January 13, 2006--Friday Fanaticisms XVII--Sticks And Stones
I’m OK with the fastings, the Sabbath ceremonies with candles, eating the Host, and even an occasional animal sacrifice, but I don’t know about the Ritual Attack on Satan that concludes the annual Hajj in Mecca. The recent one led to a stampede in Mina, Saudi Arabia that wound up killing 345 pilgrims and injuring at least 1,000 (see NT Times article linked below).
First about the Hajj itself. It is a weeklong series of activities that include (1) a trek to Mina where pilgrims sleep before (2) hiking to Mount Arafat, and (3) after that a visit to the Muzdalifa Plain where they gather stones for the upcoming stonings that highlight and conclude the week. Then (4) they move back to Mina where they encounter three walls or columns that represent Satan because that is the place where the devil is believed to have tempted Abraham. They proceed to pelt them with stones, thereby purging themselves of evil. Next (5) they return to Mecca where they circle the Kaaba in the Great Mosque and then (6) return to Mina for more stonings. It was at this final stage of the Hajj that the stampede occurred—at least 70,000 were crowded into a bottleneck of a space where on previous Hajji many hundreds have been trampled to death.
The Times piece is largely about the bottleneck aspect of this—why Saudi officials haven’t fixed the situation, widening access and egress, redirecting traffic in the narrow valleys, and such. Obviously all of this should be done since this is a notoriously dangerous situation with stampedes of this sort every time. Just last year the Ministry of Hajj completed a significant improvement, turning circular barriers around the walls that are stoned into ellipses. Well done.
Though I am also concerned about the safety of the traffic flow, in my agnosticism I also wonder about the situation itself. I know that a revisionist history of Islam would suggest that one reason The Prophet was originally resisted and driven from Mecca to Medina by those pre-Islamic priests was because they controlled access to the Kaaba and thereby, to put it directly, had a thriving version of a tourist business going on. They needed Mohammed out of town to preserve their monopoly. (Since I am an equal-opportunity offender of all orthodoxies, I must hasten to add that early and even contemporary Christian pilgrimage routes were also the profitable beginnings of modern tourism—there would be no Rome or Camino De Santiago as we know them if there was not the religious requirement that all believers must partake of one of these pilgrimages at least once in a lifetime.
Having said this, I also worry about something as profoundly important as the Hajj being so much about various forms of stonings. If this were just a symbolic activity, so be it. But day-to-day stonings very much persist to this day, for “crimes” such as adultery, non-marital sex, all forms of homosexuality, etc. If some feel the need to be guided by the rules set forth in Deuteronomy, also so be it, but let’s try to get out of the stoning business. If we could, I’d even vote for some old-fashioned name calling. At least that doesn't break any bones.
First about the Hajj itself. It is a weeklong series of activities that include (1) a trek to Mina where pilgrims sleep before (2) hiking to Mount Arafat, and (3) after that a visit to the Muzdalifa Plain where they gather stones for the upcoming stonings that highlight and conclude the week. Then (4) they move back to Mina where they encounter three walls or columns that represent Satan because that is the place where the devil is believed to have tempted Abraham. They proceed to pelt them with stones, thereby purging themselves of evil. Next (5) they return to Mecca where they circle the Kaaba in the Great Mosque and then (6) return to Mina for more stonings. It was at this final stage of the Hajj that the stampede occurred—at least 70,000 were crowded into a bottleneck of a space where on previous Hajji many hundreds have been trampled to death.
The Times piece is largely about the bottleneck aspect of this—why Saudi officials haven’t fixed the situation, widening access and egress, redirecting traffic in the narrow valleys, and such. Obviously all of this should be done since this is a notoriously dangerous situation with stampedes of this sort every time. Just last year the Ministry of Hajj completed a significant improvement, turning circular barriers around the walls that are stoned into ellipses. Well done.
Though I am also concerned about the safety of the traffic flow, in my agnosticism I also wonder about the situation itself. I know that a revisionist history of Islam would suggest that one reason The Prophet was originally resisted and driven from Mecca to Medina by those pre-Islamic priests was because they controlled access to the Kaaba and thereby, to put it directly, had a thriving version of a tourist business going on. They needed Mohammed out of town to preserve their monopoly. (Since I am an equal-opportunity offender of all orthodoxies, I must hasten to add that early and even contemporary Christian pilgrimage routes were also the profitable beginnings of modern tourism—there would be no Rome or Camino De Santiago as we know them if there was not the religious requirement that all believers must partake of one of these pilgrimages at least once in a lifetime.
Having said this, I also worry about something as profoundly important as the Hajj being so much about various forms of stonings. If this were just a symbolic activity, so be it. But day-to-day stonings very much persist to this day, for “crimes” such as adultery, non-marital sex, all forms of homosexuality, etc. If some feel the need to be guided by the rules set forth in Deuteronomy, also so be it, but let’s try to get out of the stoning business. If we could, I’d even vote for some old-fashioned name calling. At least that doesn't break any bones.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
9:23 AM
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