Amid precautionary measures and hygienic controls, God willing, this year’s pilgrimage will be in a scene imposed by the epidemic that has been spreading for months, so that tears will flow from the eyes that were waiting to see the old house and the holy feelings and fuel the longing that led the pilgrims to purify the Bekaa.
Satisfactory Africa
Since the spread of Islam in it centuries ago, the African continent has remained responsive to the eternal call (both men and every atrophic) and all the means of transportation until the planes shortened the times and the distances of distances.
Before that, there was a wilderness that West African pilgrims traveled in large convoys, which required a special and general arrangement on a journey that goes back and forth, and the most important of these methods are:
The "Fortieth Trail", which passes through the African West, passes through the Hausa country (northern Nigeria and southern Niger now), then the country of Kanem (now Chad), then the valley regions in eastern Chad, then Darfur in Sudan, and passes by the Solomon Oasis to go to Assiut and then the Red Sea, and from there To the Holy Land.
This route is one of the oldest African pilgrimage routes, but in the late nineteenth century, with the outbreak of war in the areas around the Kingdom of Brno (Nigeria ruled from 1380 to 1893), pilgrims' convoys were forced to leave for other roads, including the desert road that paves the desert from the most sacred country in Niger to Cairo, the Red Sea.
The Sudan road is similar to the fortieth path, but instead of heading from Darfur towards the north-east, it continues east to Kordofan and its white capital, Khartoum, and east to the port of Suakin on the Red Sea.
This method is the most used method, according to Dr. Amin Ismail Sagagi from the Department of Islamic Studies at the University of Bayrou-Kno (Nigeria).
Dr. Sagaghi commented on Al-Jazeera Net on the issue of traveling for Hajj in the past. "Travel for Hajj was a great thing for Nigeria's residents, due to the dangers that surround the road, the length of the journey, and its volatile weather conditions, and the risks it causes are bandits, slavery invasions, predatory hunting, etc."
Sagaghi adds - revealing some of what was in that era of Anat - "because of the dangers of the matter and the possibility of irreversibility, pilgrims who divorced his wife before he traveled for fear that he would announce her pending, and the wife's family may request it, all this did not prevent them between them and Hajj, perhaps some of them pilgrimage more than once. "
Hajj trip for the sign Al-Shanqiti
The pilgrims of the African West were not free, of course, from the scholars, writers, and poets who documented their journeys crossing the land of the Nile Valley to the Hejaz, and among the most famous books documenting his Hijazi journey, the scholar Muhammad al-Amin bin Muhammad al-Mukhtar al-Shanqeeti (1905-1974), which was a journey that spread the knowledge of the Sheikh in every A place where there were schools, boys, and answers to the students ’questions and their faces, and all this was documented in his book“ The Pilgrimage to the Sacred House of God. ”
The book is multi-interest, as it contains fatwas on religion and language, and narrated what was from his trip, and described what he was on his trip of meetings with the public and private, including his discussions at the Omdurman Scientific Institute, in the era of Sheikh Yusuf Ibrahim Al-Nur.
And as he had contact with Omdurman scholars, he and his leaders celebrated it, "When we decided to travel from Omdurman, Brother Al-Muhammad Al-Shanqeeti, head of a committee in Sudan, met us (Muhammad Saleh Al-Shanqeeti, head of the first Sudanese legislative assembly in the period between 1948 and 1953). The purpose of the honor, and he brought us together with Mr. Abd al-Rahman (Sayyid Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi 1885-1959, son of Imam Muhammad al-Mahdi and found al-Sadiq al-Mahdi, the former prime minister). And we spread our car and took all the rail tickets for us and all of us.
Likewise, the book was not devoid of describing its good and ugly societal status, from honoring the guest to the "mediator", and everything that happened to them in Suakin (eastern Sudan) "And the gate of the center entered before us many of the mixes of people, from black and red and we came before them, so he reminded me of that Issam bin Obaid Al-Zamani said:
I brought in people before me who * had no right to enter the doors before me.
Until he reached his goals, he performed the obligatory prayer, then he settled in the land of the Two Holy Mosques, and his scientific effects are well known.
Poetry in the impact of pilgrims
Many are the poems that he wrote from Hajj or from those who moved the Holy Bekaa to his feelings, and for the African pilgrims, he felt a lot like that of other pilgrims who had poetry as a supporter, and this is normal while what the confident poet Yunus sees in his testimony to Al Jazeera Net.
"The journey to perform the Hajj remained an incentive to write poems for poets of the feelings that are possible in them, and what the longing drives, and the number of poems is greater than a few," Younes said.
Regarding the hadith on the African pilgrimage, Al-Wathiq adds, "The memory poems of the African pilgrimage journey vary between western and central African pilgrims who came in passing, and what the people of Sudan wrote in describing these transients."
There are those who documented the trip in poetry, such as Sheikh Abdel Wadud, Ould Sidi Abdullah - who performed Hajj in the year 1924 - with a system that documented the itinerary and what happened in it, describing the places and what happened there, the people he met, the police and health procedures, and what he organized:
Until we reached the victims (white) * and say our body did not get sick
Both the oldest and the youngest * had blocked him in the left arm
We stayed and stayed there and rested * and after a little Morocco we went
We walked into the hollows of al-Hizoom * In two nights, he came (to Khartoum)
And whoever documented the trip of Hajj Ibrahim Inas Al-Kulkhi, the Senegalese, in much of his poetry, although the pilgrimage in his time became most of it by plane, but this did not prevent the Khartoum airport from being a station between Lagos and Jeddah:
I ran from my land with a bird, a bird * with love and faith attached to it
Lagos in Khartoum at night, and I * like longing, do not warp others
Jeddah at the Sacred House, Zamzam *, in an effort to defend Islam openly
Kindly, I don't know what is good. * It has everything that Hashemi achieved
African pilgrimage in Sudanese literature
As the shrine of pilgrims from West and Central Africa goes on in Sudan, the impact of the pilgrimage and its African path have expanded in various aspects, including what is social, cultural and economic, but its impact has appeared in the demography of Sudan.
Sudanese literature has dealt with this matter in its different genres, including the novel “Breath Saliha” - winner of the Katara Prize 2018 in the category of published novels - by writer Omar Fadlallah.
The novel talks about a girl who is an orphaned parent, who belongs to a family of Moroccans Shanagit, her grandfather travels to perform the obligatory duty and leaves it at "Sheikh Mohammed", to begin another trip to catch up with the grandfather.
Critic Mustafa El-Sawy spoke on the pilgrimage journey in the novel to Al-Jazeera Net, saying, "The pilgrimage journey came within the context of the novel and became one of the components of the artistic form, due to its connection to the historical form. In addition, it occurred at the heart of the semantic network of the pattern of formation of characters, which constituted a qualitative addition to the form and its content."
As for the poetry - which is the Office of the Arabs - the confident Yunus sees in his testimony to Al-Jazeera Net that the lengthy Sudanese poet Salah Ahmed Ibrahim "need" is a value that cannot be overcome when speaking through the Hajj.
Al-Wathiq added that "the poem addressed the story of an African need, from entering El Geneina on the western borders of Sudan to reaching Arafat, with all her suffering and torments and with joy of arrival."
The poet says:
"All of Africa is fed up, and it is not fading
And its destination inhabitants - its Red Sea
Hijaz
It is now on the street of our city
So look
Here is the need "to begin the journey of need inside Sudanese territory.
The popular poetry praising the Messenger of God, peace and blessings be upon him, was not absent from that, but was the owner of the largest share in what the scholar and praise Sheikh Amer Abu Qaroun mentioned to Al-Jazeera Net. "The collections of popular praise are full of mentioning cities and kingdoms from West and Central Africa such as: Fez, Chinguetti, Brno, There was Bella, Hausa and repetition, and this has its causes. Poetry is colloquial and eloquent, reflecting the condition of his society, and the impact of African pilgrims was evident in our country.
Is the way back?
In a research paper presented by Dr. Amin Sagaghi presented at a symposium at the African Research and Studies Center entitled "The Wild Road to Hajj from Nigeria .. History, Challenges, and Revisiting", the researcher cites a number of attempts to revive the Wild Hajj Road between Nigeria and Sudan "Some youth felt the need Reviving the historic land route in the late 1990s, so they were experimental land trips in the years 1989, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1997, but all these efforts were unsuccessful for political, economic and security reasons. "
But the remaining fact is that, if the road cannot be revived, the past centuries in which the pilgrims crossed Sudan left a lasting, multifaceted and lasting impact.