We keep dying if we leave our brains with our shoes

January 2006, Al-Qalam

The traffic had been moving extremely slowly for over a kilometre. Then I discovered the reason for the hold up. Across the intersection, the road had been closed. This meant that two roads – the one I was on and the one from the left – fed traffic into a single road – to the right. Fortunately, drivers waited their turn and when the robot changed to green, they moved. So while the traffic was slow, there wasn’t a snarl-up.

Just then, a traffic policeman appeared to direct the vehicles. He did this for about two minutes before disappearing. And, suddenly, there was chaos! Suddenly no one cared about the robots; suddenly the discipline was completely lost. It was as if those two minutes of dependence on the cop had made people into slaves to his assistance. While we were able to conduct ourselves quite well before he had arrived, now we were confused and had lost the capacity to think for ourselves.

This incident took place just before the jumu’ah salah. And I reflected on it as I listened to our imam, Shaikh Yahya, talk about hajj and the manner in which people blindly follow their particular madhahib during the pilgrimage – even in contradiction to their common sense and, often, contrary to the instructions of the Prophet Muhammad (s).

This year’s major hajj disaster (there seems to be one every year) – the loss of over 350 lives at the jamarat – can, in part, be explained by a similar attitude to that of the drivers who created the chaos at the robots.

It is as if the drivers and the hujjaj both place their brains, their faculties of understanding and thought, in the hands of someone else. They would both be fine if that third party did not exist. But once on the scene, that party becomes an intellectual proxy. In the case of the drivers, the proxy was the traffic policeman. In the case of the hujjaj, it is their respective ulama.

During my hajj, there was an incident that is an appropriate illustration of this condition. During our first day at Mina, there was a huge fire that destroyed many of the camps. We all had to flee Mina and to return to the safety of Makkah. Many of those camps that had not been destroyed in the blaze – like the South African one – had been flooded by firefighters.

When we reached our hotel in Makkah, one group of our compatriots was quite disturbed by this turn of events; they were afraid that the blessing of their hajj had been diminished by their return to Makkah. The only way to solve the problem, they decided, was to phone Durban and ask a senior maulana from the Jamiatul Ulama Natal for a decision. Never mind that he was thousands of kilometres away and had not even heard of the fire yet. He promptly advised them that they had to return to Mina! Return where? To what? There were no tents left standing! But people in the group decided they had to follow the instruction.

The frightening thing is that this was not an isolated phenomenon.

Part of the reason for the annual crush, injuries and even death at the jamarat is that the hujjaj want simply to follow what their ulama tell them and neither they nor their ulama are willing to use their Allah-given ‘aql (intellect).

Many ulama insist, for example, that hujjaj may not leave Muzdalifah – in their journey to Mina and the stoning of the jamarat – before sunrise. Thus three million hujjaj are expected to stone the one jamarat, all together, immediately after sunrise. If only they were willing to accept the opinion – as advised by the Prophet (s) himself – that certain hujjaj could leave Muzdalifah much earlier. That would spread the three million people over a longer period of time and allow greater safety for the pilgrims.

Or, for the last day of stoning – when this year’s tragedy occurred – most ulama insist that the stoning may take place only after midday. Again, three million people trying to perform one ritual at the same time in a place known to have the highest death rate of the hajj. Could some people of intellect not advise the hujjaj to stagger the stoning throughout the day – starting in the morning – in order to save lives? Or is the saving of lives less important than the following of particular fiqhi opinions?

Let us remember that when Imams Abu Hanifa, Shafi’i, etc made their rulings, they could not even dream of three million people in Mina at the same time.

And to simply say, as one of the Saudi princes said, that these deaths is Allah’s Will is a shirking of our human responsibility and makes us even more culpable for the deaths of hundreds of people.

But the blind following seen during the hajj is not limited to the tragic jamarat incidents. On Arafat, in Mina, at Muzdalifah, numerous people blankly refuse to follow the sunnah of the Prophet (s) – of joining their salawat – because they have been told by some ‘alim (or because they claim to follow the opinion (often wrongly) of Imam Abu Hanifa) that they may not do so. The attitude seems to be: who cares what the Prophet (s) said; as long as we follow our maulana / sheikh we are fine.

I remember Ebrahim Rasool, now Western Cape premier, complaining that when Muslims come to the masjid, they leave their brains outside with their shoes. Someone should tell Ebrahim that this calamity afflicts our community at places other than the masjid as well.

It is this leaving the brains with the shoes that one sees when one visits any of the numerous fatwa websites on the internet. Muslims ask the silliest questions about the smallest (and sometimes most personal) of questions, questions that those individuals should be answering by a tireless exercise of their minds.

Some 360 hujjaj died this year. But most Muslims die intellectually every single day as we refuse to use the intellect that Allah has given us. We should remember that, on the Final Day, Allah will not ask whose opinion we followed but what we did, each of us individually. And, we should remember the verses of the Qur’an where Allah tells of those who, on the Last Day, will say of their wrongs that they had just followed some other person. And both will be punished.