Thursday, August 4, 2011

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The Hajj and the politics of being pagan

All for the benefit of Muhammad and the Meccan cult.

by Ferdinand III


Historian F.E. Peters in his study of the pagan antecedents of the Hajj or the ritual of rubbing a black rock against female genitalia expressed the ritualized procession in the following manner:

Nor could they circumambulate the House except in the garment of the Hums. If they had no such garments they had to go round naked. If any man or woman felt scruples when they had no Hums garments, then they could go round in their ordinary clothes; but they had to throw them away afterwards so that neither they nor anyone else could make use of them. The Arabs called these clothes "the cast-off " They imposed all these restrictions on the Arabs, who accepted them and halted at Arafat, hastened from it, and circumambulated the House naked. The men at least went naked, while the women laid aside all their clothes except a shift wide open back and front. (F. E. Peters, p 3-41, The Hajj, 1994)

The Hajj or ritual which may or may not have had sex and orgies as part of its program long pre-dated the politician Muhammad. He simply took the popular festival with its rather bizarre duties and rituals, and incorporated it into Islam. This made him immensely popular with the pagan Arabs who now had a plausible excuse to support the ilah moon deity and by extension Muhammad's dictatorship. Muhammad and his henchmen then manufactured stories and fables that somehow the Kabaa's rituals were generated by Abraham and possibly even Adam:

In this passage he describes how Abraham, at God's urging, performed that original pilgrimage ritual. Abu al-Walid related to us ... (from) Uthman ibn Saj: Muhammad ibn Ishaq reported to me: When Abraham the Friend of the Merciful finished building the sacred House, Gabriel came and said: "Circle it seven times!" and he circumambulated it seven times with Ishmael, touching all the corners during each circumambulation. When they had completed seven, he and Ishmael prayed two prostrations behind the stone [maqam]. He said: Gabriel got up with them and showed him all the ritual stations: al-Safa, al-Marwa, Mina, Muzdalifa, and Arafat. [Ibid, p 3-41, 1994]

Abraham never ventured past Sinai of course but illiterate Bedouins would not know this and were probably only too happy to partake in the fiction that their beloved shrine was the center of man's earthly spiritual existence. The cult of Muhammad was thus conflated with something grander, more permanent, and more dialectically divine. How convenient.

...Other traditions recollected that the Black Stone, or at least its inclusion in the Ka'ba, was of much more recent origin. Ibn Sa'd says that the Quraysh brought it down from Abu Qubays only four years before Muhammad's first revelation. In another account, from al-Fakihi, it is traced back to the Quraysh's first reconstruction of the building, possibly at the time of Qusayy. [F. E. Peters, p 3-41, 1994]

In fact the duty of Hajj occurred at other sites in Arabia. These must have been very profitable and included fairs, trading and donations of various sorts to the shrines involved. Muhammad took the obligation of these pilgrimages and joined it to the Moslem cult. It would ensure devotion and profit.

And not only was Mecca not part of the original Hajj; there may have been no trading in the city in connection with its own rituals. Such, at any rate, one might conclude from the fact that the famous pilgrimage fairs-and Mecca is never numbered among them-are associated with Arafat and Mina and that the Quraysh seem to play no major role in them. 14 Thus the Meccan ritual was at some point joined to the Hajj, probably by Muhammad himself. [ibid]

Like the rest of Islamic theology, the Hajj was man-created. As with most of Moslem liturgy and obligation, there is a distinct political program to the Hajj and to the major aspects of idol worship at the Kabaa cube or shrine. The processions around the El-Lah idol and the black rock housed in the Kabaa have less to do with spiritual piety, than it does with paying homage to the great man himself, the founder of the cult, Muhammad through his creation the El-Lah idol. In the Koran it is very hard, if not impossible to separate the thing Allah from the man Muhammad. There is no denying this clear and obvious reality.