Sacrifice and Hajj: a campaign of consciousness

This year, by God's grace, we are experiencing the Feast of Sacrifice in the sacred land where the event took place in our ancient history. The Feast of Sacrifice, with which in Turkey we are occupied every year only in the context of escaping sacrificial animals, is in fact, if it must be recalled and reminded, a Feast of the Hajj. Sacrifice, though very important within this feast, is one of the rites, and of course the most important. And of course sacrifice is not a subject consisting merely of sacrificial animals.

Sacrifice is the representation of the great trial that Hz. Abraham lived through with his son Ishmael, with his mother, with Satan, and with his own love for Ishmael, which was extremely hard to set aside, in the process of carrying out the command he sensed he had received through a dream to sacrifice his son. It is such a trial that, with each of its scenes, it is a perfect example for the trials that every human being may face in this world.

In the Hajj, all these dimensions of this story of trial are represented anew every year with the participation of millions of people. Since the birth of Islam, indeed even before it, this representation re-enacts this trial. Everyone who takes part in this representation casts himself as an Abraham.

First, at Arafat, in the place where Adam met Eve, everyone taking part in this representation comes to know himself, knows the world, sees the existence of other people and their lack of difference from himself, sees the borders and distances that have been interposed and sees how they become unimportant in an instant. He understands with certainty what the only being is that is worth trembling for in this life. He sees what he should make an "issue" of, and how much. For he sees that a person's issue is at the same time his religion. He sees that the things placed before him as issues in his own world are not an issue here. Because a human being learns his Lord, comes to know his Lord. As he knows his Lord, he knows himself too. As he knows both his Lord and himself, he places everyone and everything in its proper place within the hierarchy of being. He learns to put everything in its proper place.

Arafat is the place where a human being sees his own limits before the absolute existence of God and finds the opportunity to put himself in order. However rich he may be, whatever lofty worldly positions he may have reached, whatever title and rank he may have received, the people who come to this meeting place experience being stripped here of all their titles, positions, even their material possessions. They taste death before dying; could there be a greater lesson, a stronger education than this?

However far Muslims may have historically strayed from their path, the institutionalized existence of the Arafat gathering alone serves as a powerful warning, a widespread education, that can bring them back into line. Like the other stations of the Hajj, as one of God's sacred sites, it is like a divine guarantee of the eternal validity of tawhid.

The form and nature of the gathering at Arafat does not change either. A person takes part in it in such a plain and unadorned state that, while the magnificent atmosphere created by this plainness renders a person utterly powerless before God, the atmosphere of the scene, repeating every year despite all changes, takes time and the rhythm of time at once onto its own axis and turns it.

This powerlessness that a person voluntarily assumes has no debilitating effect; on the contrary, it has the necessity of ensuring that one who knows God and himself has no fear left of any other power before God.

Against the Satan he came to know at Arafat, against the attempts at seduction of Satan by which he was caught many times at Mina, a person completes his provisions for the struggle at al-Mash'ar al-Haram. As he prepares to pay the costs (the sacrifice) that drawing near to God in the absolute sense requires, he repels one by one all the whisperings of Satan, in the guise of philosophy, argument, theory and ideology, that try to make this cost seem heavy, unnecessary and misguided.

What is a person's sacrifice? What is it that keeps him from his absolute devotion to God, that slows him down, that tries to dissuade him from his path? Money, love of property, ambition for position, a woman or a man? According to Ali Shariati's exquisite interpretation, whatever it is, that is a person's great Satan. A person begins on the first day by stoning it. He knocks it down first. Because whichever it is, it is drawing the other satans to itself, binding them to that great one, and taking them as its aid. Once the great one is brought down, it is easy to bring down the small and the middle one.

Sacrifice is a call to accounting that must be taken up together with all the rites of the Hajj. A call to know one's position within the order of existence in this world. Sacrifice is an uprising of consciousness, a campaign of consciousness, against every kind of ideological, cultural, theoretical distortion that tends to distance a person from the reality of things. Because in the process leading to the sacrifice a person is considered a guest of the Absolute Being, he therefore prays his prayers as a traveler.

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This year, owing to the train service that the Saudi Arabian administration put on from Arafat to Mina, although no excessive crush formed on the road, the sight of the flood of people flowing toward al-Mash'ar al-Haram as evening fell does not change at all. The incredible acceptance of the people, who trample every kind of pride and status anxiety underfoot in this journey that begins in Mina and continues at Arafat, while staying at Muzdalifah, does not change at all.

The Hajj, with all its rites, is an experience that ties the past and the present together, and in this respect makes its own time valid.

The Hajjs of past times were without doubt much more arduous, and undertaking them in that arduous state was much harder. At a time when a Hajj journey took weeks and months, there were comparatively fewer Hajj visits, and going on Hajj required a greater sacrifice. Today, in its eased form, people may not need to endure much sacrifice to go on Hajj, but even though it is easier today, compared with the comfort people are accustomed to in their ways of life, there is still a proportionate degree of hardship, of ordinariness, of sacrifice, and when they set out on this road it becomes inevitable that they pass through the training kneaded with the inescapable hardship of the Hajj.

The share of what Hajj and Umrah journeys have given people in the religious revival experienced recently is always worth addressing separately. At a press conference in Mecca, the head of the Diyanet, Prof. Mehmet Görmez, announced that this year statistical data, long neglected, will be kept and shared with the public in order to bring out the sociological dimensions of Hajj and Umrah journeys.

In experiencing the Hajj and the Sacrifice, it is very important to understand what they bring into our lives and how they are lived. The consciousness of where, and at what distance, we stand near or far (Arafat) is the first step for us to be able to draw near (sacrifice).