The Fifth Pillar Sacrifice, Wagner & the Eid
By Abdal Hakim Murad | 2026-01-13T19:52:22.433797+00:00 | Topic: Ramadan
The Fifth Pillar: Sacrifice, Wagner & the Eid
By Abdal Hakim Murad
Opening
Reference: Opening invocation from the Sunnah
Eid Mubarak everyone
So we've come to the end of this little journey that some of CMC's lecturers and expert supporters have kindly led us through over the last ten days, these layali-in-ashr.
The Journey of Hajj
We have reached now the culmination of the Eid and it's a good time to look back to see where this journey has taken us. It's a journey, I suppose, about a journey. Hajj is a journey of a lifetime and as we've seen, it has layers within layers.
It's not a simple thing to understand. In many ways it's unfamiliar and enigmatic but we know that the more we reflect on it and that we listen to what our great scholars have said about the depths of it, the more we move into a greater respect and this is min baab ta'zeem sha'airillah, whoever honours and magnifies Allah's rituals. This is from the taqwa al-qulub, from the piety of the hearts.
So hopefully there has been some tashwiq, encouraging people to make the niyyah, to do hajj and umrah insha'Allah because it is an extraordinary, unique, transformative event.
Cultural Perspectives on Hajj
And we've been to various cultural places. I liked Janita Karic and her presentation of the traditional understanding of the hajj from Bosnia and the two venturesome ladies in the 1960s, I think it was, who went on their own and slept in the desert and one of them said, it was like having the whole world behind me.
As I approached the Kaaba, there was more and more of dunya behind me, which I think sums up very well how one is supposed to feel internally. Also Dr Ingrid Mattson with her understanding of the piety of mothers and the role of mothers because there's this strong matrilineal dimension, of course, with Hajar and Ismail in the foundation of the city, the validation of childbirth, the validation of the embryo, there's something quite characteristically Islamic about that.
Gender Equality in Islamic Practice
We did talk a bit about the fact that the five basic pillars of the religion are equally incumbent upon both of the genders, which is in terms of ancient religious practice an unusual thing.
There's almost daily contestations on the western wall of Jerusalem with this women of the wall group, Jewish women who want access to that bit of what they take to be the Temple of Suleiman so they can pray where the men pray and it's an issue that's been through the Israeli Parliament.
And also the controversies in India recently, last year in particular, 2019, the Ayyappa Temple which is in Kerala is one of those Hindu temples that does not allow women of childbearing age to enter their precincts at all. But Alhamdulillah, this is not an issue for us - women can and do enter the Kaaba itself, the holy of holies if they wish.
The Beginning of Isra and Mi'raj
What we saw, and Dr Sameer in his presentation was very good on this, is that the Haram, the great sanctuary in Makkah is the beginning of the Isra and the Mi'raj, the night journey.
And the beginning of that is as it were the holy prophets accepting the name of Al-Amin, the trustworthy. And this is one of the characteristics that the haji has to acquire as he passes through the various stages of the hajj ritual and the hajj ordeal.
The person who is Amin is somebody who is of the fitrah, human beings being naturally honest and naturally recognising that honesty and uprightness are good things.
Even if we don't acknowledge this, we feel guilty when we are confronted with the evidence of our own moral failings. It's from the fitrah. So:
(Sahih al-Bukhari Hadith 10, Sahih Muslim Hadith 40)
"The Muslim is the one from whose hand and whose tongue people are safe."
And this is the essence of Amanah.
The Dua for Aafiyah
And this relates also to what we could say on the day of Eid is kind of the culminating consequence of a properly performed hajj which is a healing. One of the duas which we are recommended to say on the day of Arafah, which is basically just prayers, is:
Reference: Sunan at-Tirmidhi Hadith 3514
"Allah, I ask you for aafiyah," which means well-being, healthiness, in other words, being the right kind of thing in God's creation, being in right relation to other human beings and to the rest of creation.
And it's very important that we recognize when we're on Arafah, the need to feel reconfigured and readjusted because that's the best day for dua:
Reference: Sunan at-Tirmidhi Hadith 3585
"The best dua is the dua said on the day of Arafah."
The Transformative Nature of Hajj
And even for those of us who've been fasting on the day of Arafah, which is our way of vicariously participating in the hajj, it's a day of aafiyah and of healing. So we've noticed that behind each of these apparently enigmatic outward forms, there is an indispensable lesson about how we need to be inwardly transformed.
It's not just an outward journey from everywhere to the one place, which is the Axis Mundi, the center of everything, and ticking off various little boxes in the hajj manual so that we know we've done it right.
Allah will accept that kind of hajj, but it's not getting the most out of it. And the depth of it has often inspired some quite wonderful poetry.
Poetry of the Hajj
One of my favorite recent poets in the Middle East is Sheikh al-Jamal, Sidi Muhammad al-Jamal, who unfortunately died very few years ago, who was the Imam of al-Aqsa, who has this wonderful collection of poetry, Rawdat al-Haqqaiq al-Shi'ariyah, Garden of Poetic Truths. There's an English translation, and he has this long poem, Al-Hajj al-Akbar, The Greater Pilgrimage, and here the greater means that there's an inward as well as an outward journey.
Just a nugget. "I answered the call of my beloved, the face of the pole of guidance always in front of me. Truly love carries the consciousness of guidance.
I stood there in the presence of truth when a breeze touched me on the mountain of mercy, Jabal al-Rahma. Ardent desire drove us to the sanctity of truth. There I was present, my tears keeping me awake till the break of day.
Whence I sped to Muna in love, so he's talking about Arafat and Muzdalifah, holding onto the image of my original face. Back to the fitrah, back to how I need to be, the hajj as reparation. I went on to the
casting of stones, aiming at mercy in my beginning."
The Hajj as Transformation
It's important to grasp this. The hajj is not just a kind of theatrical series of symbols that remind us of how we ought to change, but it actually helps us in the process of changing. There is something in the tawaf and the sa'i and the arafat and the stoning that actually doesn't just symbolise a transformation but is a cathartic contribution to that transformation.
To the extent that we're sincere and we're real in the hajj, we will be transformed. One of the most interesting things you can see on the hajj is how people change from the beginning to the end.
The Meaning of Hajj Mabroor
And this is the real meaning of al-hajj al-mabroor, which is an odd expression, but it's in the sunnah. We ask for the hajj al-mabroor. Birr is goodness.
So the hajj to which goodness has been shown, it's the hajj in which goodness, birr to others, has been made to triumph:
"You won't achieve this birr, this goodness, until you spend something of what you love."
And in one of the dictionaries I found this morning, hajj al-mabroor is one characterized by the giving of food and by sweetness of speech.
The Verse about the Day of Eid
Let them then, this is on the day of their Eid, put an end to their unkemptness. Oh God, I can brush my hair again. And let them fulfil their promises, their pledges, because people make pledges on Arafat, or free a slave, or whatever. And let them go around the ancient house.
Reference: Quran 22:29
The Impact of the Meccan Sanctuary on Western Culture
But what I want to look at today is to look at things from a slightly different angle, not the way in which the hajj and the sanctuary have impacted the cultures of the Muslim world in so many deep and delightful ways, but to consider ways in which it has, as it were, anonymously impacted the culture in which we live in the modern West.
Western Christendom, historically you'd thought, wouldn't have anything to do with the Meccan sanctuary, despite Adam and its Dhi.
Mathurbat al-Linas, a place of resort for mankind, a sanctuary, the West didn't look at it.
Nonetheless, so enormous a spiritual vortex, so powerful a fountainhead of blessings, as the Meccan sanctuary, inevitably is so powerful that it transforms beyond the formal limits of the Dar al-Islam and goes into other ummahs as well.
Dante and the Mi'raj
And one of the best known is, of course, in Dante, the greatest of the medieval European Christian poets, whose Divina Commedia is one of the monuments of world literature, which is about Dante visiting heaven and hell in the company of an angel or Beatrice, his muse.
And then in the 1920s, along comes an obscure Spanish priest, Miguel Assini Palacios, who's an Oriental Studies person. And he publishes a book called La Eschatología Musulmana en la Divina Comedia Muslim Eschatology in Dante's Divine Comedy, in which he says, this story, going up through the seven heavens, isn't in the Bible or in early Christian literature, it comes from Islam and the narratives of the Mi'raj.
Wagner and the Meccan Sanctuary
But what I want to look at today, as we bring this little series to a close, is another story that's perhaps less well known, which is the impact of the Meccan sanctuary on the operas of Richard Wagner.
That sounds very bizarre. Wagner, the student of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Fichte, all of the bad German philosophers, a nationalist, somebody who's pushing away Christianity and trying to go back to ancient Germanic gods, Odin and Wotan, and all of those hairy grey deities with hammers.
The Grail Legend and Its Islamic Origins
But we know that one of his favourite operas, Tristan und Isolde, which is a rather dark love story, clearly comes from the medieval Persian Sufi romance of Vis and Ramin.
The one I want to talk about is his last opera, which is his kind of religious opera, which is Parsifal, which looks like a kind of Game of Thrones, Stoneran and Dragons thing with knights and witches and a magic castle, but turns out to be hugely significant for our purposes.
And he gets his story from a German, as you would expect, a 12th century poet, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and that's really the great fountainhead, at least of the Germanic tradition of the grail legends. Wolfram, of course, in his poem says, well, where do I get this story of the grail from, the grail? No, it's not in the gospels.
Wagner's Acknowledgment
So Wagner himself admits that this story that is building up as being the last gasp of a sacred narrative in European culture is from the Meccan sanctuary. It's obvious. So Toledo, can we speculate about what might have been in that manuscript?
Wagner has a letter to somebody called Mathilde Wessenbank, who he's courting at the time. "One notices, I won't do the German accent, one notices, unfortunately, that all our Christian legends have a foreign, pagan origin. As they gazed on in amazement, the early Christians learned, namely, that the Moors in the Kaaba at Mecca venerated a miraculous stone, a sunstone or meteoric stone, but at all events, one that had fallen from heaven. However, the legends of its miraculous power were soon interpreted by the Christians after their own fashion, by their associating the sacred object with Christian myth."
Spanish Muslim Hajj Narratives
Well, we do have some hajj narratives in the surviving stories that the Spanish Muslims have bequeathed to us. A certain Nuzayla Calderón, who is from Ávila, has a story, which is actually in a manuscript in the Cambridge University Library, in which she talks about her trip from Ávila, which is in northern Spain, to the hajj.
So the Eid, she calls una Pascua. The Spanish Muslims tended to use a lot of Christian vocabulary in order to articulate their Muslim beliefs. So Pascua means Easter, but the Spanish Muslims called the Eid Easter.
Romaría is a Morisco Spanish Muslim word for the hajj or the pilgrimage, but Romaría literally means a journey to Rome, a Catholic pilgrimage.
La Población, they say it's an obligation. Población is actually Omra, because Omra has the sense of building up population, so they turn it into Población.
The Principle of Ihram
Let's look at this principle of ihram, which seems to be echoed at the beginning of Parsifal:
"And whoever amongst them deliberately, his recompense, his atonement, shall be an equivalent value to the animal which he slew. Two upright witnesses amongst you should bring about that judgement and should make sure it's done."
"As a gift for the presence of the Ka'bah. Or alternatively, a kafara, a penance. Feeding the poor. Or the equivalent of that in fasting."
"So that this person, this pilgrim might taste the wickedness of what he has done. Allah forgives that which went before so in the Jahiliyyah, you don't need to atone for that, that's gone. And whoever does it again, Allah will take revenge on him. Allah is mighty and possessed of the capacity to take revenge."
The Wildlife Sanctuary
Quite a strong verse about hunting in the Haram and in the state of Ihram. Now, as you go away from the profane world towards the sacred city, you go through three stages. The first stage is when you put on your Ihram, which is traditionally quite a long way from the city, maybe even a hundred miles away.
And there's just five or six categories:
(Various Hadith collections)
In the Hadith, like a dangerous dog (الْكَلْبُ الْعَقُورٌ) and scorpions and so forth, which need be killed. And some of the (فاسق) from some of the Ulama means that, well, a lion and so forth.
You don't really want them prowling around the Hajj tents when there's children about. But basically the principle is they are sacrosanct. And therefore you have created the world's first wildlife sanctuary.
Parsifal and the Spiritual Journey
In the opera, back to Parsifal, this is again what happens at the beginning of his journey. It's the animals and ethics towards animals.
Parsifal appears on the stage and is this young man with his bow and arrow, but something terrible has happened because somebody has shot an arrow and killed a wild swan. Gurneman, who is the head of the Knights of the Grail, is shattered and horrified that anybody near Monsalvat, the sacred place, could do such a terrible thing.
The point of this is that that's the beginning of moral discernment and it's like that in the journey of life. So what Wagner is telling us, which is what the hajj is telling us, is that the beginning of the spiritual journey is ethical discernment.
The Journey from Nafs to Ruh
So the opera starts, and it is a genuine explanation of the process of spiritual growth and the spiralling in from ignorance to truth, from multiplicity to unity, from nafs to ruh. It's a very remarkable thing, actually, to come from the late 19th century.
Act I, I guess, is about the beginning of knowledge, muhasabah, self-awareness. Many people never even get to that stage.
And then it's about futuwa, which is the knightly chivalric virtue.
And then Act III is about khilafah, about being the one to whom the angels can bow down.
And the more we do that, the better it will be:
"Those who struggle for our sake, we shall guide them to our paths."
That's kind of the slogan of the hajj, if you like.
The Meaning of Hajj Mabroor
"You won't achieve this birr, this goodness, until you spend something of what you love."
The Unity of the Ummah
So the sanctity, on the day of Arafat, the holy prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, indicates to his hajis, the sahaba, in his great final khutbah, what is happening here.
That because of the principle of chivalry, the pilgrimage is not just about a crowd of people being alone, in the sort of near-Platonic sense, the flight of the alone to the alone, but it's a collective thing.
So he says:
(Sahih al-Bukhari Hadith 1741, Sahih Muslim Hadith 1679)
"Your blood and your property are haram, sacrosanct, taboo, just as this day of yours is sacrosanct."
"In this holy month and in this holy city."
So the bond between the Muslims at the end of the whole hajj story, as they move into the final sacrifice and the dispersal into their different clothes and back to their countries, is the reality of the unity of the ummah, which is a re-enactment of human unity, because we were all together at the day of alastu bi rabbikum.
The Symbolism of Safa and Marwa
And again, this is a perfect representation of what we have in our sanctuary, where the mataf, the place of the tawaf, where the black stone is at the middle, is circular. And the nature of the ritual means that you can't really do it in any non-circular way. And then there is zamzam, the purification, and then this other principle which is just as sacred according to the story, which is the sa'i, between safa and marwa.
So the circle is adjacent to the straight line, the grail and the lance. And it's the same symbolism. And the sevenfold tawaf, which is around the presence, inclusiveness, the veil, the feminine, and then the linear, the masculine, which doesn't end where it begins, because it's not about eternity, it's about world and irada, begins at safa and ends at marwa.
Safa means purity. It just comes from the temple, from the holy spring. Safa, purity.
And you end at marwa, which is precisely marwa, manly virtue at the end. The tip of the lance is the point at which you go out into the world, not as a kind of random shooter of swans, but as somebody who's been completely transformed by this.
Conclusion
And on this little CMC journey that we've had over the past few days, unfortunately we can't go to the haram, but our intention really has been to remind people of the greatness and the profundity of this ritual. We haven't gone through the fiqh very much of the practice, but if there's been, in what my colleagues have said, some energizing principle that has made people think, I'd like to go there, I'd like to
see the Ka'bah again, I'd like to touch it, I'd like to be in that unique place of closeness, I'd like to leave all my dunya anxieties behind and just be with the presence of al-haqq, ta'ala, that longing, which is the longing for the wathan, the homeland, then insha'Allah they will have been a blessing in this and this will not have been an effort in vain.
So may Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala give to the Muslims everywhere the forgiveness and the unity that he grants them at Arafat and insha'Allah continue to increase the number of hajjis and mu'tamireen from today ila yawm al-qiyamah, insha'Allah, and forgive all of them their sins, insha'Allah.
Closing
(Traditional Islamic closing)