Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

DISCOVERING SCRIPTURE IN SCRIPTURE t 19
The Origins of the Meccan Pilgrimage
Abraham’s work in Mecca was not complete, however. In Muhammad’s
day, numerous pilgrimages were being performed in and
around Mecca—performed, that is, by a population still immersed
in paganism. But the Quran announces that it was not always so.
The pilgrimage (hajj) was in fact instituted by Abraham, as the
Quran tells us (22:27–30), and at God’s explicit command.
It is clear from these and similar quranic texts that the original
pilgrimage rituals were not so much described to Abraham as alluded
to for the benefit of a Meccan audience that was already
quite familiar with them. Most of the quranic texts referring to the
hajj as a matter of fact have Muhammad and not Abraham as the
speaker. It was once again left for later commentators to fill in the
details, not of the hajj, to be sure, but of Abraham’s and Ishmael’s
connection with it. The chief authority here is al-Azraqi (d. 858),
who was not a quranic commentator but one of the earliest historians
of Mecca, and so an expert whose interests were somewhat
different from those of exegetes: al-Azraqi is writing history. He
describes how Abraham, at God’s urging and under Gabriel’s direction,
performs the first hajj, which is an almost exact replica of
what every Muslim has done there from the moment that the
Quran and its messenger rescued this ritual from the pagans who
were so mindlessly performing it, unaware that they were quite
literally following in Abraham’s footsteps.
The Binding of Isaac (or Ishmael)
The famous episode of God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his
own son, Abraham’s unquestioning obedience, the relaxation of the
command, and the Lord’s final reward to his obedient servant—“All
nations on earth will wish to be blessed as your descendants are
blessed because you have been obedient to Me”—are described with
dramatic and brilliant economy in Genesis 22:1–18. The binding of
Isaac is likewise described in the Quran (37:101–107). In the immediately
preceding verses (37:83–100), Abraham is portrayed arguing