Samson Girma The Pilgrimage to Mecca

I was doing reading about the Islamic faith and found some interesting things that reminded me a lot about this class. As many people know, there are requirements which all followers of Islam must abide by. One of these is the once in a lifetime trip to the holy city Mecca. Here, Muslims get the chance to visit the place that where their religion started. Religion is the practice of maintaining cosmos through ritual and ritual is central to this pilgrimage experience. These help those making the journey relate to the struggles the Prophet Ibrahim went through thousands of years ago. Muslims can go to Mecca at any time but in order to satisfy this requirement they have to go at a particular time of year where Muslims from all around the world undergo these rituals by the millions. With such a volume of people there is without a doubt a new sense of communitas that makes the journey different from going alone, changing the experience of the holy place. Through this pilgrimage we one can see how as Lane says “landscape is a connector of the soul with Being” (pg 20) and how rituals and a physical place that we interpret as holy can make us closer to a Higher Being.