The perpetual pilgrimage (2/2): initiatic death and the inner pilgrimage

By Eric Geoffroy · August 5, 2021 · 6 min read

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The tension of the Muslim believers towards the One is expressed through their himma, or ‘concentrative aspiration’, towards the Centre. One of the secrets of the pilgrimage, according to al-Ghazali (1058-1111), lies in those instants of communion of thoughts and invocations addressed to God during the ‘station’ at ’Arafa. The himma there is such that it is said to bring about the outpouring of the rain of mercy. Indeed, in that desert climate, the weather is often overcast, even rainy, on the day of ’Arafa.

Continued from The perpetual pilgrimage (1/2).

The pilgrimage, resorption into divine unity

‘The pilgrims, said the Prophet, are the guests of God.’ They come in answer to the divine call. This is the meaning of the talbiya: ‘Here I am before Thee, O my God, here I am before Thee! Thou hast no associate. Praise, beneficence and sovereignty belong to Thee. Thou hast no associate.’ This formula must be pronounced aloud to break the forgetfulness and estrangement that are the habitual condition of the human being. For, according to one tradition, men were called ‘an-nas’ because they forgot (nisyan) the covenant they had concluded with God.

As the formula of the talbiya implies, the pilgrim’s ‘I’ is summoned from stage to stage by the divine ‘Thou’. Just as the sacrificial victim is led gently by the pilgrim to be immolated, so the pilgrim’s ‘I’ is itself immolated in the name of the tawhid, divine unity. The delivered being then escapes from the husk of the self, like Ishmael rising up through the ransom of the ram.

The pilgrimage is thus death and resurrection. Within the shari’a itself, the believer is asked, before setting out for Mecca, to settle his debts and to make good his wrongs: going towards initiatic death, the pilgrim will never again return to his initial state. Wrapped in their ihram garments that evoke shrouds, the pilgrims see themselves as they will be on the day of judgement, come forth from their graves to appear before God. Indeed, when they die their physiological death, Muslims often have themselves buried wrapped in the ihram garment they wore at Mecca.

The pilgrim is therefore resorbed into divine unity. ‘All things return to God’, warns the Qur’an (III, 109). The annihilation of the human ego is most plainly materialised in the tawaf, for the pilgrim’s circumambulations around the Ka’ba are those of man’s existential nothingness (al-’adam) around the sole true Reality: the Being of God. But this extinction in God takes on its full significance at ’Arafa, an immense desert plain where the gaze escapes over austere mountains. In this no man’s land, in the literal sense of the expression, one is no longer in a familiar environment, but on some distant planet. Such is the impression one has when visiting the place outside the season of the hajj. When one sees ’Arafa during the pilgrimage, the density of the crowd renders the site unrecognisable.

’The pilgrimage is ‘Arafa’

The Prophet Muhammad summed up the pre-eminence of ’Arafa thus: ’The pilgrimage is ‘Arafa.’ The ‘station’ (wuquf) at ’Arafa, for at least a few moments on the 9th of the month of Dhu’l-hijja, is the sole indispensable ritual element for the pilgrimage to be valid. ’Certain sins, the Prophet also affirms, are forgiven only at ‘Arafa.’ The plain of ’Arafa is in fact a metaphysical place, and therefore a physical non-place; it is doubtless for this reason that, contrary to all expectation, it does not form part of the sacred territory (haram). At ’Arafa, the divine theophany is bound to no particular form, whereas at Mecca it has its seat in the holy temple, the ‘House of God’. At ’Arafa, there is not the least support: no tree, memorial, construction or other; there is only that stripped and grandiose face-to-face of the believer with the Absolute. ’Arafa prefigures the day of resurrection more than any other phase of the pilgrimage; the following invocation, recited during the ‘station’, alludes to it directly: ‘My God, shade us beneath Thy Throne, on the day when there will be no shade but Thy shade!’ The station at ’Arafa is that of knowledge (al-ma’rifa), a term from the same root as ’Arafa. Here more than elsewhere, ma’rifa aims at the knowledge of the One (al-Ahad).

The inner pilgrimage

This pilgrimage towards the centre of the world is simultaneously a journey towards the centre of one’s own being. Is it not said in the Qur’an: ‘We are closer to man than his own jugular vein’ (L, 16)? While fervently practising the rites of the pilgrimage, Muslims must take the Ka’ba for what it is: a mere support of worship. We know Islam’s propensity for stripping things bare. Tracking down every trace of idolatry, the caliph ’Umar, second successor of Muhammad, had already declared that he would not kiss the Black Stone had he not seen the Prophet do so. Here is Rabi’a al-’Adawiyya, saint of eighth-century Iraq and voice of divine love, who, on the road of the pilgrimage, saw the Ka’ba coming towards her: ‘What I need, she said, is the Master of the Ka’ba and not the Ka’ba; what have I to do with it?’ Many mystics have thus called for the inner pilgrimage; consequently, the doctors of the Law suspected them of making the obligation of the outer pilgrimage null and void. This is one of the charges held against al-Hallaj (857-922). Had he not written these verses: ‘The people have a pilgrimage, and I have my pilgrimage towards my house. They sacrifice animals, I sacrifice my soul and my blood. There are men who process, but not with their bodies. They process around God, who has dispensed them from going to the sanctuary.’ Rumi (1207-1273), founder of the Mevlevi brotherhood, the celebrated whirling dervishes, proclaimed in his turn: ‘O you who set out towards the pilgrimage, where are you going? The Beloved is here. Come! Come!’¹

Concerning the inner pilgrimage, Ibn ’Arabi (1165-1240) comments on a famous saying attributed now to Muhammad, now to ’Ali: ‘Whoever knows himself knows his Lord.’ ‘In setting out in quest of the House of God, you set out in quest of yourself; when you reach yourself, you know who you are; when you know who you are, you know your Lord; and you know whether you are He or whether you are not He: it is then that you obtain the true knowledge.’

Nowadays, and because of the ever-growing flow of pilgrims, the hajj is truly an ordeal. One often hears it said that the ’umra, the lesser pilgrimage that can be accomplished outside the great movements of crowds, is, by comparison, ‘honey’. In any case, the trying character of the hajj is consubstantial with it, since it has no other aim than the purification and initiatic death of the human ego: ‘Die before you die!’ the Prophet Muhammad had said. In fact, the ordeal that the hajj constitutes is commensurate with the final cyclical position in which we find ourselves: for Islam, the last religion revealed for this humanity, man currently experiences a maximal estrangement from the paradisiacal state. The talbiya formulated by the pilgrim aims precisely at renewing the primordial pact (mithaq) sealed between God and men.

Eric Geoffroy, published with the kind permission of the journal ‘Parfaire l’homme’.

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