The Plain of ʿArafāt

One spends the day at ʿArafāt. It is a plain that is considered to be a preparation for the Day of Judgement. One is literally preparing for the day when all of humanity is before God — in a non-linear sense: no front, no back; it is not anthropomorphic — but is before God, and goes naked, stripped of all their worldly distinctions, and asks for forgiveness. So the prayer of ʿArafāt is to ask the forgiveness of God. It is very powerful, because one is literally seeing humanity there. Someone who has been to the Vatican at times when there were a lot of people — though not to any of the Hindu gatherings — will still never have seen anything like it, in the sense that there are literally Chinese people; there are Indonesians; there are Malay people; there are African people — there are black Africans and there are white Africans; there are Turkic people; there are European people now; there are American people; there are Mongolians; there are Chinese from different places in China; there are Cambodians; there are Thai people, Vietnamese people, Filipino people. People are literally coming, as it says in the Qurʾān: they will come from every deep crevice, they will come from every valley, and they will come to this place.

And they are all there; one just sees the whole thing. One sees sick people; one sees healthy people; one sees people crawling; one sees people being carried — some people literally carry other people on their backs; one sees people carrying their parents. So it is just a very, very overwhelming experience, to enter into that sacred space. And the great reminder on that day is the verse that was quoted when the Prophet (peace be upon him) made the Hajj. There was a black man who gave the adhān, and the Arabs looked down on him — they had this racism, and they looked down on him — and they asked why that man was giving the call to prayer. And so the verse came down: that We have created you in peoples and tribes, to know one another.

So the idea is that people come there really to learn. It is a little difficult to get back into. The Hajj is, for some reason, a hard thing to talk about for anyone who has been there and had the experience: it just starts coming back — that experience, in that place — and one has to try to get over it. But the verse said that We have created you in peoples and tribes to know one another, and it says that the noblest in the eyes of God are the most conscientious. And the one thing that the Prophet (peace be upon him) said on the pilgrimage was: there is no preference of a white man over a black man, or of a black man over a white man. So the idea is just to eliminate this insidious aspect of human nature, which is the idea that some people are superior to others. When one sees everybody in that same condition — the nomad and the sedentary, the rich and the poor, all just there in that same basic human condition, that we are bereft and we are poor before God — it is very powerful as a reminder: beware of considering yourself above the person next to you because of something incidental like colour, or because of something like wealth, or because of something like beauty, or because of something like lineage. In that place all of those things disappear, and one is just like everybody else: a naked creature that has to eat and sleep and defecate and urinate and menstruate and procreate and do all these things. There is something very basic and fundamental to one's humanity.

So the Hajj really does…, and what one notices with people who make the Hajj is that there is often a very powerful transformation that occurs in their life. It really is a very transformative experience. One is not the same person; one does not look at other people the same way. There is just a transformation, and traditionally they said that if a person comes back worse from Hajj, it is a bad sign: they said either he went there with the wrong intention, or it just was not accepted, for whatever reason. So the idea is that the Hajj is really a time when, on completing it, one has completed one's life's journey and is ready to die. That really is a kind of completion. So those are the five pillars, in a very quick and general overview.