“This is our chance!”

What we hoped for was to reach the blessed Rawḍah, an especially sacred area of the Mosque. As we got closer, we heard the din and hum of voices like bees getting louder. The Mosque wasn’t empty. Everyone was trying to get to the Rawḍah just as we were. Nonetheless, we hadn’t reached this far yet, so we were hopeful. We politely zigzagged our way through the crowd and neared the blessed pulpit of the Prophet ﷺ to our right. I explained to my sons the saying of the Prophet ﷺ,

“.مَا بَيْنَ بَيْتِي وَمِنْبَرِي رَوْضَةٌ مِنْ رِيَاضِ الْجَنَّةِ وَمِنْبَرِي عَلَى حَوْضِي”

“Between my house and my pulpit is a Garden from the Gardens of Paradise, and my pulpit rests upon my wellspring.” ((Jami` al-Saḥiḥ li-l Bukhari, Imam al-Bukhari’s Authenticated Collection))

Imams al-Nawawi and Ibn Ḥajar give two possible interpretations to the statement “Garden from the Gardens of Paradise.” The first being that it is literally a Garden of Paradise in a quantum trans-dimensional sense and the very area itself will be seen, as it is, in Paradise. The second interpretation being that worship therein leads to Paradise. ((Sharḥ al-Nawawi `ala Muslim, Imam al-Nawawi’s Commentary on Imam Muslim’s Authenticated Collection.)) Ibn Ḥajar adds a third to these two, saying that the Divine Love and Mercy one feels in there is as if one were in Paradise. ((Fatḥ al-Bari, Imam Ibn Ḥajar’s commentary on Imam Bukhari’s Authenticated Collection.))

In regards to the closing statement of the narration, “my pulpit rests upon my wellspring,” the renowned Maliki Jurisprudent and martyr, al-Qaḍi `Iyyad, said, “Most of the scholars have said this refers to his pulpit itself, as it was in the world.” ((Sharḥ al-Nawawi `ala Muslim, Imam al-Nawawi’s Commentary on Imam Muslim’s Authenticated Collection.)) It will rise upon the Wellspring of al-Kawthar where we will meet our beloved Prophet ﷺ. He will not be a King seated upon a throne but a humble friend feeding us water, quenching our thirst from the toils of Judgment Day, water he will feed us from his very own hands.

The Prophet ﷺ often told his Companions, “Be patient until you meet me at the Wellspring.” ((Jami` al-Saḥiḥ li-l Bukhari, Imam al-Bukhari’s Authenticated Collection)) Anas bin Malik radi allahu `anhu (may God be pleased with him) once asked the Prophet ﷺ, “Will you intercede for me with God?” He replied, “I am the one to do that.” Then Anas (ra) asked, “Where should I look for you?” The Prophet replied, “Seek me at the Ṣirat.” ((Ṣirat: The bridge all mankind will have to cross on the Day of Judgment.)) Anas then asked, “And what if I don’t find you there?” The Prophet replied, “Seek me at the scale.” ((The scale, called al-Mizan in Arabic, upon which the good and evil of everyone will be weighed.)) Anas asked again, “And what if I don’t find you there?” Finally, the Prophet replied, “You will find me at the Wellspring.” ((Musnad al-Imam Aḥmad, Imam Aḥmad’s Collection; Sunan al-Tirmidhi, Imam al-Tirmidhi’s Collection))

Telling my sons about this made them even more eager to reach the Rawḍah, but how would we get there beyond such a large crowd? We didn’t push. We didn’t shove. We stepped aside so that others could pass. We trusted in God.

Finally, after so much difficulty, my sons and I found ourselves within the enclosure of the Rawḍah. Yet everyone was shoulder to shoulder and we couldn’t find any room to pray. The people who were praying had others waiting behind them for their turn to pray. All the while, police were maintaining order by ushering people out who had finished praying so new people could pray, or asking people who were taking too long to hurry up. I had already resolved that I would focus upon making space for my boys to pray before I worried about myself. An Indonesian man, who apparently didn’t speak English well, gestured to Ibrahim saying, “Baby boy! Baby boy!” and motioning that Ibrahim should take his spot in line. I hugged him and thanked him in earnest. I will always pray for him. Just then, as Ibrahim took his spot, two spots opened in front of us so that all three of us could pray together. As I fell down and pressed my face to the ground I began to hyperventilate as tears poured from my eyes. It was as if I was no longer in control. Everything came rushing to me at once as if God was extracting all my pain out of me like poison from a wound. As I rose from prostration and completed my prayer, I raised my hands to the sky and cried,

“اللهم رب الناس أذهب الباس إشف إبني عبد الله وأنت الشافي ولا شافي إلّا أنت ولا شفاء إلّا شفاؤك شفاء لا يغادر سقما!”

“O God! Lord of humankind! Remove this ill and please heal my son Abdullah! For you are the Healer and there is no Healer other than You! Neither is there any healing other than Your healing. Let it be a healing that leaves no ailment behind!”

My boys and I were able to pray to our heart’s content. It was spiritually liberating in a way that made me realize how enslaving pain and sadness can be. For the past few months, as I watched my Abdullah lose every golden hair from his head and then eventually his entire body, I had wished that his affliction would leave him and afflict me instead. How helpless I’ve felt as a father unable to rescue my son. So I laid it all out before God.

There was, and is, nowhere else to go.

As we left the Rawḍah, a police officer grabbed my hand and asked me, “Were you able to pray as much as you needed?” I replied in the affirmative. Seeing my tear scarred face he asked, “What troubles you?” I put my hand on Abdullah’s shoulder and told him, my voice cracking, “My son has an auto-immune condition and we came here all the way from America specifically to pray for his healing.” The officer then began to pray for Abdullah and told me to have faith and trust in God who is One. The One who afflicts is the very One who cures. In every hardship is a lesson to be learned and, thereafter, is relief. But you must trust in God alone and no one else. Along with this advice, he repeatedly looked me straight in the eye and exhorted me, “Do not despair! Do not get weak!” He asked me to translate for Abdullah, so I did.

Then, immediately after the Rawḍah, we approached the resting place of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. The Prophet ﷺ is buried in the house he shared with his wife `Aisha, in the very spot of their resting quarters. On each side of him rests his two companions and successors, Abu Bakr and `Umar (ra).

One of the religious administrators put his arm around my shoulder and told me, “Here is where Abu Bakr rests, and there is where `Umar rests, and in the middle is the Messenger of God, peace and blessings be upon him.” My sons and I greeted them, “Peace be upon you, O beloved Messenger of God! Peace be upon you, O Abu Bakr! Peace be upon you, O `Umar!” Then, in the same way we entered the Rawḍah, we followed the waves of people, as comforting as the waves of the ocean, towards the exit gates of the Mosque. As we walked out I turned back and gazed upon the Prophet’s resting place one last time.

“You have, indeed, conveyed the greatest message, O Messenger of God! I will see you at the Wellspring.”

I placed my arms around my sons and squeezed them as we walked out, telling them that the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ felt helpless and lost as he desperately hid in a cold cave for days asking God to reveal Himself. Then God answered him, guided him, and raised him up to the point that, today, “Muhammad” is recorded as the most given male name on the planet. I gestured to the magnificent forest of pillars and minarets spiraling out from the smooth marble floors.

“This all started in a dark cave, on a cold night, in a mountain of light.”

I eased my grip on my sons. As they get older, I notice that at times I’m smothering them. They’re not babies anymore as much as I wish that they were. They are now men. Yet, as I eased my grip I noticed theirs tightening. All praise and thanks are due to God. My purpose for visiting Medina was fulfilled.

I came home and recorded all my experiences and thoughts into what you are reading now. I figured my son wouldn’t want the world knowing what he’s going through so I left out all our names and made it anonymous. We haven’t told anyone other than immediate family and very few close friends. Even though I wrote this anonymously, I felt that Abdullah still had to read it first. If he objected even in the slightest, I would have discarded it and never spoken of it again. He had an emotionless expression on his face as he read it. He handed it back to me and smiled.

“So what did you think?”

“I loved it, Daddy. But I want you to change one thing.”

“What’s that, Abdullah?”

“Put our names in it.”

A cursory analysis into the word “Hajj” as found in the Old Testament.

When many Jews and Christians view Islam from the outside, they find parallels to their own faiths that usually inspire a great deal of curiosity. These parallels are often doctrinal, sometimes regarding the biographies of Prophets shared between the three Abrahamic faiths like Moses and Jesus (peace be upon them). Yet, sometimes striking parallels are found by the more discerning eye. Deep inquests often reveal textual and lexical similarities that are difficult—if not impossible—to explain by mere theories of one tradition borrowing from another.

As millions upon millions of Muslim devotees engage in the rites of the Hajj pilgrimage, one of the 5 pillars of Islam, we can peer into the terms used in this age-old practice that lead us to a time long before the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ (peace be upon him) was even born. Let us look at the word al-Hajj itself:

الحجّ (al-Hajj)

Typically, the entire Arabic vocabulary, like its sisters in the Semitic linguistic group, consists of words structured from triliteral triconsonantal roots. In this case the root is Hajaj (حجج). According to the classical Arabic lexicon Lisān al-`Arab it is defined:

القصد. حج إلينا فلان أي قدم

“Purpose. As in, ‘So-and-so did Hajj unto us,’ which means he presented himself before us.” ((Lisan al-`Arab, Ibn al-Mandhur))

So the general lexical meaning of the word is “intended purpose”. In the context of the Hajj, the Ka`bah within the Meccan Sanctuary is the intended destination and purpose. To list usages of this word in an Islamic context would be, for most Muslims, an appeal to the very obvious as stories of its wonder and splendor that have been related to them since childhood. However, if we peer beyond the context of Islamic rites and deep into the past, do we find this word used in the previous traditions of the Old Testament?

The answer is in the affirmative. The book of Exodus contains the following verse in reference to a Hajj in the time of Moses:

והיה היום הזה לכם לזכרון וחגתם אתו חג ליהוה לדרתיכם חקת עולם תחגהו

wa-haya ha-yōm haza lakhem li-zikrōn wa-khagōtem otō khag li-Yehōwa li-dorotaychem khuqat `olam takhaguhū

“And this day shall be unto you for a memorial; and ye shall keep it a feast to the LORD throughout your generations; ye shall keep it a feast by an ordinance for ever.” [Exodus 12:14]

In this verse the King James translators rendered the uninflected noun Khag (חג) as “feast”. This word Khag is wholly cognate to the Arabic Hajj (حج). Elsewhere in the verse the word Khag is inflected as khagotem and takhaguhū. One must pay attention to the fact that the Hebrew phonetic “kh” (ח) is the pharyngeal fricative “h” (ح) in Arabic. Also, one must note that the phonetic “g” (ג) is cognate to the Arabic “j” (ج). So for analytical purposes in this context the verse would be rendered:

“And this day shall be unto you for a memorial; and ye shall keep it a Hajj to the LORD throughout your generations; ye shall keep it a Hajj by an ordinance forever.”

Another verse using this root is the following:

ואחר באו משה ואהרן ויאמרו אל-פרעה כה-אמר יהוה אלהי ישראל שלח את-עמי ויחגו לי במדבר

wa-ākhar bā’u Mōshe wa-Aharōn wa-yomru el-Par`o koh-amar Yahweh Elohay Yishrael shalach et-`ami wa-yakhugū li ba-midbār

“And afterward Moses and Aaron went in, and told Pharaoh, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Let my people go , that they may hold a feast unto me in the wilderness.” [Exodus 5:1]

The inflected word that the King James translators rendered “feast” is yakhuggū (יחגו) which is cognate to the Arabic “yuhajjū” (يُحَجّوا) so for analytical purposes the verse would be rendered in this context as:

“And afterward Moses and Aaron went in, and told Pharaoh, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Let my people go, that they may hold a Hajj unto me in the wilderness.”

This is not to suggest that Moses and Aaron went to Mecca and performed Hajj as Muslims know it today. It is merely to exemplify that a consecrated journey and pilgrimage unto God at His Temple did, indeed, precede the rise of Islam in the 7th Century CE.

An additional and astonishing dimension to this that makes the concept of lexical borrowing between the Old Testament and the Qur’an improbable, if not outright impossible, is found in an alternate form of the root in Hebrew, Khug (חוג). Friedrich Wilhelm Gesenius (1846) defines this word:

“חוג To describe a circle, to draw a circle, as with compasses. Job 26:10…m. a circle, sphere, used of the arch or vault of the sky, Pro. 8:27; Job 22:14; of the world, Isa. 40:22.” ((The Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon, Friedrich Wilhelm Gesenius, p. 263))

Let us look at the verses he has cited above:

“When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass (חוג) upon the face of the depth.” [Proverbs 8:27]

“Thick clouds are a covering to him, that he seeth not; and he walketh in the circuit of heaven (וחוג שמים).” [Job 22:14]

“It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth (חוג הארץ), and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in.” [Isaiah 40:22]

Thus, this word not only means sacred pilgrimage and feast unto God in the Bible, it also means to encircle. To any Muslim this will be a striking discovery.

Semitic languages have been, since time immemorial, broad and deep systems of expression where one word’s many variant, but supplementary, meanings all coalesce to a greater understanding of that lexeme. So in this case we have a root which has a form meaning a feast, also meaning a pilgrimage, and in one form meaning to encircle! The Hajj pilgrimage, which is at its core an encircling of the Ka`bah called Tawāf, is concluded with none other than the Feast of the Sacrifice, Eid al-Adha, to commemorate Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son at God’s command. Borrowing all these meanings buried in lexica that did not even exist until hundreds of years after the life of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ would require no short of a Semitic linguist and Biblical scholar. It should be noted that the Bible itself would not be available until 200-300 years after the passing of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ ((The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, vol. 4, Geoffrey W. Bromiley, p. 982)) . Such lexical depth and lucidity is consistently found throughout the Qur’an as God has stated therein:

“This Qur’an could not have been authored by any other than God, as it rectifies what came before it and elucidates what was in the previous scriptures. Let there be no doubt that this is, indeed, from the Lord of all Worlds.” (Qur’an, 10:37)