Mumbai To Mecca: A Pilgrimage to the Holy Sites of Islam

"By the way the Hajj is actually not the biggest Muslim pilgrimage in the world as many people often assume. The biggest is the Shia Arba’in pilgrimage to Karbala, which reportedly attracts 20 million people. When I went on the Hajj—just before Covid, officially there were 2.5 million people, and unofficially as many as four million—a lot of people enter the country before the Hajj and are not always accounted for. The Hajj rites are not just centred on the Kaaba, the black cube in the centre of Makkah. The ‘mini Hajj’, known as the Umrah, can be concluded entirely within the vicinity of the Kaaba, but the Hajj proper involves nights in tents in the desert; time atop Mount Arafat and even sleeping out in the desert in the open air. All of these are based on ancient rites we believe were originally set out by Ibrahim—Abraham—the father of all three monotheistic faiths. A lot of these rites go back to the story of Ibraham and his second wife, Hagar, which is a story also found in the Bible—Martin Lings refers to it in his book—in which he has to abandon Hagar and his son with her, Ishmael in the desert. This is seen as the foundational story of Makkah as a town. Through the Hajj we reenact some of that story as well as other moments from Ibrahim’s life, such as when he is tested by God; being asked to sacrifice his own son and being tempted by the devil. Each rite, just like Ramadan, is a metaphor for aspects of our own lives. You might have heard of how we chuck stones at three pillars? These pillars represent the ‘devil’; again, a metaphor for the ‘devil’ within; the vices and challenges we struggle with. In total, over a period of five days, almost four million people are moved from location to location within tiny windows of time. Logistically it’s an absolute nightmare. I took this book with me on the Hajj. It’s beautifully written, but I hadn’t heard of Trojanow before I picked it up in a charity shop. One section, I remember vividly is when Trojanow is at the pillars and he thinks he is going to die because of the sheer weight of the crowd. He didn’t write this that long ago, so you can imagine how I felt reading it, thinking, my god! I had my elderly mother with me, and her twin, my aunt and her son. There have been some horrific incidents at bottlenecks in the past—I run through some in my Hajj Diaries—but to the credit of the Saudi authorities, they have done a marvellous job in putting in new safety measures. If you want to go chuck the pebbles at the pillars now, they are the size of high-rise towers housed in a structure resembling a multi-story car park. So, they’ve put some of their money to good use, but they really need to get the toilets in the Mina tent city sorted. I struggled there, and I’m somebody who rough camps! Absolutely. I loved it. It’s nice and small, so it popped into my bag very easily. It’s a very light and easy read. Some of the chapters are only a page and a half and others are much longer. It’s billed as the Hajj ‘through the eyes of a Westerner, but the heart of a Muslim,’ because he’s a convert to Islam of German-Bulgarian origin. It’s a wonderful glimpse not only into his journey to the Hajj but his journey to conversion. To tell this, he flits back and forth in time, between Mumbai, where he was working at a kind of school for young ulema (scholars) teaching them English, and his Hajj—one of the great chapters is called Ramadan where he offers a glimpse of his first Ramadan as a new Muslim with the Indian Muslim community he is amongst; the excitement of that first day of fasting and the difficulty of the rest. Trojanow reveals how society changes to the demands of Ramadan, and how the Muslims around him become even more pious. We get a glimpse of a beautiful communal iftar when he breaks fast and his attempts at seclusion in the last ten days of the month, where he says rather than everyday life being interrupted by prayer it is ‘prayer interrupted by everyday needs’. Credit also has to go to the translator, Rebecca Morrison, as the prose is very beautiful. You can imagine, carrying lots of dry guides on how to perform the Hajj, the joy I felt having this beautiful book to dip in and out of."