eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
The hadj, or sacred journey, is the pilgrimage to Mecca that all Muslims are enjoined to make once in their lifetimes. One of the world’s oldest religious rites, the hadj has continued without break for fourteen centuries. It is, like most things Islamic, shrouded in mystery for Westerners. Here, Michael Wolfe, an American-born writer and recent Muslim convert, recounts his experiences on this journey.
Wolfe begins his narrative in Marrakech, Morocco. Beginning with the month-long fast of Ramadan, he immerses himself in the traditional Muslim life of Morocco. Then, in Tangier, he visits mystics and the American author Paul Bowles. From there, he journeys to Mecca, the sacred desert city in Saudi Arabia closed to all but Muslims.
Though the buildup to the Gulf War hovers in the background, the age-old rites of the hadj are what most preoccupy Wolfe. His experience profoundly strengthens his bond to the faith he has embraced as an outsider, making it personal and alive. At a time when the eyes of the world are on Islam, The Hadj offers a much-needed look at its human face.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802192196 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 11/20/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A Taste of Fasting
A man alone is the epitome of conflict.
Early one night in April in the month of Ramadan, I found myself at New York's Kennedy Airport, booked aboard a night flight bound for Brussels, on the first leg of a long trip to Tangier. I had no itinerary beyond Morocco, only an interest in learning about Islam and an appointment in July in Saudi Arabia, several thousand miles to the east.
The mental excitement at the start of a long journey, the heightened fascination with new scenes, was working overtime in me that evening. Even standing in a ticket line, I stared hard at the travelers around me, searching their faces. The most exotic of them, a group of Moroccans in traditional djellabas, were not surprising; I was heading for their homeland, after all. It was the Jewish contingent that surprised me. As we flocked to the first gate, I made a head count. Half the group were Orthodox Hasidim.
Many more men than women made up their party, and several dozen children, mostly girls. The men in their Old World black frock coats looked novel and remote against a Sabena Airlines backdrop. Hints of old-time Lublin marked their clothes and curly earlocks. They paced the floor with hands clasped at their backs or leaned in twos and threes against partitions. A smile, a nod, did nothing to soften these faces. They glared back at me the way they glared at the airport, as if its modern lines were a reproach.
The women, on the other hand, looked like prosperous U.S. housewives. A trio sat within earshot on a stainless steel couch, laughing, gossiping, fashionably dressed, wearing cosmetics. They neither stared nor averted their eyes like their husbands. They seemed to have slipped free of the old conventions. At one point a young mother casually opened her dress to nurse an infant. They all spoke Yiddish.
The announcement that our flight would be delayed established my first bond with these private people. Disappointment pierced their defenses, opening a patch of common ground. At last I was able to put the usual questions to an elderly couple in line with me buying a soft drink.
The man appeared to have stepped out of pre-Bismarckian Europe. His wife wore a blousy print from Bloomingdale's. Were they going to the Holy Land? I asked her. The husband answered. They were going to celebrate Passover with a branch of his mother's family back in Belgium.
I felt increasing fascination with these people. Among the older ones certainly were some whose relations had not escaped the pogroms. The man and wife fit this category. What, I wondered, had made his Belgian relatives trustful enough to settle in Western Europe? What had driven others across the sea to the Bronx and Queens? I asked these questions of myself, for private reasons.
My father's father had come to America from Byelorussia, an 1890s refugee from Skidel with sufficient cause to cross the sea (via Sweden), then cross into Ohio from New York. Like a lot of his peripatetic generation, he had not come to the States to preserve a faith. He had come to succeed, to escape a depression, in flight from economic ruin and probable conscription by the czar.
His second son, my father, a cocky product of the Roaring Twenties, turned away from Jewish orthodoxy, took a Christian wife, and settled across the state in Cincinnati. These choices had enormous consequences. The city, for instance, brought him to the capital of Isaac Mayer Wise's radical reforms.
Wise was the first great organizer of Reform Jewish institutions in the country. He came to the city in 1854. As a novice rabbi, Wise installed family pews inside the synagogue, breaking down the division of the sexes. Later he anglicized and standardized his prayer book. He established the first rabbinical college in the States. In adapting Judaism to modern life, Wise emphasized its universal mission. He firmly opposed the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, viewing it as a meaningless distraction. He died in 1900.
My father arrived in Cincinnati in 1930. By the time I was born, he had joined a Reform congregation more liberal than even Wise imagined. He remained observant of the Jewish holidays but raised his family in a secular setting. Yiddish culture and kosher cooking fell by the wayside. He neither kept an Orthodox household nor regretted its absence. We celebrated Hanukkah; we had Christmas trees, to boot. Ours was a pattern, repeated many times over, that pitted modern American life against the Talmud. Arthur Hertzberg describes it well in an essay called "What Future for the Jews?": "American society no longer forces people to assimilate into a dominant culture. It is possible for people to allow their Jewishness to fade without making a decision to be anything else. The drift of life in contemporary America is toward free association."
I grew up in the gentile suburbs of a largely Germanic city where Jews and Christians mostly got along. I attended a public school during the week; I went to a Jewish "Sunday school" on Sundays. I had two sets of friends, one at each end of the city. In the leafy, postwar village where we lived, Catholic, Protestant, Episcopal, and Baptist churches were all around, while the nearest synagogue lay twenty miles away, in a district that increasingly was black. I caught on early to the richly disjunctive business of belonging to a minority in America. I learned to read passable Hebrew at the synagogue while singing in my high school Christmas choir. I was "confirmed" at fifteen (the Reformers' bar mitzvah) while dating an Episcopal minister's daughter. I thought nothing of these apparent contradictions. By the time I was twenty, however, I had grown out of both religions and left Ohio. In me, and in many others, life's drift won.
* * *
The Hasidim queued up at JFK were almost as far from my own past as from Poland's. Their regulation three-piece black wool suits, matching knee- length overcoats, starched shirts, and hard fedoras clearly marked them as a breed apart. No wonder space-age airports made them nervous. Like Shakers, they inhabited a sartorial time warp dating from their European exile. Yet dress was not what really unified them. Their clothes were a veil, a surface, a layer of armor, protecting a tradition much more ancient.
A young man seated near me, with auburn ringlets and a beatific face, began to fidget. I watched him search his suitcase, then lean back on the couch, roll up a sleeve, and tie onto his arm the identical leather phylacteries used by King David. This was the tradition that most mattered. Despite their outer garments, he and his people predated Europe. Their real roots went back three thousand years.
Like their opposite number, the twentieth-century Muslims, these were people of a sacred book. They knew their book and lived by it and so received a faith that unified them as a Chosen People. Their way was lighted by a revelation fixed in writing while the rest of the world ran out like candle wax. Later the man could not quite look at me. Careful not to bump our baggage carts, his eyes swept the tips of my shoes as we passed in a doorway.
On board I learned that his group comprised a block-booked package tour of thirty people on a two-week tour of Jerusalem. Others, like the couple I had met, would stop in Brussels. I was embarked on a different pilgrimage, one that would end four months from now, in Mecca. Setting out alone tonight, I felt a complex kinship with these strangers, a tenuous relationship — as history is tenuous, a connection less of blood than irony. I had never been much of a Jew by any standard. By theirs I did not even qualify. Yet even now, as a recent Muslim convert with proof on a piece of paper in my wallet, I understood the world the Hasidim recalled.
* * *
I hadn't gone shopping for a new religion. After twenty-five years as a writer in America, I wanted something to soften my cynicism. I was searching for new terms by which to see. The way one is raised establishes certain needs in this department. From a pluralist background, I naturally placed great stress on the matters of racism and freedom. Then, in my early twenties, I had gone to live in Africa for three years. During this time, which was formative for me, I'd rubbed shoulders with blacks of many different tribes, with Arabs, Berbers, and even Europeans, who were Muslim. By and large these people did not share the Western obsession with race as a social category. In our encounters being oddly colored rarely mattered. I was welcomed first and judged on merit later. By contrast, Europeans and Americans, including many who are free of racist notions, automatically class people racially. Muslims classified people by their faith and their actions. I found this transcendent and refreshing. Malcolm X saw his nation's salvation in it. "America needs to understand Islam," he wrote, "because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem."
I was looking for an escape route, too, from the isolating terms of a materialistic culture. I wanted access to a spiritual dimension, but the conventional paths I had known as a boy were closed. My father had been a Jew; my mother Christian. Because of my mongrel background, I had a foot in two religious camps. Both faiths were undoubtedly profound. Yet the one that emphasizes a Chosen People I found insupportable; while the other, based in a mystery, repelled me. A century before, my maternal great-great-grandmother's name had been set in stained glass at the High Street Church of Christ in Hamilton, Ohio. By the time I was twenty, this meant nothing to me.
These were the terms my early life provided. The more I thought about it now, the more I returned to my experiences in Muslim Africa. After two return trips to Morocco, in 1981 and 1985, I came to feel that Africa, the continent, had little to do with the balanced life I found there. It was not, that is, a continent I was after, nor an institution, either. I was looking for a framework I could live with, a vocabulary of spiritual concepts applicable to the life I was living now. I did not want to "trade in" my culture. I wanted access to new meanings.
* * *
After a mid-Atlantic dinner I went to wash up in the bathroom. During my absence a quorum of Hasidim lined up to pray outside the door. By the time I'd finished, they were too immersed to notice me. Emerging from the bathroom, I could barely work the handle. Stepping into the aisle was out of the question.
I could only stand with my head thrust into the hallway, staring at the congregation's backs. Holding palm-size prayer books, they cut an impressive figure, tapping the texts on their breastbones as they davened. Little by little the movements grew erratic, like a mild, bobbing form of rock and roll. I watched from the bathroom door until they were finished, then slipped back down the aisle to my seat.
We landed together later that night in Brussels. Reboarding, I found a discarded Yiddish newspaper on a food tray. When the plane took off for Morocco, they were gone.
I don't mean to imply here that my life during this period conformed to any grand design. In the beginning, around 1981, I was driven by curiosity and an appetite for travel. My favorite place to go, when I had the money, was Morocco. When I could not travel, there were books. This fascination brought me into contact with a handful of writers driven to the exotic, authors capable of sentences like this, by Freya Stark:
The perpetual charm of Arabia is that the traveller finds his level there simply as a human being; the people's directness, deadly to the sentimental or the pedantic, likes the less complicated virtues; and the pleasantness of being liked for oneself might, I think, be added to the five reasons for travel given me by Sayyid Abdulla, the watchmaker: "to leave one's troubles behind one; to earn a living; to acquire learning; to practice good manners; and to meet honorable men."
I could not have drawn up a list of demands, but I had a fair idea of what I was after. The religion I wanted should be to metaphysics as metaphysics is to science. It would not be confined by a narrow rationalism or traffic in mystery to please its priests. There would be no priests, no separation between nature and things sacred. There would be no war with the flesh, if I could help it. Sex would be natural, not the seat of a curse upon the species. Finally, I'd want a ritual component, a daily routine to sharpen the senses and discipline my mind. Above all, I wanted clarity and freedom. I did not want to trade away reason simply to be saddled with a dogma.
The more I learned about Islam, the more it appeared to conform to what I was after.
* * *
Most of the educated Westerners I knew around this time regarded any strong religious climate with suspicion. They classified religion as political manipulation, or they dismissed it as a medieval concept, projecting upon it notions from their European past.
It was not hard to find a source for their opinions. A thousand years of Western history had left us plenty of fine reasons to regret a path that led through so much ignorance and slaughter. From the Children's Crusade and the Inquisition to the transmogrified faiths of nazism and communism during our century, whole countries have been exhausted by belief. Nietzsche's fear, that the modern nation-state would become a substitute religion, had proved tragically accurate. Our century, it seemed to me, was ending in an age beyond belief, which believers inhabited as much as agnostics.
Regardless of church affiliation, secular humanism is the air westerners breathe, the lens we gaze through. Like any world view, this outlook is pervasive and transparent. It forms the basis of our broad identification with democracy and with the pursuit of freedom in all its countless and beguiling forms. Immersed in our shared preoccupations, one may easily forget that other ways of life exist on the same planet.
At the time of my trip, for instance, 650 million Muslims with a majority representation in forty-four countries adhered to the formal teachings of Islam. In addition, about 400 million more were living as minorities in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Assisted by postcolonial economics, Islam has become in a matter of thirty years a major faith in Western Europe. Of the world's great religions, Islam alone was adding to its fold.
My politicized friends were dismayed by my new interest. They all but universally confused Islam with the machinations of half a dozen Middle Eastern tyrants. The books they read, the news broadcasts they viewed depicted the faith as a set of political functions. Almost nothing was said of its spiritual practice. I liked to quote Mae West to them: "Anytime you take religion for a joke, the laugh's on you."
Historically a Muslim sees Islam as the final, matured expression of an original religion reaching back to Adam. It is as resolutely monotheistic as Judaism, whose major prophets Islam reveres as links in a progressive chain, culminating in Jesus and Muhammad. Essentially a message of renewal, Islam has done its part on the world stage to return the forgotten taste of life's lost sweetness to millions of people. Its book, the Qur'an, caused Goethe to remark, "You sec, this teaching never fails; with all our systems, we cannot go, and generally speaking no man can go, further."
Traditional Islam is expressed through the practice of five pillars. Declaring one's faith, prayer, charity, and fasting are activities pursued repeatedly throughout one's life. Conditions permitting, each Muslim is additionally charged with undertaking a pilgrimage to Mecca once in a lifetime. The Arabic term for this fifth rite is hadj. Scholars relate the word to the concept of kasd, "aspiration," and to the notion of men and women as travelers on earth. In Western religions pilgrimage is a vestigial tradition, a quaint, folkloric concept commonly reduced to metaphor. Among Muslims, on the other hand, the hadj embodies a vital experience for millions of new pilgrims every year. In spite of the modern content of their lives, it remains an act of obedience, a profession of belief, and the visible expression of a spiritual community. For a majority of Muslims the hadj is an ultimate goal, the trip of a lifetime.
As a convert I felt obliged to go to Mecca. As a veteran traveler I couldn't imagine a more compelling goal.
The annual, month-long fast of Ramadan precedes the hadj by about one hundred days. These two rites form a period of intensified awareness in Muslim society. I wanted to put this period to use. I had read about Islam; I had joined a mosque near my home in California; I had started to practice. Now I hoped to deepen what I was learning by submerging myself in a region where Islam infuses every aspect of existence.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Hadj"
by .
Copyright © 1993 Michael Wolfe.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.