IslamiCity
Listen PodCasts, Live Quran, Watch Videos @VideoHub
One of the consequences of abandoning the Creator, Almighty Allah, is to abandon oneself. To forget Him is to be made to forget one's own essence.
For people are created to worship their Creator and Master, turning their lives into an orchard of devotion, a stream of servitude, and a dawn chorus of praise to His holy Self and sublime Attributes, in full accordance with His command. To do otherwise is to swim against the current, to live unnaturally, and to embrace aberration, which inevitably yields proportionally unnatural and aberrant results.
The truth remains: Allah is the Creator and Master, while people are no more than His creations and servants, endowed with free will to choose willingly and conscientiously the path of His only truth-Islam-over the rest of phony and pretentious paths, and to submit to Him, living according to His revealed word of inspiration, enlightenment, and guidance, rather than the conceited and sham authorities and "words" of men.
Indeed, as the adages affirm: it is unnerving for a servant to live a life without serving; life withers when severed from the One who gives it; and estrangement from the Creator is estrangement from life itself.
The never‑ending undermining of justice, democracy, and fairness-perpetrated at the highest national and international levels-has led to incessant instability, conflicts, wars of attrition, ethnic cleansing, and genocides. This demonstrates that modern man has yet to shed the mantle of shallow barbarism, tribalism, and chauvinism, and to begin viewing the world, life, and humanity in a nobler light.
Refined cultures and advanced civilizations remain the ultimate goal, but they are still distant dreams, their paths strewn with obstacles that appear practically insurmountable. As a result, the most elusive yet most coveted assets of the human race-peace, security, happiness, and holistic well‑being-remain anything but attainable, let alone cherished and enjoyed. Civilization itself remains none but a utopian mirage.
What is generally regarded as "civilization" today is merely a spectacularly staged decoy by corrupt world orders and their extended arms of governments and media, designed to mask dysfunctions and anesthetize expectant populations. There is nevertheless a grim consistency here: there can be no peace among people if there is no peace within people; no progress or optimism outwardly if the same is lacking inwardly.
Surely, one cannot help others if he cannot help himself, nor can he guide anyone if he himself is misguided. Such is the dreadful state of humanity: wandering without compass, colliding with dead ends. Optimism has withered, and hope, once a balm, has become a thorn of discomfort and despair.
It stands to reason that materialism-both as a doctrine that holds matter to be the fundamental substance of reality, and as a way of life that champions excessive attachment to possessions and wealth-is the quintessential emblem of humanity's modern downfall. It is the face and the loudest anthem of modern man's ruin.
Having reduced themselves to mere matter, people have ended up prioritizing possessions, wealth, and status symbols over spiritual and moral values. The former has become the sole obsession and goal, while the latter is treated as a lateral inconvenience, at best a token lip service.
Materialism further reduces human experience to mechanical processes, rendering humans to live and behave like robots or machines. And so, hearts grow hardened, emotions die, and minds become clouded. Nothing functions properly except the body, which merely follows predetermined and programmed behavioral patterns.
Life is thus rendered cold, meaningless, empty, boring, and one‑dimensionally flat. People themselves become anything but exciting, visionary, ingenious, or inspirational. Genuine meaning, beauty, and authenticity have long vanished, leaving behind a black hole of nothingness, meaninglessness, and ugliness, which connotes a void that continues to devour man and everything he imagines himself to be or to possess.
Makkah stands as the antithesis of this condition. It is the place where the human being is summoned to shed the illusions that imprison him. In its barren valley, the glitter of the world loses its power. The desert does away with the unnecessary, leaving only the essential. To come to Makkah is to sacrifice: comfort, wealth, routine, ego.
The pilgrim leaves behind home, identity, and social markers, entering a state of radical vulnerability in which worldly protections, privileges, and distractions are stripped away. Hajj is not a journey of accumulation but of abandonment. It is the ritual of emptying oneself so that one may be filled with truth.
The pilgrim walks in the footsteps of the Prophet Ibrahim, who was willing to sacrifice what he loved most. In that willingness lies the secret of liberation. When the heart is freed from attachment, it becomes capable of receiving the Divine presence.
The pilgrim also walks in the footsteps of the Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him and his family), who endured immense suffering for the sake of truth and was eventually forced to leave his beloved hometown of Makkah. Then again, within those sufferings and that migration lay the hidden secrets of mobilization and victory. He and his earliest followers suffered in order to become purer, better, and stronger; and they migrated so that they might return. When they did, they re‑entered Makkah with virtually no resistance, restoring its sanctity and reviving its place in history and in the building of civilization.
When people begin to live for higher causes, everything-including life, vocation, and home-takes on a new meaning. Many things suddenly reveal themselves not as we once thought they were, nor as we desired them to be, but as what they truly are, or what we never imagined they could become. People start questioning perceptions, narratives, and the very realities they once assumed.
Makkah, therefore, was not only a compass and an axis but also a criterion. It offers the lost and disoriented soul a point of meaning, a reference, and a yardstick. By it, a person can judge, appreciate, experience, and truly live. By the way, life is not to be lived and enjoyed according to our distorted desires, but rather in accordance with the will of the Creator of life-the One who knows all that is manifest and concealed in the heavens and the earth, and what lies within the hearts of men.
Makkah as a criterion is therapy, not metaphorically, but existentially. It heals by removing the sources of human distress: comparison, competition, fear, and self‑obsession. In Makkah, no one cares who you are. No one asks about your profession, your income, your lineage, or your achievements. The city compels you to confront the truth that your worth is not tied to what you own or display. Your value lies in your heart and in the record of your deeds; it lies in what you most genuinely are and what you were always meant to be.
Such a measure is absolutely fair, for true meanings and identities are what people can afford and live peacefully with, whereas false standards, fabricated selves, and artificial distinctiveness are easy to generate but impossible to rationalize, sustain, or truly delight in. It is a lose‑lose situation. A person spends his resources and even himself, yet knows he is receiving nothing in return. Such is a pain easily understood, but difficult to dissociate from, and still more difficult to cure.
It is truly unfortunate that people attempt to live lives they cannot afford, not just in material terms, but also emotionally and psychologically. In striving to sustain illusions of grandeur, they exhaust their hearts, burden their minds, and fracture their spirits. What results is not fulfillment but depletion, a life stretched beyond its means, hollowed by desires it cannot sustain.
In passing, Shariati interprets the Hajj pilgrimage and its locus, Makkah, not only as ritual worship but as well as a profound existential drama. For him, Hajj is a reenactment of humanity's origin and destiny: a movement, a migration, a becoming. The pilgrim retraces the footsteps of Ibrahim, Hajar, and Isma'il, embodying struggle, sacrifice, and surrender to Allah.
In ihram, all worldly distinctions dissolve-wealth, race, and status are removed-leaving only the equality of servitude before Allah. In tawaf, the believer circles the Ka'bah, declaring Allah as the pivot of life and truth. At 'Arafat, humanity rehearses the Day of Judgment, standing equal before their Lord. In stoning the pillars, the pilgrim symbolically rejects idols, false authorities, and material attachments.
For Shariati, Hajj is the heart's flight beyond material confines, nationalism, and self-worship, a rebirth into the purified self, aligned with divine truth. It is both personal worship and civilizational manifesto. It is a collective declaration of Islam's universal truth, binding humanity to tawhid, justice, and equality.
There is furthermore no fear of violence, for Makkah is "balad amin"-the city of safety-where even animals and plants are protected. Each pilgrim should reflect that the One who safeguarded generations of both believers and polytheists-in a time when Makkah was under the control of impure idolatry-can surely protect him too from every form of insecurity and uncertainty. Pilgrims, while others suffer, are guests of Allah and under the full care of the Host. Their well‑being is His concern.
All things considered, one may ask affirmatively rather than anxiously: what can truly go wrong under such circumstances? As the Qur'an proclaims: "Have they not seen that We made (Makkah) a safe sanctuary, while people are being taken away all around them? Then in falsehood do they believe, and in the favor of Allah they disbelieve?" (al‑'Ankabut 67).
The Qur'an similarly highlights that the two greatest benefits the Quraysh had long enjoyed in Makkah were sustenance and security. It was Allah "who has fed them, saving them from hunger, and made them safe, saving them from fear" (Quraysh 4). Hence, Allah commands them to worship and serve only the true Lord of this House, the Ka'bah (Quraysh 3).
In the same vein are the words of Allah: "And they say: 'If we were to follow the guidance with you, we would be swept from our land.' Have we not established for them a safe sanctuary to which are brought the fruits of all things as provision from Us? But most of them do not know" (al-Qasas 57).
This verse beautifully parallels the earlier Qur'anic emphasis on Makkah as a sanctuary of sustenance and security. The Quraysh feared that embracing divine guidance would divest them of worldly power and uproot them from their land. Allah responds by reminding them that He Himself had already established Makkah as a protected haven of peace, a place where the fruits of all things were brought as provision. Their fear of loss was misplaced, because the very stability and prosperity they enjoyed were gifts from Allah, not products of their own ingenuity. They did not hold mastery over what was to come.
Allah also says: "O you who have believed, indeed the polytheists are unclean, so let them not approach al-Masjid al-Haram after this, their final year. And if you fear poverty (from the loss of their merchandise), Allah will enrich you from His bounty if He wills. Indeed, Allah is Knowing and Wise" (al-Tawbah 28).
Here again, Allah emphasizes that the establishment of truth and the removal of the impurity of paganism and polytheism do not lead to loss, but rather to acculturation and enrichment. What may appear, from a material perspective, as deprivation is in reality a means of divine provision and expansion.
There is, therefore, nothing in the ways of falsehood that believers should crave, imitate, or feel dependent upon, nor anything with which they should seek association. This principle must be most pronounced in Makkah, where the purity of faith and the detachment from all forms of worldly contamination are to be embodied in their fullest sense.
Without doubt, truth is a fountain of refinement and enrichment; falsehood is a pit of impoverishment and degradation. Makkah denotes that fountain at the heart of the expansive meadow of Islam's universal and global truth. It is the source from which the waters of guidance flow, irrigating the barren lands of human existence and transforming them into gardens of faith and civilization. In Makkah, the fountain of truth is not imagined but lived, not distant but immediate, its streams reaching across the world, binding humanity to the orbit (qiblah) of surrender.
In Makkah, the pilgrim discovers a freedom unknown in the modern world: the freedom of not needing to impress anyone, to fear anyone, or to depend on anyone in order to live truth and fulfill authenticity. Once liberated, the pilgrim should lose himself in the infinity of the city's meaning and the consequentiality of its purpose. He becomes intoxicated with inner worth and beauty, and-without attachment to the material hindrances of the world-traverses the vertical dimensions of life, freely enjoying them and constantly seeking to relate himself to those dimensions.
If it is exciting for a pilgrim to discover that absolutely nobody cares about how he looks, and that no one judges him on that basis, it becomes all the more profound when he realizes that neither does he himself care about his appearance, nor does he judge himself by it. The beauty lies in the fact that everyone and everything is immersed in a set of celestial norms and criteria. Makkah becomes a milieu, and Hajj a moment in time, where matter, time, and space recede into the background, and where otherworldliness, no matter how small or seemingly inconsequential (because people differ in their spiritual and mental capacities), is elevated and placed upon a pedestal.
Even when ihram, as Makkah's symbolic uniform, is not worn-being only a temporary and conditional attire of the pilgrim-simplicity and meaningfulness in dress remain the norm. Rarely does anyone bring his worldly "official uniform" into Makkah, lest it rival the spirit and dignity of the sacred city. Therein, adornment and fashion kneel before essence, and form is consistently made subordinate to meaning.
Most people may not articulate this explicitly, nor consciously reason along such lines, but the truth of Makkah and its identity reside deeply within their cores, shaped over the course of their lives as they continually orient themselves towards it as their ritual and existential qiblah, whether physically or spiritually.
Beyond clothing, even people's haircuts-whether shaving, significantly shortening, or trimming-contribute to sameness, equality, and uniformity. What Makkah epitomizes is the apex of Islamic philosophy, enshrined in the Prophet's hadith: "Verily Allah does not look at your forms and your wealth, but He looks at your hearts and your deeds" (Sahih Muslim).
Giving up oneself for Allah means surrendering everything to Him, or offering it all in His way. It is the act of placing one's possessions, desires, and very being at the disposal of the Divine will. To give all away for Allah is not loss but emancipation and deliverance, since what is relinquished in His path is destined to return as eternal gain harvested precisely when it is most truly needed.
The Long Road to Mecca: A Brief Historical Overview of Chinese Muslim Pilgr...