An Hour From Eternity: Journeys to the Sacred House

An Hour From Eternity: Journeys to the Sacred House This is a journey unlike any other. A journey where travelers describe the happiest hour of their lives not as a wedding night, but as a single hour standing before the Kaaba. Where a girl weeps at sudden wealth and asks, if a creature looked at us and we became rich, how would it be if the Creator looked at us? Today, you and I will walk through the accounts of pilgrims to Mecca, through their wonders, their hardships, and their moments of pure transcendence. Let's begin at the heart of it all. One traveler recorded entering the Kaaba itself on the morning of Tuesday, March 19, 1935, alongside a team of Iraqi scouts. He had entered before, back in 1930, praying two rak'ahs at each of its four corners. At the door of the Kaaba sat the chief of the Al Shaibi family, receiving money from visitors and perfumes brought from India and other Muslim lands to scent the sacred house. Another pilgrim described his first glimpse of the Kaaba in words that still shimmer. He wrote that from the first look at its beauty, all the misfortunes and hardships of travel vanished, as if there had never been a thorn on the road. He saw the Kaaba as a ruby, revealed to onlookers in a black garment of dignity. He and his companions spent the entire night beside it, praying and seeking forgiveness until dawn. But the road to this beauty was anything but gentle. Consider the water of Jeddah. One traveler complained that the salt purified from seawater only made thirst worse. He wrote that you swallow it desperately and your thirst intensifies, as if you drink thirst itself. Only mineral water or rainwater, stored in tanks in a few houses, could truly quench it. Yet Jeddah dazzled in other ways. Its markets overflowed with shells, pearls, coral, perfumes, and goods from India, Japan, Egypt, and the Levant. Its finest palaces stood in the district of banks and consuls of Holland, Russia, England, and France, homes with gardens, electric lights, and radios. And it was, the traveler noted, the only city that the Franks entered while having no influence in it. And what of the road itself? Here the accounts turn darker. On the way to Madinah, one traveler described rows of Bedouins, men, women, and children, many of them naked, stretching their hands out to beg, running behind the cars, some chanting songs to soften hearts. And they had, he observed, a remarkable system. Give a coin to one, and he quickly tells his companions, and hands reach toward you from every side. But here is the astonishing twist. These beggars, the traveler reminds us, were the descendants of Bedouins who once dictated their will to armed armies, preventing the Turkish and Egyptian caravans from marching day or night unless they paid heavily. What changed? The rule of the Saudi king, with its severe application of Islamic law, cutting off the hand of the thief, punishing those who tampered with security. The result, the traveler wrote, was a level of safety this land had not known, he believed, since the era of the Rightly Guided Caliphs. Justice in Mecca could indeed be swift. One account tells of a boy who stole from pilgrims and had his hand cut off in the presence of the emir of Hajj himself, to protect the sanctity of religion. And then there is the mountain. Cave Hira, where the Prophet once worshipped. One sheikh, Abu Mahdi Issa, recounted a night there that he would never forget. He had gone with three companions. A storm broke, clouds and lightning, then thunder so tremendous he said he had never seen its like. He did not doubt that it was death. He clung to his place, saying he would prefer to meet God in such a spot. When the storm passed, he emerged to find two of his companions dead, one sitting with his appearance unchanged by a single hair. He spent that night alone on the mountain, and confessed he had never seen anything more terrifying. Yet through all of it, the hardship, the thirst, the terror, one voice captures why they came. A pilgrim wrote of standing before the sacred house at two o'clock and declared that this hour does not count from age, but from eternity. He wished for the wheel of time to stop. Everything in this world, he wrote, is mere craft and profession, except standing between the hands of God in prayer. Perhaps that is the lesson these travelers left us. The journey strips everything away, comfort, safety, even companions, until only one thing remains. A heart, standing before its Creator, filled with a joy that no container on earth could hold.