Rock Pigeon
The sacred and the profane
This winter I had the privilege of visiting the majestic Niagara Falls. When we arrived in Canada that December evening, I had all sorts of preconceived ideas of what the experience would be like. I imagined there would be a narrow and wavy path along the river that would slowly bring us closer to the hidden treasure of these spectacular waterfalls. I imagined we would hear them rumble from a distance and then suddenly be overcome by their majestic grandeur as they appeared from behind the trees.
I could not have been more wrong.
As we drove closer to the Falls, the broad streets became more crowded. We paid a high parking fee and then got out of the car to be guided towards our destination by flashy holiday lights. As we came closer, the holiday lights were effortlessly outshone by the lights of casinos, hotels, and even a Ferris wheel. The distant rumbling of the Falls was barely noticeable. It dissolved in the street noises and multilingual chatter all around until, suddenly, they were right there. The Falls were bathed in a rainbow-colored light that was so bright that I mistook a Seagull flying in the distance for an LED drone. Behind me, cars were passing on a busy street. Around me, people were walking in and out of casinos and hotels, taking selfies in their plastic Niagara rain ponchos. As my gaze slowly crawled up the towers around me, I noticed the many silhouettes of people watching the discolored Falls from the comfort of their hotel rooms.
The Niagara Falls are a booming business. Millions of people visit each year and bring a lot of money to spend. In order to maximize profit, tourists are persuaded to watch the light show on the Falls at night, with bombastic fireworks to close the evening - or to signal the transition into the casinos. The Falls that I expected to be so very majestic actually seemed rather small and sad amidst the entire circus. Like a king whose body, suddenly seems insignificant, almost a bit silly, when dressed up in layers of flashy fabrics and gemstones, seated on the greatest throne.
Anger came to visit me. “How dare these people violate such a beautiful, sacred place?” she said. When I shared some pictures with friends, I expected them to share my feelings of disbelief and disapproval. But what I had not expected was that so many of them would give words to a thought I had only quietly entertained, as they sadly uttered: “Just like Mecca…”
The Niagara Falls were formed only about 12,000 years ago when the last Ice Age came to an end and the melting ice released large streams of water into the Niagara River. With great force, the water plunged over the cliff of the Niagara Escarpment, and the Falls were born. For many indigenous nations, most importantly those of the Iroquois Confederacy (the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and since 1722, the Tuscarora), the dance of water and gravity displayed at the Falls is not only of ecological and aesthetic but also of cultural and spiritual importance. The name ‘Niagara’ is an anglicization of the Iroquoian word Onguiaahra, meaning ‘thundering water’.
The name of the sacred site in Mecca (Makkah in Arabic) also had a slight linguistic change over time. The Qur’an and the Bible refer to it as Bakkah, often anglicized as Baca. Quite literally the opposite of the Falls, the name refers to a place of drought without a stream, ‘The Valley of Weeping’, which may refer both to a type of ‘weeping tree’ that grows in dry places and drips resin tears, as well as to the history of hardship in the desert. Here we remember the story of Ishmael and Hagar, peace be upon them. Ishmael cried from thirst after being left alone with his mother Hagar in a part of the desert we nowadays know as Mecca. In despair Hagar ran back and forth between the hills of Safa and Marwah to find water. Miraculously they were saved as the Zamzam spring arose to quench their thirst. In Niagara, the water came thundering down as the teardrops of mist rose up, whilst in Mecca, as the teardrops fell down, the water rose up.
The French missionary and explorer Father Louis Hennepin is often credited with having first ‘discovered’ the Falls in 1678, as though he somehow magically lifted the thick mist that veils them. Of course, long before his ‘discovery’, the area of the Falls was frequently settled and visited by indigenous peoples for both ceremonial and practical purposes. Long before the unsustainable boom in tourism of the last century, and even millennia before the building of the first Western hotel in 1822, many indigenous people followed narrow and wavy paths along the river to reach the Falls.
Similarly, millennia before the desert could be crossed by airplanes and concrete turned the hills of Safa and Marwah into a parking lot-like structure, many people crossed the wavy desert in narrow caravans to reach Mecca. In Surah Al ‘Imran, ‘The Family of Imran’, the third chapter of the Qur’an, we read, “The first House [of worship] established for humanity is the one at Bakkah - a blessed sanctuary and a guide unto all the worlds full of clear messages. It is the place where Abraham once stood. Whoever enters it should be safe. Pilgrimage to this House is a duty owed to God by all people who are able to undertake it. And as for those who deny the truth - verily, God does not stand in need of anything in all the worlds” (Qur’an 3:96-97). This first House of worship is the building we know today as the Kaaba, a cube-shaped stone building dressed in black cloth embroidered with gold calligraphy. It was first built by the prophet Abraham and his son Ishmael, peace be upon them. Some say it was built at the same location where Adam, peace be upon him, had first built a sanctuary on earth. Others say angels had graced the place even before humanity did. Either way, when the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, instructed that the false idols of his people be removed from the Kaaba and he circumambulated it, he did not create a new ritual or sanctuary; he restored an ancient sanctuary for the remembrance of God. A sanctuary for all of humanity. Over the years, the sanctuary has been destroyed and rebuilt, lost and restored, just like the faith in so many of our hearts.
Restoration may be needed once again. In recent times, new idols have drawn dangerously close to the Kaaba. For most of history, the buildings in Mecca were modest, never challenging the Kaaba as the ultimate centerpiece - the pupil in the eye of the sacred city. But in recent years, the iris of Mecca has been expanded and modernized to such an extent that its pupil, the Kaaba, seems to have shrunken like that of a deer in the headlights of a car. The clock tower of Mecca, the third-tallest building in the world, has an estimated two million LED lights that can be seen from 17 kilometers (10 miles) away. Every night, in a light show, it shoots beams of light up to 10 kilometers (6 miles) into the sky. Its broadcasted call to prayer can be heard 7 kilometers (4 miles) away. From the perspective of the rich in the comfort of their hotel rooms, the Kaaba remains but a grain of sand in this artificial sea of light and sound. Seemingly small, like the Falls. Like the body of the overly adorned king.
What makes a place sacred? When sociologist Emile Durkheim philosophized about this in his The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life he defined the sacred as “things set apart and forbidden.” Mecca fits well within his definition of a sacred place because it is a separate, special space to which special rules apply. You have to dress a certain way and act a certain way in the Sacred Mosque of Mecca, the Masjid al-Haram. The connection Durkheim makes between the sacred and the forbidden can also be found in Arabic, as the word for a sacred place (haram) and the word for forbidden (haram) both tie back to the same root letters of ha, ra, and mim.
Because Durkheim’s definition contains some truth, it is tempting to accept it as the truth. Academia has become so fragmented that it is easy to forget that a sociological theory does not address the truth as a whole, but only the truth as studied through social phenomena. If we were to ask the same question, “What makes a place sacred?”, to a scholar of political science, physics, law, or theology, the answer would be vastly different, yet not necessarily any less true. If we were to ask any Muslim pilgrim in Mecca what makes the place sacred, or any Indigenous inhabitant of the Falls, would their answer be any less true? Their answer is also based on science, at least in its original meaning of scientia - knowledge. Perhaps it is based on the kind of knowledge that makes a person conscious, that renders a person con scientia, with knowledge. Perhaps it is based on the kind of knowledge that gives us our conscience and the knowledge of right and wrong, on which modern science has nothing to say. Not some seemingly objective form of knowledge, but the kind of knowledge that recognizes that science, the art of getting to know, can only be performed by whole people with both hearts and brains, in all of their complexity.
What is sacred is not just what is set apart and riddled with rules. What is sacred is what is holy, valued, significant, and deeply loved. Sacred sites do not just deny and forbid; they grant and give. They bring protection, freedom, and life. And as much as they create a superficial distinction between the sacred and the profane, on a deeper level, they sacralize the profane, leaving nothing but the sacred, or nothing but the profane, depending on your faith.
The other day I read a wondrous story. It was the story of the so-called ‘Al-Haram Pigeon’. The author writes: “The Al-Haram pigeon is distinguished by the beauty of its shape and colors, and by the long neck [and] the distinctive colors that surround its neck […] [T]hese descriptions differ from other types of pigeons and other birds in the world.” After reading his words, I eagerly looked for pictures of the ‘Al-Haram pigeon’. When I did, I couldn’t help but laugh. Any person who has ever set foot in a major city in Europe, North America, or the Middle East will recognize that this ‘Al-Haram Pigeon’ is simply a common Rock Pigeon. That same Rock Pigeon that so many of us who are urban city-dwellers practically see as rats with wings - which says much more about us than it says about either rats or Rock Pigeons.
Of course, Rock Pigeons are sacred, just like rats. They’re God’s creation. But are the Rock Pigeons in Mecca any more sacred than the Rock Pigeons on the streets of Manchester? Is the water powerfully thundering down the Niagara Falls any more sacred than the water flowing out of my tap?
Sacred spaces are everywhere we dare to see them. Everywhere we dare to remember, for the Qur’an tells us that the Face of God is wherever we turn, not just in the direction of Mecca (Qur’an 2:115). The prophet Muhammad told us that the entire earth is our mosque, not just the buildings we built for our own convenience. But for a people inclined to forget, there is an added importance to preserving spaces that help us remember. If we cannot remember God everywhere, then at least let’s try to remember Him in some places. If we cannot preserve peace everywhere, then at least let’s make sure to honor our sacred spaces as the safe sanctuaries they ought to be. If we cannot overcome greed and dominance everywhere, then at least let’s not build capitalist shrines and multi-billion dollar megatowers on former sites of remembrance, such as the house of Abu Bakr, which is now a Hilton hotel. At least let’s follow the example of Jesus, peace be upon him, and drive the money changers and sellers of Pigeons out of our temples (Matthew 21:12-13).
Let Mecca be the place where Pigeons are seen as sacred creatures. Not because there is anything special about the Pigeons trotting around the Kaaba, but because in that beautiful sacred space, we finally see how special all Pigeons are.
There is a myth going around that the ‘Al-Haram Pigeons’ of Mecca do not fly over or defecate on the Kaaba. Of course, they do - they’re Pigeons. I watched a video in which a man argued that birds releasing their droppings on the Kaaba is evidence that God does not exist, for if God existed, why would He allow a bird to poop on His House? It made me laugh.
It’s all God’s house. Even we are God’s house. And even Pigeon droppings are the work and Word of God. Maybe they’re a little joke - a little reminder to keep us from idolizing the building that so purposefully is kept empty. How poetic that the house of God be empty, or rather, filled to the rim with air. The same air that we breathe. And if our soul dwells in our breath, our lungs are nothing but the Kaaba: the sacred place that briefly holds something so much greater than words could ever reflect, or droppings could ever pollute.
I don’t think I could say it any more beautifully than Ziauddin Sardar did in his book Mecca: The Sacred City:
“I was rooted in humility, standing stock-still before the sight of the Kaaba, humbled by the feelings overpowering me, struggling with all my might to take hold of the sensations I felt, to keep possession of every aspect of this experience. The sight, the light - and gradually there was a smell. What was the odour of sanctity? It infused this atmosphere. I could identify the lingering grace notes of incense, mingled with a miasma of dust, the infinitesimal fine particles of airborne sand mixed with motes of woolen fluff stirred up by the throng of feet traversing a bed of carpets. This melange blended with the effusions of human bodies. And there was something else. Some edge, some sharp, acrid something. Suddenly a flight of pigeons took to the air in the open space before me. The beating of their wings startled me, jolting me back to time and place and a simple realization - the added ingredient was pigeon droppings. Out of slime we all came, the Qur’an says, and though we can ascend higher than angels, the footprints of humanity remain in the mud. So why should the odour of sanctity not include the savour of pigeon droppings?”