The annual Muslim Hajj pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca has its origin in one of the most enduring epics of human history. The Prophet Mohammed was born in 570 AD in Mecca, a staging post along ancient trade routes carrying frankincense from the southern Arabian Peninsula. It was a city in which a multiplicity of gods were worshipped and, by the time of Mohammed’s birth, a city gripped with an insecurity born out of declining trade and endemic tribal warfare.
In the year 610, Mohammed ventured into the Arabian desert, where he heard the voice of the Archangel Gabriel imparting revelations from God which would give birth to Islam. After three years, the Prophet began to preach his message to the people of Mecca. The vested interests of local elites were deeply hostile to the revelations, seeing in them a threat to their positions of power, and they forced Mohammed and his followers from the city. Their escape or hijra (which literally means ‘flight’) north to the city of Medina and the date (622 AD) came to stand as markers of the new faith and the first year of the Islamic calendar, 1 AH (After Hijra).
By the time Mohammed returned to Mecca in 630 AD, his following had grown in number and power. Mecca soon became the centre of the new faith. Mohammed died in 632 AD, but Islam had already acquired an extraordinary momentum.
Uthman, the third successor to Mohammed as leader of the Islamic community (644-656 AD), drew together the sayings and story of Mohammed, using scribes and a panel of religious scholars to form the canon of suras (chapters) which make up the Qur’an. Emerging from this poetic and lyrical embodiment of faith were the five pillars of Islam—paramount to their worship of Allah. Shahada (the profession of faith, Islam’s basic tenet, that ‘There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is His Prophet’); Sala (prayer); Zakat (the giving of alms to the poor); Sawm (the fast for the duration of Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar and the month in which God’s revelations were first revealed); and the Hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca which is incumbent upon all Muslims of able body and sufficient means).
By 710 AD, the conquering armies of Islam had reached Morocco, Al-Maghreb al-Aqsa, the Farthest Land of the Setting Sun, and deep into Persia and India in the