My Hajj

My Hajj Adnan Mahmutović (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photos by Yousef Khanfar | www.yousefkhanfar.com The photos in Yousef Khanfar's Hajj project Humanity at Large, in cooperation with the United Nations, are impressionistic images that show human beings as islands within the waves of the great ocean of humanity, intertwined within the same fabric, stitched with fine threads of race, religion, color, and more. [End Page 10] The Puterbaugh series is a special feature sponsored by the WLT Puterbaugh Endowment. The tears, the rituals: a family goes on a journey and joins millions of strangers pouring into Mecca. In this moving essay, a writer evokes the beauty, movement, and emotion of the Hajj itself. In the beginning, there was the gravity of the call: And proclaim to the people the Hajj; they will come to you on foot and on every lean camel; they will come from every distant pass (The Qur'an 22:27). We answered as a family. All five of us. We were pulled out of our Nordic home to complete the circle of faith. Like a boomerang that throws itself out only to return to itself. A homecoming. I'd been feeling so old for years and dreamt of being buried in Mecca like men and women from old tales. But Hajj wasn't going to be that kind of story. The story of Hajj begins with your last will and testament. I asked people on social media what they wanted me to leave them. I didn't say why. They took me for my regular joking self while I was burning with the desire to finish my life in that holy place. I sat with SonNo.1 watching Swedish woods and told him I had nothing to leave them. Whatever I possessed would be regulated by state laws. I hoped that my writing would someday be enough for a few Swedish fikas. I named the person I entrust with sorting my unpublished mess. I didn't say I hoped my legacy to them was this family Hajj. A memory of my love. I imagined them without me, and I was missing them already, and I cried. I cried on the plane from Stockholm when everyone was asleep or watching movies. Cried in Istanbul while waiting for the delayed flight to Medina. Cried when some of the passengers were not let onto the plane because of visa issues and again when they fixed them. Cried at the passport check. At the first sight of people streaming into the Prophet's Mosque. When I met friends I didn't know were there. On the bus to Mecca when our guides sang Bosnian Nasheed songs. At first sight of the Kaaba. During our first tawaf around the Kaaba and at that first Fajr prayer outside Masjid Al-Haram as both men and women formed rows in ways I'd never seen before. At the break of dawn. I didn't cry because life was hard and unjust or because of past traumas or self-pity. That was new. From the onslaught of weird tears to the rituals, you will always be unprepared for Hajj. The guides will serve you practicalities and leave you to figure out the narrative as you become a character in that story: a family goes on a journey and joins millions of strangers pouring into Mecca. Hajj is the fifth pillar of Islam and the end of the cycle that begins with the Shahada, the simplest aspiration unbound by spacetime, over the five daily prayers, the fasting of Ramadan, and the zakat tax, to the stunning testimony of will set in one place at a prescribed time, only to come back to that original aspiration: La ilaha ilallah. There is no other divinity except God. Hajj is the walk in the shoes of God's friend Abraham, who built the Kaaba with his outcast son Ishmael. The ultimate testimony of faith. Your intention, the niyah, must be pure, and your material [End Page 11] commitment absolute. Every step, from the struggle to purchase a package, over the logistical problems and the global cocktails of germs and viruses and fungi...