Transforming Pagan Hajj into Islamic Hajj

Formulation of the Claim

The Qur’an presents the hajj as a transition from earlier pagan rituals to an Islamic hajj redefined within a new horizon.

Explanation

For Arkoun, this transformation is not understood as a superficial change in names or in some rites, but as a reordering of the religious meaning of place, time, and ritual. The hajj here enters into a broader process that reshapes the sacred domain itself and gives it a significance tied to Islam rather than to its previous meaning.

This also means that earthly history is not left outside the religious sphere; rather, it is appropriated and reintroduced into the construction of Qur’anic meaning. The hajj therefore becomes an example of how a preexisting practice can be transformed into an element within the new symbolic system established by revelation.

Its Place in the Book’s Argument

This atom falls within Arkoun’s concern with how Islam formed historically through the reworking of earlier religious and cultural elements. It comes close to the book’s theses, which hold that the Qur’an does not merely confront inherited tradition, but rather redirects it and reinserts it into a new religious structure. Hence the importance of the hajj as an example showing that Islamic founding involves a transformation of meaning more than an absolute rupture with it.

Limits of the Claim

This atom should not be taken as a detailed judgment on all the elements of the hajj, nor should the entire history of the rites be reduced to this formulation alone. It describes one aspect of Arkoun’s understanding of the way inherited material is integrated, and does not claim to offer a full historical account of the emergence of the hajj.

Brief Evidence Passage

”A material basis for the spiritual leaps of the pilgrim while in a state of ihram, as well as sites of manifestation and embodiment with contents specific to each religious experience. For this reason, we are right to describe all this as a kind of semantic-symbolic expansion specific to the hajj. The sacred space of the miqat, the site of the temple, namely the Kaaba, the cloth that covers it, the pilgrim’s routes or circumambulation, Zamzam water, the stones of the stoning rite, the body of the sacrificial livestock and their blood, the pilgrim’s highly distinctive clothing… etc., all this system of material signs refers to a system of religious beliefs, or, better said, it refers to symbols in the original sense of the word, that is, the contact between two separate parts of one and the same thing. Thus, we find that in the sacred “spacetime""

Nearby Links

• Readings in the Qur’an
• History