Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

224 t CHAPTER NINE
To Mount Arafat and Back
On entering Mecca, the pilgrim should proceed as soon as possible
to the performance of the tawaf, the sevenfold, counterclockwise
circumambulation of the Kaaba, the first three at a somewhat
quickened pace. Pilgrims attempt to kiss or touch the Black Stone
embedded in the eastern corner of the Kaaba as they pass it,
though the pilgrimage throng often makes this impossible. The
tawaf completed, the pilgrim goes to the place called Safa, beyond
the southeast side of the Haram, and completes seven “runnings”
between that and another place, called Marwa, a distance altogether
of somewhat less than two miles. Today both places, and
the way between, are enclosed in an air-conditioned colonnade.
The tawaf originally formed part of the umra or Meccan spring
festival, but the running between Safa and Marwa was connected
to it by Muhammad himself, as we can still read in Quran 2:153.
There is a certain flexibility in the performance of those Meccan
rituals—some prefer to do them very late at night when the
weather is cooler and the crowds thinner—but precisely on the
eighth of Dhu al-Hijja the hajj proper begins. The pilgrims proceed
to Mina, a village five miles east of Mecca, where some pass the
night, while the rest proceed directly to the hill called Arafat in the
midst of an open plain eleven miles from the Haram, where they
spend the night in what becomes, for that solitary evening, one of
the largest cities in the Middle East. The next day, the ninth, is the
heart of the hajj. The pilgrims, now many hundreds of thousands,
assemble and stand around the rocky hill of Arafat. At times sermons
have been delivered during this interval, but they have nothing
to do with the ritual, the point of which is precisely the standing
before God, as Abraham did, from noon to sunset. Just before
sunset occurs the “dispersal,” a sometimes pell-mell rush to Muzdalifa,
a village halfway back toward Mina. The night is spent
here; then, the next morning, the tenth, there is another dispersal
as the pilgrims hasten to Mina, where the ritual Stoning of Satan,
the casting of seven pebbles at a stone pillar, occurs.
With the Stoning of Satan, the hajj has reached its official term,
but there remain a number of rites that are part of the pilgrims’