THE UMRAH

I couldn’t grasp the romanticization of the Kaabah when I was smaller. I couldn’t comprehend the sentiments and the people longing for Makkah – the foreign desert thousand miles away from home.

I couldn’t understand why it is so overwhelming for people to stand before the Kaabah in the Masjidilharam that they couldn’t help but shed some tears. 

Mekah is just a place, and Kaabah is just a building – that was what I thought when I was a kid.

But being before the Kaabah as an adult, seeing it with my own eyes now could I understand it all. 

For a sinner, being a guest of the Almighty in His Masjid, the land of the Prophet, I couldn’t stop feeling so lowly and cried. 

Now I understood it all. When I was a kid, I didn’t sin. I didn’t feel the burden to repent. 

Now, the sinner in me feels so ashamed for all the wrongdoings he had committed in his life that being a guest of God is not deserving of him. He does not deserve this reward. Thus he cried for feeling so unqualified, unfulfilling and unworthy while the sins he had done flashes before his own eyes while he looked at the Kaabah. In that moment he felt so lost, but ironically, he felt a sense of home. Of returning to a certainty he never thought he'd find.  

The Kaabah, the Masjidilharam and the city of Mekah is not just a place, he finally understood. It’s a home he never had.