Small note: I did this essay last night at an Iftar. Hands shaking, it seems that I have lost the ability to do spoken word in public… I worry I have lost the ability to speak without fear. Yet, I am grateful that I did speak. I am thankful that it was received well. And as I promised to several in attendance, I would release the essay once I was done. Blessings.
We call them obligations, as if written by Divine Decree, the only way that we can come to know God is through these things.
We speak of them as if we are put upon, we say ‘need’, and ‘must’, and it rolls off the tongue with an absence of want… how often we feel other than joy when we do that which has been told to us.
We call them obligations, the five pillars, outlined for us that we may have a better understanding of the Divine, a better chance at survival in the dunya, an opportunity to yearn for the deen in the moments in between.
We call them obligations, and they sit like a lingering overwhelm. A bucket list that we were provided upon our intention to be Muslim, checking them off one by one, worrying our bottom lip when we are unsure how we will fulfill them.
We call them obligations, and yet they call them opportunities.
“We stand on the shoulders of giants.” Chartres could only imagine who we would come to know as giants.
For we do not merely stand on their shoulders, we walk in their footsteps.
We call it Hajj. The Pilgrimage, the journey, the act of praxis made real, by following the path no longer a metaphor but a replication of those who came before us.
It is as if we look back upon our ancestors, our guides, those that came before us, and we trail along after like toddlers, seeking to better understand that which we could only hope to learn, while our feet long to tread the paths that others have created in their wake.
We look at our history as if it merely words upon paper, ink dripped on pages that we bore through in our tutelage.
Mousa, and the Prophet, but also Che Guevara, Huey P. Newton, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Ida B. Wells, Toussaint Louverture (Haiti), Fred Hampton, Angela Davis, Emiliano Zapata, Martin Luther King Jr.,… Malcom.
We call it Hajj, as if we are the only ones that follow in the footsteps of our ancestors. As if we forget ourselves, forget the way that our lives are intricately and Divinely woven by the Best of Planners.
We call it Hajj, as we pour over brochures, fretting over costs and expenditures, thinks of hotels, and places we long to see, thinking of food and shops, and tears that we’ve seen trail down cheeks of those who have gone before us.
We call it Hajj, yet they would have called it life.
Those that have gone before us, those that have given their lives in the pursuit of revolutionary bravery.
The trail that slaves took to freedom, those who housed them and those who used them, was this not Hajj?
Is Hajj not the hand held links of the indigenous, as they move from oil site to oil site, to protect the land from the hands of the greed induced fanatics that seek money in the wake of destruction?
The Protesting bodies that walked the streets of Alabama and Mississippi, in pursuit of liberation and equality for black and brown individuals, would this not be a Hajj, a pilgrimage?
Those who gave their lives for the freedom flotilla, both the first and the second and those that are to come… is this not a praxis of a path, outlined, and taken, a Hajj in its own right?
Hajj… the journey of the Gazawi to the borders of their prison in 2021, shot dead and harmed by those who would make peace an enemy.
We call them obligations, and I cannot help but wonder if we are doing a disservice to the very real implications of what an honor it is to walk in the trail of those that came before us.
We call them obligations, and I cannot help but wonder that the yawning ache in my chest, that crawls like a child, wondering what, and when, and how… can I live up to the ancestors that chose bravery over fear, courage over safety, honor over silence.
We call it Hajj, and yet for some, they would call it life.
I have yet to see all of the foot prints in the sand for those in which I follow, but I know that I do not tread into the future where others have not been. I take the wisdom in knowing that when the ink scrawled upon the book of life, that is the telling of my story, I lived it knowing that I was not alone.
For those that came before me carved the path of my Hajj, in the trail that they left behind.
Our lessons are not merely in our obligations.
They are in the way in which our lives, are pilgrimages, that were written and outlined, and crafted with love by the Divine.
We call them Obligations, but I choose to call it life.
For what greater opportunity, than to live, and to see my life as a Hajj in daily service of Allah.
May we find ourselves in the footsteps of those who wondered bravely into the unknown, the uncharted.
May we find ourselves one day, taking over where others feared to tread, and create paths that are new, for others behind us to walk in the wake of.
May we learn, that our honor is not in the ‘need’, but in the honor of the ‘want’, in the sacred opportunity of the doing, and in the living.
Ameen.
I truly miss this face