My Hajj Story
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The 7 Hour Walk | #MyHajjStory
Dr. Naved Bakali looks back on the 7-hour walk his Hajj group took from Mina to 'Arafah and some lessons he learned along the way.
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. Assalamualaikum wa rahmatullah. I want to share some reflections with you on my experience in going for Hajj. I had gone for Hajj in 2006, so it was a long time ago. I was still a student at the time, and I was just newly married. At the time, Hajj happened to be during the winter vacation of school. So different groups had been offering various packages, and one group was offering a package for students. It was a discounted rate for students. So my wife and I, we had a bit of money saved up, and we thought, you know, it's a great opportunity, let's go for the Hajj. So whatever savings we had, we used it to pay for this package. It was a very basic package, very minimal sort of accommodations and so on. So we had gone. And I think one thing that's a constant in any kind of stories you hear about the Hajj is that it can be a very difficult, very trying situation. There's so many people there at once, and just by the nature of the Hajj, given that there's millions of people all in one place at one time, there's things that are bound to go wrong, and whatever can go wrong really does go wrong, regardless of how experienced your Hajj group is. And so you can imagine now that we were going with a group that was very far less experienced in organizing these groups, and it was a very basic package. And so we got there, and the challenges started pretty much early on. So customarily, you go to Mina before the Day of Arafah. And so we set out early in the morning to go to our tents in Mina. We were going to spend the day there and get ready for the Day of Arafah, which would be the next day.
So we set out early. We walked to our tents in Mina, but we finally arrived after a half hour, 45 minutes of walking, we finally arrived there. And lo and behold, there's people in the tent. So we get there, there's people in the tent, they're arguing that it's their tent, and we're arguing it's our tent. It was kind of a standoff for quite some time. We were there for maybe an hour, maybe two hours. Neither of us wanted to really budge. Eventually, our group was young, we were students, the tent was older men, we figured it's Hajj, we should try to be patient, and given that we're younger, we can try to find something else. So we just decided to leave. We left the tent for them. And then we went from tent to tent, trying to find a place to stay. So we literally went to five different tents, getting kicked out numerous times. Eventually, we managed to find something by the end of the day. So we set out probably before Dohr, and then by Maghrib time, finally we found a tent that we were able to keep our group together. So we rest up at Fajr time, we pray Fajr, and then after Fajr, our buses are not there, taking us to Arafat. So we thought that, okay, so far with this group, we didn't have tents, we had a difficult time getting a tent. Our biggest fear was that we wouldn't be able to make it in time if we wait for these buses to make it to Arafat. And so we figured, again, we're young, we're students, we're relatively healthy, we can walk from Mina to Arafat. So we decided to make the walk. And it's about, I think, an eight-kilometer walk in total.
It ended up taking us about maybe six or seven hours to do that walk, because we ended up getting lost on the way. We couldn't find her tent in Arafat. And so it was a very grueling kind of walk. It was in the middle of the morning, we were out in the sun throughout the hottest parts of the day. And you'd imagine on the surface that when you share this story, that this must have been the most difficult part of the Hajj. And it was probably the most unfortunate part of the Hajj, you could say. But I think for me, this was probably the most beneficial part of the Hajj. Because in doing this walk from Mina to Arafat, we kind of experienced Hajj in a different way. Typically when you go for Hajj with these packages, especially if you're coming from a Western country, it's a very insular kind of experience. You're kind of just riding the bus with people from your group, you're staying in tents and hotels with people from your group. You're really kind of only experiencing Hajj with people that are from your surroundings, people that are coming from Western sort of privileged backgrounds. But on this walk, we literally were walking with people that could not afford these types of accommodations. They couldn't afford the transportation. And so we're kind of experiencing Hajj from a different perspective now. And thousands and thousands of people were making this walk. And some of the images are still engraved in my mind of people that were maybe in their 80s or 90s, hunched over almost 90 degrees and with a cane, and yet they're making this long walk in the heat. And so you really kind of get a sense of the privilege that you're living in when you see Hajj from that perspective. The Hajj is really a microcosm of the Muslim Ummah. And you get a sense of what the conditions are for different Muslims.
Some of the people that were on this walk, they were with canes, they were older people, they needed assistance walking. Some of them had their sandals broke along the way and very basic sort of things that they had with them. And you really kind of get a sense of the privilege that you've experienced in your life when you see Hajj from that perspective. And so hopefully the idea, at least for myself, was that when you see this kind of circumstance, you see how Muslims are living and so on, it helps you kind of get a sense to understand your privilege and to be grateful for that. But also to kind of empathize with the difficulties that other Muslims experience. And also just seeing Hajj from that perspective, you see Muslims from all over the world. You're no longer kind of isolated within your group. You're seeing the Hajj of the people that are coming from all over Asia, all over Africa, all over North America, Europe, from everywhere. Really you're seeing Muslims from every kind of corner of the world. And for me it was a really sort of eye-opening experience. It was a really amazing experience. I think the benefit you can take from that is that sometimes you perceive things as very difficult or very hard. And these things, people describe them as a test that you experience when you go for Hajj. But sometimes the benefits of the Hajj are hidden in these sort of difficult moments, in these intense sort of difficult circumstances. That's where you can really kind of gain some of the fruits of the Hajj. Another thing that was an amazing experience for me is really seeing how the Hajj, I mean for me, when I think of the Day of Judgment, it's an awesome unimaginable event where everyone is brought before Allah for judgment. And the site and the Hajj, I think in terms of lived experiences, it's the closest thing that you can ever experience to get a sense, even a fraction of what that experience would be like.
Just because you're so many people all together all at once in one small space, very crowded, everyone's kind of testing each other, everyone's sort of looking out for themselves. It's a very difficult circumstance that you're in, surrounded by people. And it can be very difficult and challenging. And so for me, it really kind of gives me a sense, a fraction of what the feeling may be like on the Day of Judgment. When you're surrounded by everyone and everyone's in this difficult sort of circumstance. The last sort of lesson I can I think share with you all is just this idea of being able to go for Hajj when you're at a young age in your life. I really see the Hajj as one of those events in your life that's a turning point. You really kind of live a different life after you've returned from the Hajj. And when I think of the Hajj, and I think of how it impacted myself, and how it's a turning point for so many people, I wonder, doesn't it make sense to, if you're able to at a young age, go for the Hajj, doesn't it make sense to have that turning point early on in your life? So that you can kind of live the experiences of your life through that change that you've experienced in the Hajj, as opposed to going through that transformation later on in your life. Why not, before you've had children, before you've started your career, why not make that transformation in your life so that that transformation is not just a turning point in your life, but a transformation in your life so that that transformation informs your decisions in your career. So it informs the decisions that you make in terms of your family and parenting and so on. And really I think that it's so much more beneficial to live that transformation through those key milestones in your life, as opposed to doing the Hajj later on in your life when you've passed so many of those key milestones in your life. So these are just some of the sort of benefits and lessons I wanted to share with you all. For those of you that have made the Hajj, may Allah accept it from you all.
For those of you that have not had the opportunity to go for the Hajj, I pray that Allah extends His invitation to you all, so you're able to make this blessed and amazing journey. Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullah
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