I Saw Jesus Above The Kaaba During Hajj — This Changed My Life Forever
My name is Ibrahim Alumari. I am 63 years old and at this stage of my life I have nothing left to protect except the truth.
When you have lived this long, when you have buried people you loved and watched your own hair turn gray and felt your knees remind you every morning that the body does not last forever, you stop being interested in appearances.
You stop managing what people think of you. What you care about, what you become desperate to hold on to is what is real and what I am about to tell you is the most real thing that has ever happened to me.
I never thought I would say these words. Not to my children, not to my oldest friends, not even to myself in the quiet of my own room at night.
But I saw what I saw and I am 63 years old and my eyes are still good and my mind is still clear and I know the difference between what is real and what is imagined.
What happened to me during my Hajj pilgrimage was real. Every part of it and I cannot spend whatever time God has left for me on this earth carrying it in silence.
I was born in the city of Ta’if in the Shed region of Saudi Arabia.
The city of roses and honey and cool mountain air. The city that sits above the heat of the surrounding desert like a man standing on a high place looking out.
I grew up in a household where faith was not optional and not merely cultural but the actual substance of daily life.
My father prayed five times a day without exception for as long as I knew him.
My mother kept her Quran on the kitchen table the way other women keep a vase of flowers as a natural and beautiful part of the ordinary space.
I memorized the opening chapter of the Quran before I started school. I grew up knowing who I was and what I believed and where I stood before God and I never questioned any of it because there was nothing in my life that made questioning necessary.
I worked for 35 years in the municipality of Ta’if. Administrative work, city planning, the kind of steady, reliable career that a steady, reliable man builds in a steady, reliable city.
I married my wife Maryam when I was 26. We have four children and 11 grandchildren and a house in the Al Hada district that has known more noise and laughter and ordinary family chaos than I could ever properly describe.
I am not a famous man. I am not a scholar or a politician or a man whose name appears in newspapers.
I am an ordinary man who lived an ordinary life with genuine faith at the center of it and for 30 years the one thing I had not yet done, the one gap in the life I had built was Hajj.
Every year I told myself this would be the year. Every year something came up.
The children were young and needed things. The salary did not stretch far enough. The timing was wrong.
I watched other men from my neighborhood return from Mecca transformed wearing the title of like a garment of honor and I felt the particular ache of a man who has been meaning to do the most important thing and has not yet done it.
When I finally retired and the children were grown and Maryam sat across from me at dinner one evening and said, “Ibrahim, this year we go.”
I felt something open in my chest that I had not known was closed. We saved for two more years after that conversation.
We planned carefully. We prayed about it and when the day finally came that we put on our Ihram garments and joined the millions moving toward Mecca, I wept.
I am not a man who weeps easily but I wept that day with the gratitude to have a man who has finally arrived at something he has been walking toward his whole life.
The city of Mecca during Hajj is something that no description fully captures. I had heard people try my whole life and I had thought I understood what they were describing.
I did not understand until I was inside it. The scale of it, the density of it, the sheer number of human beings gathered in one place for one purpose.
It overwhelms every sense simultaneously. Millions of people dressed in the same simple white cloth stripped of all markers of status and nationality and wealth moving together like a single living thing.
A single heartbeat made up of millions of individual heartbeats. The sound of prayers from every direction in every language layered over each other into something that is no longer individual voices but a collective sound.
A sound the earth itself seems to produce rather than the people standing on it.
I had carried burdens to Mecca. Every pilgrim carries something that is the nature of the journey.
That is why we come. I carried 35 years of accumulated regrets. Moments I had handled badly as a father.
Words I had said to Maryam in anger that I could never fully take back.
Prayers I had performed carelessly. Years when the faith had been form rather than substance.
A decade when I had been so busy building the ordinary life that I had neglected to tend the interior one.
I carried all of this into the Grand Mosque and I intended to lay it down.
That was why I had come. To lay it down and go home lighter. On the third evening of our time in Mecca, Maryam was resting and I went alone to perform tawaf, the circumambulation of the Kaaba.
The walking of circles around the black cube that has been the center of Muslim worship for 14 centuries.
The courtyard was full as it always is, as it never stops being during Hajj.
I joined the moving current of worshipers and began to walk. My lips moving in the prayers I had memorized, my heart reaching toward something I had been reaching toward my whole life.
The man beside me was younger, perhaps 35. Broad-shouldered with the focused expression of a man who is somewhere sacred and knows it.
His name I would learn later was Nasser. He noticed my slower pace and moved slightly to give me room and at one point when the crowd pressed in he placed a steadying hand briefly on my arm without being asked.
Small gestures. The kind of small gestures that happen between strangers in that place because the place itself asks something of the people inside it.
I was thinking about my father. He had died 11 years ago without making Hajj.
A grief he carried quietly to the end. I was walking these circles partly for him carrying his name in my chest alongside my own and the weight of that was making my steps heavy and my eyes wet.
The prayers on my lips were real prayers, perhaps the most real I had produced in years.
The reaching was genuine. The desire to be heard was genuine. And then I saw the light.
I want to be careful here. I want to be precise. I am a man who spent 35 years in municipal administration.
I am not a man given to exaggeration or dramatic embellishment. When I tell you I saw a light above the Kaaba, I am telling you what I saw with the same precision I would use to file an administrative report.
A light appeared above the Kaaba. Not the floodlights that illuminated the mosque. I know those lights.
I had been looking at them for three days. Not a reflection of anything in the courtyard.
Not the moon which was in a completely different part of the sky. A light that came from a source I could not identify that had a quality completely distinct from any artificial or natural light I have encountered in 63 years of looking at the world.
It was softer than any bright light has the right to be. Bright in a way that the eye could hold without pain and it moved not erratically, not like a malfunction, but with the quality of something alive, something that had intention.
The way water moves when it is responding to a current underneath the surface rather than wind on top of it.