which we all said, yes, and even further, agreed to keep ourselves in a state of worship towards that One-ness. By the time we make our merry way through the rest of our biological formation, we forget all about this. Yet, the signs of the Creator are everywhere, even in our own selves, the Qur’an says. And there are signs in the magnitude of beauty. In the face of these all, we are often struck with awe. This awe is a part of our lowly state before that which is sublime: like God, beauty and other miracles of life.
For a brief moment, we remember.
We remember that we are not alone. We remember that we are always in the presence of God. We remember that when all of this life is done and over with, to God we do return, and we will be reunited. How do we spend our life time without this union? Why, we practice. We practice remembering, in terms of dhikr, in terms of worship and in terms of work. Islamic jurists divide all human actions into two categories, ‘ibadah and mu’amalah. ‘Ibadah is ritual worship and mu’amalah is mostly social interactions. At some point, I need to talk about the goals of mu’amalah, in terms of justice, but we’ll have to take that for granted at the moment, to focus on ‘ibadah.
‘Ibadah comes from the root form ‘-b-d serve or worship, also the root of the word ‘abd, which is the one who worships Allah, or His servant. As human beings we have two aspects of our relationship with Allah, we are absolutely servants, vis-à-vis His uluhiyyah, divineness, or Jalal, exalted reality. Therefore the proper posture is one of surrender. We are also khalifah, or agent, representative and trustee. This is our relationship to Allah’s Jamal attributes or her rubbubiyyah. In this, our proper posture is active engagement in all aspects of life. This engagement should manifest our inner states of surrender (this is for all our actions, not just in worship or ibadah, but also in our mu’amalat).
There’s a Sufi image of these two postures, like a ball, the top half facing towards Allah as ‘abd and the bottom half facing towards the earth as khalifah. We are the whole ball, and these are not contradictions, but complementary aspects of our totality. We just have to remember that we are both and not get arrogant before Allah, nor get irresponsibly removed from our encounters on the earth. It’s a balance, trust me. The five times daily prayer, or salah, perfectly reflects the harmony of this totality.
There are four major positions taken up by the able bodied. First we stand (facing towards Makkah, easy to find these days with the iphone!), then we bow at the waist in the ruku’, from which each unit of the performance gets its name, a rakah; then we prostrate with nose, forehead, palms of both hands, knees and toes touching the ground, sajdah; then we sit back from this sajdah before repeating it. That is, two prostrations for every rakah. Each prayer will have from 2-4 rakat.
Clearly in sajdah we have the best expression of our status as ‘abd-Allah. But we also stand; in fact, we begin the performance at the stand: the best expression of our status as khalifah of Allah. The bow, or ruku’, after standing, acts to put the whole of the performance in motion, and to point in the direction of that motion, towards God (metaphysically, and the Kaaba in Makkah, physically). The final position, sitting, the posture of reflection, mediates between the action of agency and the humility of servitude. All must be performed with the reflective consciousness of the human being, the only part of Allah’s creation given so much complexity as both the responsibility of agency and free will and the servitude and obedience.
The salah is performed wholly in the Arabic language. Since the reform of the Catholic church taking away the performance of the Eucharist in Latin, the use of something other than common every day vernacular (and this is true of the distinction between spoken Arabic and the formal classical Arabic of this performance), many have forgotten how meaningful this can be, but again it is a special kind of meaning, a non-ordinary.
This is not a song we sing on our way to work, hi-ho, hi-ho. This is not the song we sing to celebrate a human birthday, nor even the lullaby we sing to help our children sleep. This is the song we sing before that which is Owner, Maker and Ultimate Judge of even all our earthly kings, Allah. Not any old tune will do.
What is more, one feature of ritual is that the “message” is not self encoded. That is why I keep making a distinction between this and what we mostly understand when we use the word prayer in English. Prayer is all about our immediate status. “Help me get through this”, “Give me an A on the exam”, “make her heart turn to love me”, “Grant me a successful hajj.” etc.
Worship responds to a higher level in fact, the highest level of formality. Even in its repetition there is a special kind of efficacy as well. All this is important in achieving the connectivity between us and the Sacred. All this is intended in its performance. You have to THINK when you perform it. The Prophet once said, “as-salah imadud-din, salah is the column upon which the din (of Islam) is built”: holding up the sky as it were.
To stop five times a day, to assume these postures, to utter this un-self encoded message, makes a difference, not to God, but to us, here and now.
Sometimes people think but why pray five times, or how can you pray five times, Isn’t that a lot? Doesn’t that take a long time? Actually, the simplest performance takes less time than it does to smoke a cigarette, but no body every asks the office worker from the 38th floor, who has to go outside because of the smoke restrictions in the building, doesn’t it take a long time!
I had already lived in one Muslim majority country before I came to live in Cairo, but there I had my first experience of Muslims NOT stopping everything to pray. I did not understand it then, and was weighed down by the experience. I had lived in two Muslim majority countries before I came face to face, in Malaysia, with people who actually kept to regular performance but where liars, cheaters, back stabbers and irresponsible. I never met a killer who did keep up the performance, but with things like September 11th and al-Qaeda, or, persons like Osamah bin-Laden, at least I know they exist.
So, it’s not magic. The prophet said, “If a man washed in a river five times a day, would there be any dirt left on him?”, and the companions said, “No our Prophet, there would be no dirt left on him.” “That,” he said, “is what happens to the soul, when one prays five times a day, no dirt is left on it.” Perhaps some one forgot to tell Osama.
But actually, I have heard a much clearer explanation. It’s pretty simple too, if you think about. The performance of salah is more than just bopping your head up and down against the ground five times a day, looking like a chicken eating rice. We are not a machine. It has to have something more: It has to have both the humility and the consciousness of orientation towards the Sacred.
In my time, with certain Sufis and certain activists as my closest friends, it has sometimes been difficult to find a combination of allegiance to worship, good spirit and political activism. This is really strange for me. I mean, I know it is possible to hold that orientation towards the Sacred in heart even without the performance, but I do think and I have experienced that it makes a difference.
Anyway, that is the goal that I seek with this, and all the other rituals at hajj.
I plan to put my mind, my body and my heart into their performance at Makkah and the other near by places. I don’t think it will change God one iota, but I do hope it will change me, at least into the best of me.
Amin
