Empty Room
\r\nAn enormous courtyard and in the centre, a hollow cube. Nothing more! You suddenly tremble! Wonder, amazement! An empty room, that is all. Is the qiblah of our faith, our love, our formal prayer, our life and our death just this? A pile of dark, rough stones, placed upon each other, spaces unevenly and inexperiencedly filled between with mortar, nothing more!
\r\nSuddenly a doubt runs through you. Where is this? Where have I come? I understand a palace or the beauty of an artistic architecture or a temple. I understand a sacred magnificence and spiritual silence under high, grand, elegant, artistic ceilings. I understand a tomb - the burial place of a great person, a heroic genius, Prophet, Leader!
\r\nBut this? No architecture, no art, no beauty, no inscription, no tile, no plaster-moulding, not even the burial place of a Prophet, an Imam or a grave of an eminent person to whom I can pilgrimage to recall the person that I had come to see so that I can feel a point, a visage, a reality, an object.\tThere\tis\tnothing\there.\tThere\tis no one here.
\r\nSuddenly you understand how good it is that no one is here! Suddenly you feel the Kabah is a roof, a roof from which to ascend, to suddenly leave the Kabah behind and open your wings in space. Then you feel absoluteness! You sense eternity. That which you never sensed in your divided life, that which you do not find in your world of relativities, that which you cannot feel, you can only philosophize about, can be seen here: absoluteness, eternity, non direction. He!
\r\nHow good that there is no one here. How good it is that the Kabah is empty. You gradually realize you did not come to visit a shrine. You have made the Hajj. This is not your final destination.
\r\nThe Kabah is a sign so the way is not lost. It is only a sign, an arrow. It only shows you direction. You have made the Hajj. You have made the resolution, resolved upon the absolute, moving towards eternity, eternal motion, towards Him.
\r\nCompiled From:
\r\n \"Hajj: Reflection on its Rituals\" - Ali Shariati