"Oh God said to Abraham, kill me a son".

I begin by borrowing the opening verse of the song "Highway 61 Revisited" which Dylan wrote in the mid-sixties, at the height of his youthful irreverence to dispel any idea that I am proselytising, given that the subject I am writing concerns one of the principal pillars of the Islamic faith, the Hajj

Today, Muslims all over the world will celebrate what we in Malaysia call Hari Raya Haji, the 10th day of the month of Zulhijjah . This is the day when Muslim pilgrims gather at Arafah, a plain outside Mecca.

It is called wukuf , the pinnacle of the pilgrimage ritual. This is a sight to behold, where from a small hill top one can see for miles around up to two million people gathered for that one day, with all distinctions of class and race done away with (the men wearing two pieces of unsewn cloth and the women in telekung ).

They come to answer the call of their Lord with the chants of Talbiyya , 'Here, I come, O Lord, here I come in answer to your call. There is no God but you, here I come. For all dominion, all bounty and all goodness belong to you'.

As a Muslim steeped in secular western education at one point in my early adult life, a number of factors prompted me to immerse myself in books on Islam and practise the faith with a firmer foundation of knowledge.

The Hajj was the last frontier that I gradually managed to understand and wholeheartedly accept. It was the last demon that I had to battle with and subdue, notwithstanding the egalitarian appeal of the Wukuf .

Ping-pong table

One of my earliest recollections of the Hajj was of sending off my grandparents in 1967. I remember on that very hot day, our families, packed in a Morris Minor, headed for Port Swettenham, not very far from our village near the Klang town.

In those days, very few people in the village could afford to make the pilgrimage and the Tabung Haji (Pilgrims Board) either was very new or still on the drawing board. The crowd on the dock was enormous, the sun was beating down mercilessly and we could hardly move while waiting for the pilgrims to board and the cargo to be loaded up to the ship.

It was well after midday that we were finally allowed to board the ship and share intimate moments with our loved ones. My grandmother sat on her bunk bed, calm and serene, speaking very little while my mother wept quietly.

It was my first time on a ship and I relished the opportunity of taking a short tour with my father. The sight of a ping-pong table and the badminton court, the cafeteria and the deeply-tanned seamen nonchalantly going about their jobs dissipated the atmosphere of sadness a little bit.

I was told that the journey took two weeks each way and the entire trip lasted three months. Going on pilgrimage was still considered a perilous undertaking as much as it was arduous and we all accepted the fact that our loved ones may not come back at all.

Violence and mercy

Still, the hazardous nature of the journey was not the particular aspect of the pilgrimage that made it difficult for me to reconcile between my rational mind and the tenets of spiritual faith for many years.

Going back to the utterly irreverent verses of Dylan's song, it is the narrative of Prophet Abraham and his son Ishmael with the images of the knife, sacrificial killing, blood , images that one with a modern scientific education and world view finds it difficult to comprehend, that somehow these violent events are supposed to connect with the universal aspects of religion, such as spiritual enlightenment, compassion and mercy.

Those disturbing thoughts have been tormenting me since childhood whenever the story was recounted in sermons during Eidhil Adha prayers but perhaps not to the extent that the character Lord Jim suffered, played by Peter O'Toole in the movie of the same name.

I have not read the book but the movie was based on Joseph Conrad's novel, written in 1900 about an English seafarer in the Orient who took charge of a ship carrying pilgrims from the Malay archipelago.

During a storm, the ship hit an object and fearing that the ship was about to capsize, in a moment of cowardice, he abandoned it and left the pilgrims to fend for themselves. The most memorable scene was seeing the pilgrims praying in neat rows led by an imam when the storm abated and the sea was calm again.

And Lord Jim remained forever tomented by that vision.

Sharpened knife

I guess my problem, which I think I share with others of my generation, was that the basic religious instruction that I received in childhood and at boarding schools which I attended after the age of 12, emphasised only the rituals whilst the fundamental aspects of spirituality that would have allowed us a deeper understanding of the faith were not given their due, not that we could blame anybody for this predicament.

When I went to the West at 17 for my eventual medical studies, I enjoyed absolute, complete freedom to explore the world of ideas and books. This was when I found the conflict between the tenets of faith and the probing of the rational mind the sharpest, more so in the rituals of the Hajj .

Why did God the most merciful, the compassionate command Abraham to kill his son Ishmael? I think the reason why these disturbing thoughts could not be resolved was that I did not know what happened to Ishmael after that event.

Now we know that he, like his father, went on to become a great prophet. But as a child, I was not very sure, as all narration about him in religious lore ceased when a sheep was put in his place as Abraham placed his sharpened knife on his neck.

After a number of books and lectures, I finally came to understand that the Hajj is the worship of a lifetime, just as the five daily prayers the worship of the day. It is the yearly commemoration and re-enactment of Abraham in his faith and in his submission to the one God, to Muslims the essential teaching of all prophets that culminated in final messenger, Muhammad.

Primordial nature

It was easy enough to understand the symbolism of the unity of God that underlies the tawaf , the circumambulation around the Kaaba . One can also readily understand the significance of the sa'ie , the re-enactment of the Hajar , Abraham's wife running between two hillocks in search of water for her thirsty infant as to bring home the point of the importance of human striving and not relying on passive supplications alone. But the sacrificial killing of a son?

For that I am thankful to Ali Shariati, the Iranian sociologist and scholar who has illuminated me on this question with his book Hajj . Shariati's translated books are mainly transcripts of lectures that he gave to students and young educated Iranians.

Two notable ones are On the Sociology of Islam and Marxism and other Western Fallacies . His ideas on the Islamic worldview and ideology of social, political and economic change so moved the young Iranians to throw their lot with the mullahs and overthrow the Shah.

Unfortunately, he died young in exile in London under mysterious circumstances two years before the revolution and we are deprived of the flowering of Iranian intellectual culture. But Hajj was written as a proper book that recounted his experience of the pilgrimage and his interpretation of the rituals.

One that I found particularly illuminating is on the question of Abraham sacrificing his son Ishmael. To Shariati, Ishmael symbolises something that a person holds dear, and to modern man this is often greed for material wealth, lust for power, ego. The Hajj means giving this up, sacrificing our own 'Ishmaels' and one who has performed it sincerely will regain his pristine, primordial nature.

In practice, of course, for man, by his nature, perfection in morals and character is an impossible, lofty ideal but what is actually demanded is striving towards it approximation.

If Shariati were alive today, he will likely lament that in performing the Hajj , the Muslims stress mainly the forms and less on the substance, that they have very much missed the point.

Sleazy life

Greed and materialism are modern man's driving impulses in social behaviour. With the prosperity of the 90s, religious tourism to the Holy Land has become an industry, with five-star packages and repeated trips (especially for the minor pilgrimage, the Umrah ).

We all know that no rehearsals are required for the Hajj and the Quran repeatedly mentions the great merit in spending one's wealth in helping the needy, the orphans and the underprivileged.

Wouldn't it be better that instead of performing the Umrah , the person spends the money to sponsor a number poor students or single mothers? And many have criticised the Tabung Haji as having deviated from its original objective of helping Muslims save for the pilgrimage and perhaps to cross subsidise the poorer Hajj aspirants.

It has become a business with dubious investments in plantations in a neighbouring country and also in massive infrastructure projects. Worse, it has been rumoured that its funds have been used to bail out failed crony businesses.

And people have the perception that politicians perform the Hajj and the Umrah largely to advertise their commitment to Islam, embracing their 'Ishmaels' in a life of sleaze once again when back in Kuala Lumpur.

In the end, its just another trip out on Highway 61.