Tawaaf

This is part of a longer piece I'm trying to write about my Umrah experiences, "Find me in Makkah, Leave me in Madinah". I guess I just had to start with tawaaf, it being so dear to my heart.
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I don’t know how to explain what makes Tawaaf different from all other religious rites. You really have to be there to truly comprehend. Tawaaf is so raw, so stripped down, so simplified, so real that you can’t compare it, you just can’t compare it to anything else. You’re not singing, you’re not dancing, you’re not eating. You’re not ringing bells, you’re not lighting candles. You’re not garlanding a figure. You’re not meditating in seclusion in a manner that can only be mastered with long training. You, all of us, illiterate and elite, you’re doing the same thing you have been doing since you were born: you’re moving. You’re walking, maybe you’re running. You don’t need to be taught. You don’t need to be told. The Kaa’ba is there so you know where to go. The black stone is there so you know where to start. But in the end, it’s all you. You’re turning.

I’ve heard a lot of interpretations. We go anticlockwise to mirror the movement of the constellations. Or we circumambulate like the angels. They could be all correct, but that’s not the point. The point is what you feel. I can’t tell you that, because it’s what you feel. I’ll tell you about myself though. I felt like I was swept into a current. I knew I was moving but I wasn’t paying attention to my own inertia. I experienced something so unique it is rarely replicated in the world: conscious transcendent contentment. What the world tries to do is get you at this state by getting you out of your state: by getting you drunk, high, making you whirl and couple with spirits, giving you an andrenaline rush. But the strange thing about tawaaf is that you slip into it while being 100% conscious and in control of your senses, while being the same person you were seconds ago before starting, and yet feeling something that completely envelops you, something that is so rare to feel that you are confused about it initially, and only realize it after the fact. You’re not in a trance, you’re not inebriated – you’re completely aware, and yet you’re emotionally overwhelmed. I was praying, and I never wanted it to end. I felt that I belonged, for once, for ever. How can I explain it? I was at peace with myself, with what I was doing; I understood why I was there, I understood where I was going. Towards the end, I was terrified of leaving. I knew what the world was, I knew how quickly my heart could change from the piercing humility of that experience.

Unfortunately, due to my occupation as a reader, I had come across several pedantic, baseless articles – that were nevertheless being toted as true and widely circulated – by some caustic individuals trying hastily to mark the rites as some meaningless, despicable, cultist, pagan ritual. There’s no need to debunk this (any scholarly book would suffice), but I thought to myself: how I pity, how I wish any one of them would do a single tawaaf. There are seven tawaafs around the K’aaba; in any one of them – in all of them – , you could pray for whatever your heart desires. But when you are in the midst of all those people, old and crippled, young and beautiful – what do you hear? They’re praising God. They walk, they cry, they look up, and they praise God. This is the time to get your wants fulfilled! This is the time to ask! And they do ask, but more often than not, they gradually forget why they are asking. The urgency of the prayer of want they so meticulously crafted back home, dissolves into semi-significance and they are puzzled by it, why was it really that important? Because they understand something. Something clicks. You never want to tear yourself away from a tawaaf. You feel that, if I did just a few more, I would reach complete tranquility. Everything would make sense. Why, why did that material thing matter? Why didn’t I spend more time with my loved one? Why have I done all those senseless things? It’s as though you have been looking at life with severe myopia and someone just handed you a pair of glasses for the first time. Everything comes into perspective – your life comes into perspective – and you are dumbfounded that God has held onto you so long considering who you are. And you are overwhelmed.