Soon it will be that time of the year again in the Islamic calendar when millions of Muslims from across the globe will descend on the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia for the annual Hajj pilgrimage. Hajj is one of the five indispensible pillars of the Islamic faith which every Muslim must fulfil at least once in their lifetime. For many Muslims, the Hajj will form the apex of their religious experience. Like all pilgrimages, it is one of the mind, body and the soul.

Many of you may have seen the annual news coverage of the sea of devout Muslim pilgrims of all races draped in nothing but two simple white shrouds circumambulating gently around the huge black cube known as the Ka’ba. It is an undeniably beautiful and poignant sight to behold whatever your ideological bent might be.

For me the Hajj has always symbolised the transcending of racial, class and gender barriers. It is one of the most powerful expressions of social equality one will ever witness. Both King and pauper stand side by side becoming equals as they bow their heads in humility acknowledging a power greater than themselves as they cast their ego aside. It is was this experience of Hajj which led Malcolm X to radically change his extremist views from the ‘white devil’-hating Islam that he had learned from the Nation of Islam to Islam’s true message of peace, love and the brotherhood of mankind.

In the last few years I have been given the chance to go on an all-expense paid trip to Hajj by my dear mum (God bless her). However, each year I have blankly, but respectfully, refused her offer. You may be surprised to read this given the way I just plugged the Hajj like some Saudi Thomas Cook travel agent on commission. But my objections against Hajj are based on moral and ethical grounds, indeed, it is a political protest against the iniquities of the Saudi regime and their growing cannon of human rights abuses under the indifferent gaze of the international community.

This month it was brought to our attention that eight Bangladeshi migrant workers were publically executed under the barbaric Saudi penal code. The Saudi government has a warped and archaic interpretation of Islam which in turn justifies such horrific punishments. It is an interpretation which ensures that the monopoly of power and wealth remain in the hands of a few self-appointed leaders (who are mostly related) and guarantees that the less vulnerable remain vulnerable. Women were only granted the right to vote a few weeks ago and will only be able to run as candidates in regional elections (they can exercise this in 2015). However, if any women in Saudi Arabia are thinking of driving to the ballot box, they can think again – women have not been granted this simple right yet.

Furthermore, funded by the petrol dollar, Saudi Arabia has managed to spread its malevolent interpretation of Islam to all four corners of the globe through the dissemination of their religious literature which feeds the mind of many impressionable young Muslims teaching them a very rigid interpretation of the faith. Paradoxically, as reported by Amnesty International and other human rights groups, the kingdom also uses draconian laws to arrest people without trial under the guise of its anti-terror laws. In some cases individuals have completely disappeared and in others reappeared after a long period of unlawful detention.

Many Muslims will object to my stance of boycotting the Hajj and cry out the proverbial “render unto God that which belongs to God!” What has all of the above got to do with the religious ritual obligation of Hajj? Shouldn’t religion and politics be kept in separate, tight compartments?

I would argue that by boycotting the Hajj we have a chance to deliver a two-fold blow to the Saudi regime. The first will be an economic one since Hajj generates billions of dollars of revenue for the Saudi government. Although this may be an insignificant blow to a country saturated in oil, no one likes to lose money, especially the creasy Bedouins of the House of Saud.

But it is the second form of protest which would have greater repercussions because of its symbolically powerful nature. In boycotting the Hajj, Muslims will be protesting against the barbaric interpretation of Islam preached by the Saudis. For me, such a protest would be akin to a Lutherean- style of reclaiming religious interpretation for myself. A tyrannical regime such as the Saudis needs to be challenged theologically as well as politically. By framing protests in a vernacular familiar to them, we will essentially challenge the regime’s raison d’être.

It would be hypocritical of me to go on Hajj knowing all I know about the Saudi regime. It would be a pilgrimage in body devoid of a soul, an empty ritual with no significance outside of itself. I was always taught that any religious act of faith must have a tangible manifestation, a rippling of goodness that emanates from its core to the outside world. This transformative power of religion on the terrestrial plane has always been the mainstay of the world’s great traditions and their proponents. History has shown us time and time again that faith has the power to move mountains.

This has always been the way of ‘good’ faith, the healthy type like that of Buddha who protested against the Hindu caste system, or the faith of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Theirs was a stubborn faith that did not allow them to turn a blind eye to the social injustices in the world they found themselves in. Gandhi once remarked that he who says that religion and politics don’t go together hasn’t understood politics. When Muhammad preached the religion of Islam in seventh century Mecca he came with a bundle of egalitarian enterprises which were hugely ahead of their time; he raised the status of women, orphans and slaves and granted them rights some of which were unmatched by Europe even into the 19th century such as giving women the right to vote and own their own wealth and property.

The recent concessions made by the Saudi government are half-hearted measures to appease the pro-revolutionary sentiments currently brewing in the kingdom. Although the Arab Spring has yet to reach the arid lands of Saudi Arabia, there have been reports of a number of small anti-government protests which have unsurprisingly been quashed before they gather momentum such as in the region of Qatif as reported by Reuters. Furthermore, even the slightest waft of a revolution in neighbouring Arab states seem to strike fear into the heart of the Saudi regime. This explains why Saudi Arabia have sent their own troops into Bahrain to break-up growing protests by the Shia communities.

Many Muslim theologians, along with other political leaders, have weakly called on the country to declare a moratorium (suspension, not a ban) on the use of the death penalty. As a Muslim, I’m also protesting against such indifferent theological hair-splitting. There is something deeply inhumane about those individuals who choose to quibble about abstruse theological questions while people are being hacked and hanged to death. But it is not only Islamic scholars who are to blame. Because of Saudi Arabia’s strategic location, a country with huge oil reserves, it has been granted an alarming degree of unspoken immunity by our own politicians who continue to place profit before people.

Buried deep beneath the veneer of Hajj is a countless list of human rights abuses committed by the Saudi government. We are only now realising the mammoth implications of united global political protests made possible through technology. Such protests have the capacity to be organised and implemented within weeks. This is a technological grace which literally saves lives and overthrows dictators. We have seen how the pressure threshold of a government is strained and lowered as long as the masses continue to apply that pressure. I, for one, would love to see the triumphant spectacle of over one billion voices of the Muslim world crying out in unison against the plethora of human rights abuses committed by the Saudi regime. Sadly, I know that such a spectacle is idealistic given that most Muslim majority countries are infamous for human rights abuses. I would, however, expect Muslims in the West to exercise their freedom of speech to condemn the Saudi regime. Freedom of expression, as the scholar Hamza Yusuf eloquently put it, was about the freedom to speak out against tyranny. I hasten to add also that Mecca, the birthplace of Islam, is considered to be the capital of the Muslim world and one cannot but imagine the rippling implications for the rest of the region.

To my immediate family and friends my stance is viewed to be outright sacrilegious. But my understanding of Islam is not one of a literalist reading, which is always the pernicious foundations of extremism. It is a symbolic reading in which I consider the Hajj to be the manifestation of the highest form of equality sanctioned by the divine hand of God itself. Such a symbolic reading cannot exist when the backdrop is the total opposite. Muslims need to reappropriate the symbol of Hajj as that emblem of equality originally intended by the Prophet Muhammad. This for me would be akin to a political pilgrimage which will most definitely be accepted by God. True spirituality has always been revolutionary. After all, the Quran itself declares that ‘whithersoever you turn, there is the Face of God’ (Quran 2:115). We do need to go to Mecca to get spiritually closer to God. Such a restrictive notion of God is far more sacrilegious than what I am proposing.

So, this year, once again, Mum, I’m sorry, I can’t possibly think of going on Hajj.

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