yaum as-sabt 20th Dhu al-Hijjah 1428
Bismillah ar Rahmaan ar Raheem,
As salaam alaikum wa rahmaatuulahhi wa baraakaatuu,
I was first given the book The Hadj by Michael Wolfe while I was actually on Hajj in 2002. After years of procrastination I finally decided to read the book before the start of Dhul Hijja this year. I was thinking that it would remind me of my hajj and get me reacquainted with that the Hajjis were going through. The book starts with Abdul Majeed’s (M. Wolfe) trip to Morocco before the Hajj and his reflections of his experience in Morocco make up more then half the book. There was no table of contents to the book, so there was no way of me knowing that I would spend more time reading of Abdul Majeed’s accounts in Morocco then the actual Hajj the namesake of the book. At first I was a little put off, because I wanted to get to the meat and potatoes of the story, but soon I found myself engrossed in the life and characters introduced in the book’s Marrakesh half. By the end of the first section I was hoping that by the end of the book Abdul Majeed would do a recap of the lives of the Marrakesh people he introduced me to. The second half of the book deals with his Hajj, and again Abdul Majeed does a superb job of introducing characters that make you want to jump between the words, shake their hands and give them salaams. Abdul Majeed made Hajj in 1990 which makes it very interesting because this was the last Hajj before the first Gulf War, and soon after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. It is very interesting to read the insights of the last Hajj before the new world order of today. I was expecting just a recount of a man’s time making pilgrimage and I got much, much more. The book was very easy reading and I enjoyed it.
