Religion: The Hadj of Ahmed Murad

The hadjis were coming home last week. All through the Middle East, Africa and wherever in the world Islam has taken root, airports, seaports, railroad stations and bus terminals were crowded with families waiting for about half a million Moslems who had made the hadj (pilgrimage) to the holy city of Mecca.*

In the crowd at Beirut’s airport was a spry little Arab in a long white gown and a white skullcap, sandals on his feet and a light of wonder in his eyes. At 71, Ahmed Youssef Murad—sometime Montana homesteader, World War I doughboy, Kentucky restaurant owner and elder of a mosque in Damascus—was happy. “My hadj was a gift of God,” he said. “I will do it again if I live.”

Beirut to Jidda. Ahmed Murad is one of the few U.S. citizens ever to make the pilgrimage, and the road he took to get there was long and roundabout. Born in Lebanon, he came to the U.S. in 1902, armed with a railroad ticket to West Virginia, the names of relatives and not a word of English. But he learned fast, traveled far and lived well, until a quarrel with his Kentucky wife ended in divorce, and in 1947 he decided to go back to the Middle East. He bought a small house in Damascus, married again and settled down to a simple life on skimpy savings and a U.S. Army pension. This spring he prepared for the hadj to Mecca.

First he went to the local police court and obtained a certificate of good conduct. Then he went to the Saudi Arabian consulate for a free visa (before 1951, when Saudi Arabia was not yet oil-rich, the government taxed pilgrims $72 a head). Then Ahmed paid $144 for a round-trip airplane ticket from Beirut to Jidda on the Red Sea, 1,000 miles away.

In Jidda he met his mutawwif—a professional guide who took Ahmed and 20 other Syrians under his wing for about $15 each, instructing them in the religious procedures required of a pilgrim and arranging food and lodging for the entire trip. Life used to be grim in Jidda during the ten days of the hadj, as heat-sick pilgrims squatted in the streets gathering strength for the 46-mile trek to Mecca. But newly rich Saudi Arabia has recently built a “Pilgrim City”—a roofed compound, equipped with food shops, electricity, running water and toilets. Here pilgrims wait out a three-day quarantine before inspection by doctors.

Jidda to Mecca. When his day of departure finally arrived, Ahmed set out on the road through the mountains clogged with thousands of pilgrims (“White, brown, black, yellow people, all moving together”). As they streamed along the road together—a few in cars and buses, some on mules, but most on foot—a steady chant rose in unison from the column: “Labbaika Allahumma labbaika! [Here we are, Lord, here we are].”

Fourteen miles from Mecca, signs warned in Arabic and English: HALT-RESTRICTED AREA. MOSLEMS ONLY PERMITTED BEYOND THIS POINT. ToUghlooking guards armed with clubs and submachine guns inspected passports carefully to weed out any infidel. As the pilgrims rounded the last bend and saw Mecca white and dazzling in the desert sun, their chant burst into a roar: “La illaha ilia Allah, Muhammad rasulu Allah [There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is the prophet of Allah].”

Ahmed stayed in Mecca eight days, living in one of the small hotels that crowd the city. Again and again he visited the Kaaba, the small cubic building that houses the sacred Black Stone—the center of the earth for Moslems. Guided by his mutawwif, Ahmed queued up to put his head in the bowl-like enclosure to kiss the Black Stone, worn away by the lips of pilgrims, and added his kiss to the kisses of centuries. He made his seven counterclockwise turns around the Kaaba, three times running and four times walking.

Mecca to Arafat. On the eighth day came the final stage of the pilgrimage—the 15-mile walk to the valley of Arafat, where all hadjis must be present at the same time to listen to prayers recited on Mount Arafat. The temperature that day was well over 100°, and the old and weak were dropping everywhere. Tubs of water were available for dunking heat-exhaustion victims. “Even if they don’t recover,” said one veteran, “they are perfectly happy, because they have died on a hadj.” The death rate for this year’s pilgrimage was more than a thousand. Many were buried within twelve hours in unmarked graves in one of two vast cemeteries near Mecca and Jidda.

On the tenth day of the hadj began the joyous feast of El Idha, commemorating Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son Isaac, and Ahmed walked with his fellow pilgrims to the nearby village of Mina, where each must sacrifice an animal. Some 500,000 beasts are imported each year; ordinary pilgrims cut the throat of a goat for about $20; the rich may kill a cow or even a camel. The meat is supposed to be distributed to the poor, but for want of transport, thousands of carcasses are left rotting on the ground. The Saudi Arabian government is considering setting up a cannery to preserve the flesh.

Last week, Ahmed Murad still glowed with the grace his hadj had brought him. “It was a gift of God to see all those people around Mount Arafat,” he said. “There was no me and no you, no Abraham, no Jesus, no Mohammed. Just God alone.”

* The pilgrimage is one of the five “pillars” of Islam enjoined on all Moslems. The others: prayer, almsgiving, abstention from food or water during the days (but not the nights) of Ramadan, witness to the oneness of Allah and the pre-eminence of his prophet, Mohammed.