Shine Your Light
A Journey to Mecca in Layers
Ummah Wide Travel Series
By Dustin Craun
Years ago while visiting my Mother on the plains of Colorado, I walked out to the edge of the suburbs to look at the sky in all its glory as the sun was beginning to set. Once I reached my destination I sat in meditation and said over and over again in Arabic La illaha il Allah (There is no reality except God) centering my focus on my heart. After some time a storm that looked to be far away in the distance rapidly closed in with flashes of lightning striking all around me. As I began to walk home I continued my dhikr (sacred remembrances) but the lightning came closer and closer so I started to run, then boom, flash, I was to late a strike hit so close to me that all I could see was an all encompassing white light all around me.
What seemed like an eternity in a flash and then it was gone….. Ahhh! I was still alive, and after experiencing that flash of light encompass my entire being, I realized that is the closest existent metaphor for the spiritual or metaphysical light mentioned in the Qur’an which encompassed every layer of my being while I visited the holy city of Mecca for the first time shortly after that lightning strike.
This story is about my second trip to Mecca this past winter as I traveled across the world to make Umrah (the lesser pilgrimage to Mecca), to visit my wife’s family in the Arabian Peninsula and seeking to bask in that divine light again even if it was only for a moment.
It was with a bit of suddenness and surprise that I was able to travel across the world and retrace the steps in the path of the Prophets, the Awliyah (the spiritual saints/ sages) and all those millions and millions of people who came before me over thousands of years to visit these lands of pilgrimage.
Journeying from airport to airport to airport — San Francisco to Frankfurt to Istanbul to Jeddah — then straight to Mecca made for the ultimate contrasts in realities. In a world that is continuing to shrink culturally, and in airports throughout the world you can be anywhere and feel that you are always in the same place, immersed in the monoculture of westernization/ neoliberal capitalist colonial modernity. People wear mostly the same clothes, drink mostly the same drinks, eat mostly the same foods, shop at mostly the same shops and speak increasingly with similar lingual tongues. Not to say great and important cultural differences don’t still exist but in these spaces they are hard to see at times and there is probably no greater constant space of bombardment of capitalist consumerism than at the airport, which I just so happened to be stuck in as I was on and off of planes for over 30 hours.
On this day the contrasts were also embodied by my change in clothing going from my everyday suit jacket, vest, and dress shoes into changing to my ihram (essentially two white towels that men making pilgrimage to Mecca wear with nothing else) on the plane, going from wearing wingtip dress shoes to going barefoot (I forgot to bring sandals) for my last two hours on the plane, off the plane, through customs, from Jeddah to Mecca, a half mile walk from my hotel and to the sacred mosque. While the ihram is meant to symbolize the equality of all humans in front of God and ultimately on the day of judgement, getting off the plane I saw how temporary of a state this was for me and though the clothes may have contrasted with the others in line, my privileges as a White American convert to Islam were always still present with me. As I got into the customs line I stood behind two-hundred Bengali men, migrating to Saudi Arabia for jobs as the working underclass in this country that no Saudi would ever take.
While surely most of these men would love to be wearing the ihram and visiting Bait Allah (The House of God) like myself, they instead were to be intensely scrutinized by customs officials then off to work, while I flew through customs with my blue passport, met my taxi driver and was off headed in the most sacred of directions. These men were in my thoughts just as were the homeless people who I passed as I walked to the Subway in my home city Berkeley, California, that took me to the airport a full day before. My change in clothes was a change in states physically, and it is an important gesture for all of us to be reminded of the state of poverty we will all permanently visit when we are lowered into our grave, but a reality I feel far from as a moderately wealthy White western man visiting a country where the poor and women have few rights.
While the outward (zahir) reality of the Saudi government, and its insane redevelopment of Mecca; destroying entire mountains, nearly all the historical sites related to the Prophet Muhammad’s life (Peace be upon him), and building the second tallest building in the world directly outside the grand mosque of Mecca are the first things that strike you as you enter the city. Once you are inside the mosque a reality that is outside of place and time overwhelms your entire being, the internal (batin) and unseen realities of existence begin to capture your spirit and your heart. I walked alone towards the Kaba with my head held down at 5:30 in the morning just before the dawn prayer and as I neared what Muslims believe to be the center of the universe and the first house of worship on the planet first built by Adam, then later by Abraham and his son Ishmael (the Kaba). Almost instantly the weight of being in that place began to overwhelm me. How was I back here, a young man from the suburbs of Colorado my family having lived in the United States for hundreds of years and never having known anything about Islam before, and yet in the midst of a global war with ever present lies and hatred directed at Islam and Muslims these are the realities I was guided to.
As I neared the center of the mosque, I chanted the call that all visiting the Kaba chant Labaik Allahuma Labaik (Here I am at your service O Lord, here I am), finally I looked up and there it was, I had returned again. In that moment as you lay eyes on the kaba, as you renew your ties to God and you make sincere prayers for guidance, for family, for humanity; mercy and light flood your heart. The Light and the Mercy fill your spirit in a way that no food, water, sleep or other material reality could feed you. Words cannot describe the indescribable and so as I entered this metaphysical plane of being that seems of the world, but not of it, I began to perform the rituals of the Umrah. The first act of which is making tawaf, where we walk around the kaba seven times. As I began to make tawaf I knew other people were around me but it took me a long time to really notice them, the reality of God was so overwhelming in that moment. As I walked around the kaba praying for everyone and everything I could think of, the silence and the clarity of that space was deafening.
In my clearest of reflections the symbolism of it all was clear, God is the center of everything, and everything revolves around God. We spend our lives chasing the material while the reality of the immaterial surrounds us. The only question here, is whether or not we are open to these realities.
What a visceral experience, as your soul is enraptured an entire universe of people walk by you in the same daze whispering prayers, tears flowing, and begging for forgiveness for past deeds and guidance for the remainder of our lives. For most of us this is one of only a handful of times we will stand in this place, so young women pray for children who will not be born for another decade, as old men ask forgiveness for a lifetime of misdeeds and children in their pureness utter prayers for their parents and peace in the world. Your life flashes before your eyes as your heart is expanded in ways that we can never fully understand, and the weight of the world is lifted from you as you bask in that light.
After I finished my tawaf I headed to the edge of the mosque to perform the Sa’i where we walk and jog back and forth between two small mountains Safa and Marwa seven times as Hagar, the Prophet Abraham’s wife did frantically looking for water for her infant son when she was left there alone millennia ago. Imagining a mother and child without water is not difficult to do in a world where over a billion people do not have access to clean drinking water, and this is where my prayers turned as I prayed for God’s justice to be done on earth. I prayed for all those suffering without adequate food, water, and shelter throughout the world to be given relief. I prayed for an end to global warfare whatever weapon is used against anyone anywhere on the planet.
As I was in this daze of prayer, I walked by a small infant child begging in the mosque without an arm and I thought of all the impoverished children and families I have met all over the world from my hometown in Thornton, Colorado to the Dine reservation, to the U.S./ Mexico border, in West Africa, in Morocco, in Spain, in Oakland and in Richmond, California, here in this mosque, and all places in between.
How we let such suffering exist in a world of so much wealth, beauty and mercy shows how weak our faith and belief in a God of justice truly is. In that moment I remembered the standard of justice we are called to maintain, when All Mighty God says in the Qur’an
“You who believe, uphold justice and bear witness to God, even if it is against yourselves, your parents, or your close relatives. Whether the person is rich or poor, God can best take care of both. Refrain from following your own desire, so that you can act justly — if you distort or neglect justice, God is fully aware of what you do.”
May God forgive us.
As I finished the rituals of my Umrah with a clarity of heart and mind I have only experienced in these moments I walked back into the center of the mosque and saw the beauty of the global Muslim ummah (community) there in front of me. People from nearly every corner of the earth, from every class and racial background, women next to men all together in one constant and continuous state of worship that goes on every moment, of every day of every year for the last fourteen hundred years and which Muslims believe will continue until the end of time.
As I walked out of the mosque I was surrounded by people everywhere, some headed back to their five star hotels that directly surround and tower over the mosque, while others laid out their breakfast meals there on sheets of plastic on the marble tile surrounding the mosque. What a beautiful community we are, but how many ways we have been divided, by colonization, dictatorships, capitalist and nationalistic insanity, through warfare and intolerance related to ideological differences, gender, race, nation, and class.
Yet God has called us to so much more, at a time where all of humanity is becoming increasingly interconnected. What if we are living manifestations of the reality God has called us to when it is stated in the Qur’an
“People, We created you all from a single man a a single woman, and made you into races and tribes so that you should recognize (ta’arif) one another.”
What does this recognition mean? The question for us is how do we break this covenant and call when we do not respect the diversity I saw that day in Mecca, and that reality I live in, in one of the most diverse Muslim populations in the history of the world in the United States. These are questions we must begin to ask as a people who are a bridge community to the majority of humanity. How then do we begin to embrace these differences and live truly Ummah Wide? How do we live our religion Prophetically as an embodiment of the example that has been set for us and to live up to the call for justice we are held to live up to?
Related to this word ta’arif (recognition) in the Qur’an is the question of if we truly see each other in this world. Mostly we walk by each other hardened to the stark injustices and reality of the world, and rarely do we stop to notice each other and yet in the Qur’an God states unequivocally that the only form of privilege is the human beings relationship with their lord. In that moment in the courtyard of the mosque I noticed a man who looked much like those Bengali men I had seen at the airport hours earlier, he was one of the many janitors of the mosque whose job it is to constantly sweep up and keep the mosque clean. A man who may step foot in the mosque daily but likely rarely gets the time to stop in front of the Kaba and offer his prayers. So there he stood outside of the mosque facing the brick walls and exterior of the mosque his broom on the ground with the broom stick against his chest, hands outreached in sincere prayer to his lord.
While Mecca is home to the Kaba, and the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad, and the spiritual earth based core of the Muslim faith. It is also a place where twenty-five years ago you could still see the mountains surrounding the mosque, today those mountains have been mostly destroyed as has any remnant of the history of this great city. Today Mecca is becoming more and more a playground for the rich, and while those of us who can afford it can pray today two thousand feet above the Kaba in a five star hotel room, the reality is that this man taking a break from cleaning the mosque, perhaps his prayer is the one heard by God.
These were the reflections I was left with as just like that I had finished my Umrah, it was 11am and it was time for me to find some sandals and to grab a cab and head back to Jeddah to reunite with my wife. A heart filled with Gods mercy and light, my prayer was that I was able to maintain it on my journey back home.
May God bless, and guide us all!
Interested in writing travel literature or for our Ummah Wide Weekend Travel Guides: Our travel guides take you to cities throughout the world, and give you a 72 hour itinerary with a combination of the local Muslim community, history, and sights blended all together. Interested in helping us build a travel guide for your city? You can reach out to our executive editor at — dustin@ummahwide.com
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