As the Sacrifice draws near us…

MECCA. We are approaching yet another Eid al-Adha. We are approaching the day that will bring us closer to one another, the day that is itself drawing near. When we hold fast to the occasion that brings us closer to one another, it brings us closer to God as well.

God is already nearer to us than our jugular vein. When we are not conscious of this, we cannot be near to Him, even though He never ceases to be near to us. When we forget His nearness to us, we fall under the delusion that we need other intermediaries in order to approach Him, and so we may end up in the hell of surrendering bribes and commissions from His divinity to these intermediaries.

The worldly occupations and cares that intervene, the interests that turn into idols, our loves and hatreds, all increase the distances between us and God. The distances between us and God in turn create all kinds of distances among us human beings, who are of one and the same essence; or conversely, the distances and divisions we arbitrarily establish among ourselves push us away from God.

The sacrifice is a perfect occasion for us to overcome those distances. God is, in any case, still nearer to us than our jugular vein. If we wish, if we resolve, we can feel His nearness to us right now and right where we are. All that is needed is that this possibility not be understood and lived as a possession at our disposal, one we may use whenever and however we please and guard from others.

Is there such a form of deviation? There is. Indeed, it is one of the most decisive forms of deviation in the world: making God, the Lord of the worlds, our Lord, the property of our own person, our tribe, our race, even our fellow believers. Withholding His mercy from others.

Yet just as His mercy embraces everyone, no one has the right to withhold this mercy of His from anyone else. No one has the right to regard himself as superior to other nations merely because of the tribe, race or nation he happened to be born into.

The Children of Israel, who were chosen in history from among human beings to be bound to a certain duty, a mission, a standard of quality, came to regard this chosenness as an acquired right and attribute that would not be taken from them whatever they did in the world and however far they strayed from the standard prescribed for them. They turned this chosenness, which was founded on the condition of being commanded to worship none but God, into a superiority and arrogance aimed at making people worship them. Yet the purpose of their being chosen was service to humanity, not making people serve them. The purpose of their being chosen was to fulfil a mission that would keep people from worshipping other gods, not to place themselves in a position to be worshipped.

In the Noble Qur'an, these deviations of the Jews are of course not recounted in order to create a feeling of hatred toward them among Muslims by dwelling on how bad they are; on the contrary, they are recounted so that Muslims may not fall into the same error and may not consider themselves, in any circumstance, superior to everyone else in the world.

Indeed, among Muslims too there can be those who carry a tendency to deviate in the way the Jews deviated. There have been those who set out under the name of "Hizmet" (service) but ended up seeing themselves as an arrogant mastermind who assigns all people, in fact only other Muslims, the role of "serving themselves," and who turned this into a disdainful elitism that separates their own path from the path of the Muslims. This deviation should not be seen as peculiar to FETÖ alone. It stems from an ignorant mentality that can repeat itself in every era. That is why not only education but also vigilance is essential.

Living the sacrifice in its true sense, applying it by becoming one with the experience of Abraham, grants a strong immunity against this form of deviation.

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The sacrifice is approaching us, and this year, on the occasion of the Hajj, we are approaching Arafat, where Muslims from every corner of the world will gather.

Before Arafat, the first stop is Mecca.

Each year Mecca changes physically more than it did the year before. While the acts of worship and rites performed upon it are a stage on which, in terms of their plan, nothing has changed and everything has been repeated in the same way for four thousand years, the place itself is in constant flux, so that it does not remain the same physically from one year to the next.

My first arrival in Mecca was 20 years ago. In that time I no longer remember how many times I have come, whether for Hajj or for Umrah. But between the Mecca of 20 years ago and today's Mecca, almost nothing has remained unchanged apart from the Kaaba and a few structures around it. The Kaaba, to be sure, has changed constantly since the day it was built, but the speed of change in recent times is of a different order; it leaves nothing behind from old Mecca.

It is not only that buildings are demolished and new ones of colossal size erected; mountains are being demolished, and the sky is taking on a new shape. The Kaaba stands in the middle of Mecca, which is surrounded on all four sides by rocky mountains. The unchanging aspect of the view of the Kaaba was those mountains. Now no trace of them remains.

It may sound strange, but there is no trace of the stars either. Those stars, which have such an important place in Arab culture and consciousness, as the reflection of an intense experience, that one of the surahs of the Noble Qur'an bears their name, no longer show themselves at night.

No, I am not about to slip into nostalgia. God knows best; there is a wisdom in this too, and this change deserves separate reflection. We are in our own time, not in ancient times. Even if all this change has severed us from the past and carried us far from it, the bond of Hajj and sacrifice that has never been broken among us draws us back every year and removes our distance and our estrangement.

By divine grace we approach our origin anew, we re-establish our link in the chain of being anew, as we do at this time every year. Feeling that whatever has changed and passed away in all the intervening change was already perishable, and opening ourselves with a particular excitement to the awareness of our own mortality...