Standing at Arafat.
From noon to sunset on the ninth of Dhu al-Hijja, two million people in identical unsewn white cloth on one plain. The hajj is invalid without it. Malcolm X's 1964 letter from Mecca, describing eating from the same plate as men he would have called white the year before, is the best-known account of what the day does.
Standing at Arafat on the ninth of Dhu al-Hijja is the one act without which the Hajj does not count — the tradition says the Hajj is Arafat. Around two million people, in two unsewn white cloths for the men, stand on an open plain from just after noon until sunset, praying and asking. It is not a procession or a performance; it is standing. The Prophet delivered the farewell sermon there. The reason it recurs in conversion narratives is that the visual erasure of rank is total: there is no way to tell a Malaysian labourer from a Nigerian senator when everyone is in the same two pieces of cloth. Malcolm X's letter from Mecca in April 1964 is the best-known account in English — he describes eating from the same plate and drinking from the same glass as men whose eyes were the bluest of blue, and returning with a changed position on race that he then had to explain to the movement he had helped build. He was assassinated ten months later.
There were tens of thousands of pilgrims, from all over the world. They were of all colours, from blue-eyed blonds to black-skinned Africans. But we were all participating in the same ritual, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and the non-white.
Malcolm X, letter from Mecca, April 1964, as published in The Autobiography of Malcolm XWritten during the Hajj; he was assassinated ten months later.
The same ground, other faiths
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