Beware of Extremes

To return to the stoning, after that tangent: what one does is pick up twenty-one stones, and then throw seven stones at each of three pillars. It is a purely symbolic thing. Unfortunately, some of the pilgrims get a little out of hand and start thinking that it really is the devil. There was a hadith in which a man was throwing big stones, and the Prophet (peace be upon him) said: beware of going to extremes in your religion. The Prophet (peace be upon him) actually hated extremism. He really did. He was very wary of extremes; he was a very balanced person. He said: my way is the middle way. He did not like people who were fasting all the time; he said: I eat and I fast. He did not like people who abstained from sexual relations; he said: I have sexual relations. He did not like people who stayed up all night; he said: I pray and I sleep. So he really was very wary of it. One time he saw a rope in the mosque tied to the wall, and he asked what it was, and he was told that so-and-so had put it there for when they fell asleep, so that it would keep them up; and he said: take it down, and tell them not to do that. He saw another man who had sworn that he would stay in the sun until such-and-such happened, and the Prophet (peace be upon him) said: tell him to get out of the sun, and just finish his fast for the day, but not to go into the sun. So he was very much against extremes, and so one is supposed to pick up very small pebbles and literally just throw them; it is not supposed to be like… But people take sandals and throw them — it gets a little crazy. The throwing is actually probably the hardest part of the Hajj, because people do get a little out of control, and one is dealing, unfortunately, with a lot of people from the Muslim world who come out of very ignorant backgrounds. A lot of them do not know their tradition; they have not learned the rules of Hajj. So there are a lot of such things.

But it is amazing, given the amount of people, given the space, given the intensity, that there are very, very rarely any incidents. There is no report of any outright violent incidents where people actually…, other than some riots that the Iranians staged during the whole period of the Iranian Revolution. On the Hajj, if somebody starts getting angry, there are all these people around them who just tell them: be patient, you are on Hajj. They remind them, and things like that, and people respond to that. The same is true in Ramadan: you are fasting — just relax and calm down.

The sacrifice symbolises that Ibrāhīm, when he was told to kill his son — what the Jewish tradition calls the Akedah — had the son replaced with a ram. There is a difference of opinion in the Muslim tradition as to whether it was Isaac or Ishmael. Most Muslims now seem to believe that it was Ishmael, but early on the Prophet (peace be upon him) never said which child it was, and it is not really considered important; it is not essential to the story. The importance is the act of submission. What one does is celebrate that by sacrificing a ram, preferably, or some other animal, and then distributing that meat to poor people and things like that. And other Muslims take part in that around the world: even though the pilgrims are doing it, other Muslims — in Santa Clara, for instance — will go out and sacrifice on that day, many people, and it is encouraged to do that.