“Circling the House of God”: Martin Lings on Hajj

Martin Lings is a remarkable figure in contemporary Islam. His life spanned nearly the entirety of the 20th century, and the impact of his life and work acted as a bridge between the Muslim world and the West. It was Lings, for example, who was a respected authority on the work of William Shakespeare in his own right, and yet he is best known as the author of Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, which was first published in 1983 and is still in print as one of the most popular and trusted biographies of the Prophet (ﷺ) to this day.

Lings’ work has had a profound impact on my own formation as one coming into Islam. That’s why I was excited when, in one of our last classes at the Islamic school I’m attending, we watched this brief documentary about Martin Lings’ experiences in Mecca on Hajj. It’s a fascinating documentary, and one that I hadn’t seen before. In it, Lings recounts his trips to Mecca on Hajj over the years — the first in 1948 and his final trip in January of 2005, just a few months before passing away. His account is fascinating as he recalls his 1948 Hajj during a time when there were still relatively few ‘Western’ Muslim converts who went on Hajj. He recalls how his experiences in 1948 were markedly different from his second Hajj in the late 1970s. Given all of the changes in Mecca over the years, he said that “what remains totally unchanged is the barakah.”

I don’t have much more to say about this documentary, other than it is such a fascinating film, and I just wanted to share it here. Having recently gone on umrah to Mecca myself, there is much for me to reflect listening to Lings’ account. It is one thing to read and watch films about places like Mecca — but it is a whole other thing to actually have been there.

I hope you enjoy!

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