THE ROAD TO MECCA

...

I leave Medina late at night, following the "eastern route"-the one the Prophet followed on his last pilgrimage to Mecca, a few months before his death.

...

There has never been any other road for me; although I did not know it for many years, Mecca has always been my goal. It called to me, long before my mind became aware of it, with a powerful voice: 'My Kingdom is in this world as well as in the world to come: My Kingdom waits for man's body as well as for his soul and extends over all that he thinks and feels and does -his commerce as well as his prayer, his bedchamber as well as his politics; My Kingdom knows neither end nor limits.' And when, over a number of years, all this became clear to me, I knew where I belonged: I knew that the brotherhood of Islam had been waiting for me ever since I was born; and I embraced Islam.

...

This, then, was the Kaaba, the goal of longing for so many millions of people for so many centuries. To reach this goal, countless pilgrims had made heavy sacrifices throughout the ages; many had died on the way; many had reached it only after great privations; and to all of them this small, square building was the apex of their desires, and to reach it meant fulfilment.

There it stood, almost a perfect cube (as its Arabic name con­notes) entirely covered with black brocade, a quiet island in the middle of the vast quadrangle of the mosque: much quieter than any other work of architecture anywhere in the world. It would almost appear that he who first built the Kaaba - for since the time of Abraham the original structure has been rebuilt several times in the same shape - wanted to create a parable of man's humility before God. The builder knew that no beauty of archi­tectural rhythm and no perfection of line, however great, could ever do justice to the idea of God: and so he confined himself to the simplest three-dimensional form imaginable - a cube of stone.

...

Never had I felt so strongly as now, before the Kaaba, that the hand of the builder had come so close to his religious conception. In the utter simplicity of a cube, in the complete renunciation of all beauty of line and form, spoke this thought: "Whatever beauty man may be able to create with his hands, it will be only conceit to deem it worthy of God; there­fore, the simplest that man can conceive is the greatest that he can do to express the glory of God.' A similar feeling may have been responsible for the mathematical simplicity of the Egyptian pyramids - although there man's conceit had at least found a vent in the tremendous dimensions he gave to his buildings. But here, in the Kaaba, even the size spoke of human renunciation and self-surrender; and the proud modesty of this little structure had no compare on earth.

...

And there i stood before the temple of Abraham and gazed at the marvel without thinking (for thoughts and reflec­tions came only much later), and out of some hidden, smiling kernel within me there slowly grew an elation like a song.

Smooth marble slabs, with sunlight reflections dancing upon them, covered the ground in a wide circle around the Kaaba, and over these marble slabs walked many people, men and women, round and round the black-draped House of God. Among them were some who wept, some who loudly called to God in prayer, and many who had no words and no tears but could only walk with lowered heads . . .

It is part of the hajj to walk seven times around the Kaaba: not just to show respect to the central sanctuary of Islam but to recall to oneself the basic demand of Islamic life. The Kaaba is a symbol of God's Oneness; and the pilgrim's bodily movement around it is a symbolic expression of human activity, implying that not only our thoughts and feelings - all that is comprised in the term 'inner life' - but also our outward, active life, our doings and practical endeavours must have God as their centre.

And I, too, moved slowly forward and became part of the circular flow around the Kaaba. Off and on I became conscious of a man or woman near me; isolated pictures appeared fleet-ingly before my eyes arid vanished. There was a huge Negro in a white ihram, with a wooden rosary slung like a chain around a powerful, black wrist. An old Malay tripped along by my side for a while, his arms dangling, as if in helpless confusion, against his batik sarong. A grey eye under bushy brows - to whom did it belong?- and now lost in the crowd. Among the many people in front of the Black Stone, a young Indian woman: she was ob­viously ill; in her narrow, delicate face lay a strangely open yearning, visible to the onlooker's eye like the life of fishes and algae in the depths of a crystal-clear pond. Her hands with their pale, upturned palms were stretched out toward the Kaaba, and her fingers trembled as if in accompaniment to a wordless prayer...

I walked on and on, the minutes passed, all that had been small and bitter in my heart began to leave my heart, I became part of a circular stream - oh, was this the meaning of what we were doing: to become aware that one is a part of a movement in an orbit? Was this, perhaps, all confusion's end? And the minutes dissolved, and time itself stood still, and this was the centre of the universe . . .