What It Means - Day 27

In my Dar al-Islam classes this semester, especially in the 8:00 a.m. section, the topic of Hajj proved to be a popular topic.  I always show them a Vice video of a guy who went on the Hajj and it's fascinating.  It's shot by someone who works at Vice and he was dragooned to go on the Hajj by his elderly Pakistani parents.  It's got the appropriate amount of attitude and wonder.  As I've discussed before my 8:00 class knows I'm a Muslim but my 9:30 class doesn't, which makes for an interesting switch in mindset in between the two classes (especially for my student Ines who somehow ended up in both classes). I don't publicize my religious beliefs, but I also don't deny them.  The earlier class figured it out on their own because it was my travel section and so many of them had traveled with me previously. For this reason they're likely to ask me personal questions which I'm happy to quickly answer if I think it's not distracting.  Anyway, after we watched the video one of the students asked me if I was planning on going on the Hajj. The question caught me off-guard, although not really because it was a personal question. Rather, while I had kicked the idea around in the back of my mind I had never tried to articulate it to anyone else.  I asked for a couple minutes to get my thoughts together before answering (one of the things you learn as you gain my experience teaching is that it's OK to ask for a little time before answering, either to sit in quiet or to move on to another topic for a little bit while your brain processes in the background; not every question has to, or should be, answered immediately and spontaneously). In the end I said no, and, of course, they wanted to know why.I responded, truthfully, that there were several reasons and that I would respond with the mundane.  First, it's awfully expensive and I don't have $8000 lying around at the moment which isn't needed someplace else.  Since the Hajj is a requirement for every Muslim who has the means to go I suppose this isn't a particularly good reason, but it doesn't make a valid reason. Secondly, this brings me back to my perpetual struggle between the more external and internal aspects of the faith, and in the end I simply believe that God is more concerned with us treating everyone and everything in our lives kindly and compassionately on a daily basis than heading to Mecca (the two aren't mutually exclusive, obviously).  Thirdly, I told the students that the skeptical Marxist in me does believe that most things are actually politically motivated and this admonition has a lot to do with the Prophet's desire to knit the early Muslim community together and remind them that they were one people; this, of course, doesn't make it a bad thing, but it, at least in my mind, places it in a different category than a religious obligation (although, clearly, it is). Fourthly, I find the present regime in Saudi Arabia so abhorrent that I'm having trouble getting past that view, and that if I went would I be showing them some tacit approval (I'll have to tell you about my Lonely Planet Twitter explosion some time). Finally, and I proposed most importantly, if I went now I think I'd be going for the wrong reason.  I've had this discussion with my friend Steve a couple times and he think I should go because then I could write Hajji after my name, which, I always tell him, is why I shouldn't go.  Essentially, I think I'd be going out of vanity, whereas I think you should go out of humility (if that makes any sense). Part of my own personal journey of faith is the recognition of my incredible vanity and one of my goals is to realistically analyze my actions and why I do them.  I then added, let's keep in mind two things: 1) reasons two through five may just justification for reason one, and 2) ask me again next year.

Here's a flyer that popped up on Facebook the other day.  My FB feed is always odd (sort of like my Netflix queue) because I have my friends, current colleagues, too many students, many Muslims from around the world, and some people I went to high school with who are borderline if not actual racists/Islamophobes (sometimes I drop them, but mainly I'm hoping that dialogue is best).